skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trying to succeed in the App Store is a whole different world in itself.

In general advertising is tough for any $1.99 product. For this particular product I'd say it's even tougher. A dice roller is simply not a mass market product. So most of your advertising dollars are going to be wasted on people who don't care.

Asking sites for reviews and maybe even finding some D&D-type sites that would be willing to look at it and review it would be your best bet -- and just takes your time.

An ad-supported version may help visibility, but don't rely on iAds alone. The fill rates are not high enough. Alternatively, if there's a simple way to make a Lite version without giving away the whole thing, that can also be a way to get increased visibility.
Thanks for the feedback.

1. I will try to persuade some of my customers to submit app ratings. Unfortunately the ratio of purchases to review seems to be about 70 to 1, at least for this app.

2. Dice roller was taken although die roller I think is open. I'll try to tailor the name,description, and keywords to more heavily trafficked related search terms. I did include some game names in the description which seems to help with search some.

3. I have a free version with iAds waiting for Apple review now. I'm hoping that will help supplement the revenue and also drive sales to the paid version. $10-20 CPM sounds great. I'm from a web background and traditional website CPM is nowhere near that.
Your basic disgust at the concept sounds the standard distaste people have upon learning of the Compatibilist formulation of free will[1]. In "telling you what to do," Google would just be acting as an extension of your will—accessing all the same information you would access, and making all the same choices the same way you would make them. Just because the choices of what to do would come from the external world (and thus be determined) rather than from your mind (and thus "feel" more like you are in control of them) is no reason to reject those choices: they are still yours, even if they are determined.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism_and_incompatibili...
I don't see any sign you're telling the author anything he doesn't already know. At least, it looks to me like his complaint is precisely that using and with are awkward solutions, because they break object encapsulation in a particularly ugly way.

Or are you trying to argue that objects should never contain file descriptors or sockets?
"Beyond that point, you can forget about aspirational consumer buying of 48-inch flat-panel TVs. You suddenly confront the most existential questions in human life: what do I do with my life? What’s a good life? No one’s forcing me to do anything, so what do I do now?"

Actually long before the point of becoming a startup founder and possibly making to "fuck you money", you can ask that question.

Other options prior to "fuck you money" that I've considered, and having worked in a startup still might make me enjoy my life more (while working at a good "wage-slave job" 9-5)

1) Building a boat. It wouldn't be worthwhile economically, but it sure would be fun.

2) Dropping out of society and becoming a ski bum, and doing absolutely nothing every single day but ski. (did it, it was really fun, but eventually it becomes boring)

3) Working for a big established company on research that wouldn't be possible at a startup (crazy thought I know, but sometimes the big companies actually have advantages)

4) Going down the ph.D. route and becoming a professor

5) Skipping all of it and being a high school teacher and inspiring youth the way I was inspired, and coding FOSS stuff at nights and during the summer

All of them lead to meaningful and fun lives in the manner that working on stupid web app designed to sell some ad impressions so I can make 8 million bucks of "fuck you money" just doesn't, at least for me.

Now a startup that actually changes the world, well I'd do that for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with "fuck you money".

How about "fuck you living", as in, I get to do what I want and say fuck you to anyone who says otherwise (including this guy), and it has nothing to do with how much money I have in the bank. It all comes down to the decisions you make.
Soviet sergeants and officers were often ordered to shoot their own men if they attempted to retreat - Soviet infantry was instructed to advance at all cost. Also, since Stalin executed his highly ranked officers frequently due to paranoia, the average Soviet officer was something like 12 years younger than the average Nazi officer.

These two factors combined meant utter brutality and massacre for Soviet forces and contribute to them having overwhelmingly the highest number of causalities in the war. With a culture like that against their own soldiers, is it any surprise they loot, raid, pillage, and rape? That's all fairly well documented among Soviet forces, there's plenty of memoirs of the gulags (which had a lower survival rate than even Nazi concentration camps), and there's plenty of memoirs of the horrors the Soviet troops committed in occupied cities. German women would often offer themselves to Soviet officers so as to be protected from the brutality of the enlisted men.

