skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with any industry (whether it's books, music, movies, restaurants, web apps, mobile apps, consumer products) is that the ones at the low end of the spectrum generally share the following attributes:

1) They are either of very low quality compared to others at the top, or are complete garbage and are generally not worth buying at all

2) They are generic me-too rip-offs of existing popular brands or products

3) They try to fill a niche that doesn't readily need to be filled or isn't well-understood

4) Lazy marketing/communication or, worse, "build it and they will come" complacent genius attitude

There is a reason that companies like taptaptap can continue making _at least_ a half-million dollars in revenue on their apps consistently. You've got to take a look at the mid-section of the app store rankings to