> so I assume you can point out some specifics of why they are drooling, barbaric apes.

Utter brutality, a win at all costs mentality more than anyone else, and very inexperienced leadership. Much of this is directly attributable to Stalin, but really all the Socialist Soviet Republics and People's Democratic Republics went similarly (USSR, cultural revolution, Khmer Rouge, etc). For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be governmental model conducive to high morale, dignity, and respect in their armed forces.
Perhaps (dare I say it) there just aren't enough table-top gamers left? It certainly seemed to be on a steep decline as I exited my teenage years :(
sure thing, and good luck!
wikipedia helps with that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System

The earth/ground station on Svalbard is a key site for collecting remote sensing data from polar orbiting satellites, such as those from NOAA, due to its close proximity to the north pole (many of these satellites are polar orbitors; e.g. follow an orbit which almost crosses over the pole).
ccnow.com

fees are:
4.99% of Gross Sales plus
$0.50 per transaction

$9.95 setup one time

$9.95 per month if you sell < $100 per month. > $100 in a month, no fee.

I've been using them for years for some stuff - works out fine.
Yes, and if we meet and exchange one-time pads we'll be even more secure.

However neither that nor TLS "work out of the box: require no configuration, [and] no changes to applications".
1000 actually works quite well with no horizontal scrollbars. And for most local small business sites there are more visitors above 1024 than below.
A Lot of Good Marketing is Having People Want to Spend Time With You
Me too. I'm in Singapore and, say what you will about the way the country is governed, but they always make it easy for business to be conducted here. If Google is actually trying here, I'd be very interested to know what difficulties they're experiencing.
Yahtzee! Who would have thought buried way down at the bottom of the thread we'd have someone stumble upon part of the right answer. Thank you alastair, you must be old like me.
This has been tried before using Javascript - there is no new thinking here. That aside, the problem as I see it, is that the following issues have yet to be solved:

1. You can't currently limit CPU cycles in Javascript reliably

2. You can't automatedly prevent malicious Javascript code from being uploaded and distributed while still allowing people to use the Javascript keywords and constructs that are required for most useful algorithms

3. Any data that is in a format to be processed is not secure because one can view the code and the data, thereby deducing its purpose with minimal difficulty
Ooo! A swing and a miss. I'll call it a good solid foul ball.

The RoR connection is from 37signals which had something to do with this design trend (but not all).
Presumably. But AdSense is a rather different business.

Consider: I don't think advertising is subject to sales tax. Here's New York State on the subject:

http://nystax.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nystax.cfg/php/enduser/st...

When you go into a product business you may have a different set of legal issues to consider. It's also B2C rather than B2B, which changes the sort of customer service you need and (I'm guessing) dramatically increases your vulnerability to things like chargebacks and stolen credit cards.
One way I've found to get more app ratings from users is to monitor the number of app launches and after, say, 5 of them, pop up a UIAlertView asking them to rate the app. Saying "OK" opens the App Store URL. Saying "no" prompts them once more later on, and then never prompts them again.
I can't agree enough with the importance of trying to reach the taste makers in the industry. You may never reach them, but if you do, and you make a good impression, it can completely transform your market presence.

No reason not to try, especially when the cost of doing so is so low.
I find this sort of stuff very interesting 'techincally', but I think I need use-case of a customer who would pay for such a thing.
Actually that is a fair point. AppShopper's ads have sold much better through BuySellAds than us doing it direct.
I don't think fracturing our identities is a very honest way to live. Imagine what that would be like--it's like if Richard Feynman was the guy who did all the physics, but some guy under some other name did all the carousing, and no one was supposed to know or acknowledge they were the same person underneath. Feynman would become some inhuman source of knowledge instead of the real (and brilliant, and unique) human being he really was.
No, it's going to be about as hard for (say) the FBI to break TLS as it is for them to break an OTP; either way, it isn't happening.

Can you say that for tcpcrypt? Of course not.

I don't know what your second sentence even means. I didn't do anything to configure TLS. What did you have to do?
I actually used sass last week for the first time and was sold on it within a day. Maybe next week I'll look at haml.

None of my work is in ruby, so I'm not sure of the utility of haml, though.
Robo Defense (just like pretty much all popular paid games) also has a free version that includes the first few levels. It's a pretty fun game; I bought it.

And did you know you can easily return paid games or apps and get your money back within 24 hours?
Or maybe the people who don't have any secrets to hide will be seen as weird and vaguely suspicious, and hence less trustworthy when they try and tell the majority of people to stop doing what the majority of people do all the time.
where is the prior artwork?
It's sad but true, with MMOs and epic single player RPGs for the desktop and consoles available tabletop gaming is on the decline. I'm hoping to build some tools to help make tabletop gaming less about the math and physical book/paperwork management and more about the social and imaginative experience that is difficult to replicate in the video game space. All I have at the moment is a dice roller though :)
MBT Changa in cheapmbtshoes4sale.com
All this naysaying and negative, defeatist thinking: this is exactly why you will not succeed in a startup. Positivity is a necessary -- albeit not sufficient -- factor in creating something new.
Visual C++ 6.0.
I wasn't sure if they quoted that blog seriously, or as an example of bedbug infestations inciting xenophobia. (The xenophobia undoubtedly existed beforehand, but that, as they say, is neither here nor there.)
While I think this is a fine question for discussion on HN, you have to understand that 99% of HN users are clearly going to recommend the for profit route. HN is all about startup culture -- building, iterating, and constantly exposing yourself to market forces to see what works. It's the basic principle that everyone here lives and works by.

I happen to share that opinion, but perhaps my opinion might have added value because I've spent years in the DC nonprofit world you mentioned. And I can say from experience that the non profit structure as it is conceived by most organizations today is detrimental to innovation and success. Non profit advocacy is broken. This is obviously a huge topic, but I will quickly just comment on your specific situation.

Your startup is a content play, right? Never mind the subject matter. Sure, it's about do-gooder environmental stuff, but at the end of the day, you have to play by the same rules as all other content providers. Whether you like it or not, you are competing with HuffPo, TMZ, I Can Haz Cheezburger, etc etc. You are competing for people's attention. Going the non profit route just seems like a way to fool yourself into thinking you are insulated from market forces, when there's truly no insulating yourself from them. So why fool yourself. Expose yourself to the market, it will make you better and will give you a clearer and quicker picture of what works and what doesn't. The idea that things that make the world a better place shouldn't have to play by the same rules is BS. That's just a good way for an organization to die a slow, clueless death.

My two cents. But this is HN, so what did you expect? :)
Good point, worse case scenario is they ignore me and I lose nothing.
Give some simple algorithmic problems like "Given a tree in preorder, print it in postorder" or "Find longest increasing subsequence in a list of numbers"

do you want a systems developer or someone who can produce a UI that will sell, the above recommendations tell you nothing about a developers ability to recognize aesthetics. You are not looking for a hard core developer you are looking for someone who has a good blend of developing and design. Lets face it a large portion of iPhone, Web, Flash apps are shallow on the front end as far as depth of logical complexity (put this picture here, submit this data to the server). Look for someone with good organization skills, a decent eye for design and some grounding in software development, don't look for Bill Joy, to develop an iPhone app you will be sorely disappointed.
I know that article is a little old so it advocates a png, but today Safari, Chrome, IE and Moz all support gradients (albeit each in their own way).
Ask HN: Do you hate all personal finance software? Want to make a better one?
I never liked Microsoft Money though I used it. Then Redmond killed off the product and suggested I switch to Quicken. So I did, and I HATE IT. I think it is terrible. It tries to do 4,000 things and does none of them well. My wife asked my today if I had paid the Macy's bill, I pulled it up, found the search and entered 'Macy' - pretty straight forward use case...alas, no luck.

I am thinking of attacking the problem. Creating something that has the best of the desktop world and the value of the internet world while staying ultra-paranoid secure. Something wholly extensible where hackers can embrace and extend and offer their wares to the rest of the community through an extension market as part of the system.

I look at the position of Intuit in the market, their competitors and feel like they are ripe for a 37signals, do less better type of sniper hit.

Anyone interested in helping?
Just to throw a comment in here - I've talked to Dan on the phone about this, and was interested in working with him on this. My schedules and commitment didn't allow for us to work together, but I'd encourage others to get in touch with Dan - this feels legitimate and doable for the right person.
With Google not getting revenue from the Android store, they have no incentive to improve it in any way. They won't be nearly as concerned about their developers making money, either. It sounds like a terrible plan all around.
That is genius! I never even considered implementing a suggestion into the app, seems like an easy way to obtain ratings as long as it's not too intrusive. I'm definitely including it in future updates.
I'm the author of ngx_cache_purge [1]. Would you mind explaining why do you think that it's "unsupported"? This module is fully maintained, it works with every recent nginx release and supports purging content from cache of every upstream supported by nginx (FastCGI, proxy, SCGI, uWSGI).

[1] http://labs.frickle.com/nginx_ngx_cache_purge/
I guess the app store has accounted for about 1% of Apple's profits since 2008:

http://www.cultofmac.com/analyst-app-store-just-1-percent-of...

Seems like a pretty huge return on investment, although a small percentqge of their overall profits. Hilariously most of Apple's percentage of an app sale goes to CC companies
ngx_lua is production ready [1].

[1] http://github.com/chaoslawful/lua-nginx-module/commit/26d9dc...
I am trying e same thing over the next five months, but I plan to rent apartments for a month or so and travel in between. I like having the Internet, shower, and laundry problems resolved, and I'd like to get to know places beyond superficial tourist level. Plus I have friends visiting for a few weeks at a time.

Which cities have worked out well or poorly for you?

I'm probably traveling a bit heavy right now (mbp 17, 7d and lenses, kindle dx, iPad, outdoor, business, and casual clothes, global blackberry) and going for value luxury (50-100 per night for a 2br 5 star hotel suite, or a nice condo rental). I think that will increase my productivity and happiness, but I'll try the lowest cost option later this year. The people in student or backpacker places are definitely more interesting than at the oriental or peninsula. Mainly Asia and au/nz for now, and Europe probably next, and then maybe a couple months of USA.
http://www.leaguescape.com is the startup I believe (based on a separate email from the same group).

and your friends submissions all showed up as dead, probably marked as a spammer.

oh, and Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill is a great area. If anyone takes this opportunity let me know and the first great local beer is on me (Big Boss or Lone Rider, your choice).
It's hard to talk about this all in full generality, because it varies from taboo to taboo. There are a lot of taboos (homosexuality, polyamory, kinky sex) which thrive under the social consensus of "what people do in private is their own business", and once there is no privacy anymore, hopefully people will stop caring entirely about those matters.

Other taboos (adultery, racism, displays of anger) won't be as easily accepted.
It is definitely a very niche product, possibly to my detriment. I'm in the process now of requesting reviews from the larger related sites. I definitely agree with the lite version, I have one waiting in the app approval process now. It has some of the functionality and an ability to upgrade within the application.

Thanks for the feedback!
Listed midway down the page is a "Serial Number" field. In the case of this application, it is 741429. At the top of the page is a "home" button. Click the home button and then select "Advanced search" underneath "PATFT: Issued Patents". In the "query" box, enter "apn/" and the serial number, i.e., "apn/741429". Click search. Five titles appear, none of which is anything close to this patent, so it looks to not have been granted.

If you really want to be sure, go to the main homepage: "www.uspto.gov", and pick "2 search" under "Patents". Then pick "Patent application information retreiveal (PAIR)". Then pick "Public PAIR". Answer the capacha, and then put the series and serial numbers into the lookup box (i.e. 11741429), leaving the radio button set for "application number". Click search. If it had issued, on the next screen under "Patent number" and "Issue Date of Patent" you would find both the number and issue date. In this case, no values, so not issued. If you want to know more you can pick the "Image file wrapper" tab and look through the documents that make up the patent application. This one is still being prosecuted, but has not issued as a patent.
Well, this is kind of insulting to YC and it's longest running posterchild, Loopt - http://www.loopt.com/

Can't believe no one here mentioned it.
There's a few problems with your hypothetical, from the browser implementor point of view:

1) "Then you train users..." -- if your security mechanism relies on this you have already failed.

2) In the attack case, the user would have to look for the absence of an indicator. It's very hard to notice absence of an indicator as a sign of danger, especially if there are are many normal situations where it's fine for the indicator to not be there. Imagine this design for a car engine warning light:

- Normally it's always off.
- Whenever you turn left, it goes on if everything is fine.
- However, if your engine needs service, then when you turn left, the warning light stays off.

Do you think this would do a good job of alerting people to engine trouble? Your suggestion is the same thing. It's hard to train yourself to notice the lock icon not appearing, even if you are very security-aware (which most users are not).

3) If the user has a bookmark, Top Sites/Speed Dial page, or URL autocomplete entry for the SSL URL to their bank, it's hard to redirect them to vanilla HTTP. So in fact, silently accepting self-signed certs creates more MITM opportunity.

4) Srict Transport Security will likely close the remaining gaps in #3 (e.g. typing the domain name in a fresh browser instance) over time.
Interesting. I know that some games are direct ports of their iPhone versions. It doesn't make sense why they would be worth the money on the iPhone but not on Android.
"If you're single, only really strange and desperate people want to date you."

Listen and weep:

http://brandonovak.com/nudie-novaks-sexcapades

"When he was a homeless heroin addict, Brandon banged a waitress INSIDE OF A DUMPSTER."
Free As In Lawsuit
> Crunching more realistic numbers, ‘fuck-you money’ is about $4.2MM for a 30 year old guy who plans on dying at 70 and wants to make $200K/year.

...assuming no bad decisions with the money (unrealistic).

...assuming you don't go on a spending spree (which everyone says they won't do, but a significant majority of people who find themselves in cash do in fact do).

...and so on.
The post mentioned in the OP (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129) mentions some cases where knowledge about how compilers work would be useful and offers a warning about what may happen to those without this understanding:

"In fact I used to ask candidates, as a standard interview question, how they'd find phone numbers in a tree of HTML files, and many of them (up to 30%) chose to write 2500-line C++ programs as their answer."

Not that this necessarily describes you (since I don't even know what you work on), but I've heard it said (here, I think) that if CRUD is all you know, CRUD is all you'll ever do.
Stephen Wolfram Uses This
Schmidt suggests changing one's name when one goes from childhood to adulthood. This is not far from common practice in some cultures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name
Wow, way to take my trolling seriously. I didn't ask you to regurgitate your reagan zombie history "facts," I asked for some references that have some references that might have some other references to army orders/policy documents to "kill, rape, pillage" etc.
The Mystery Of The $1250 Halo Reach Has Been Solved
25 Bizarre Coins that are legal tender
Hi,

I thought you might find this article interesting: 25 Bizarre Coins that are legal tender - http://www.advanceloan.net/blog/2010/08/25-bizarre-coins-that-are-legal-tender/

Have a great day!

Thanks
Amy
I worked at a startup that had the same policy. As long as the team is responsible and driven it is not an issue.
Taking some patented "idea" from a GPL'd piece of code and re-implementing it in your own separately licensed code is not something that the GPL gives you the right to do.

Your definition of open-platform requires that the code not be covered by any patents. Anyway, the best thing that can come out of all of this is more deep-pocketed players angry with the software patent system.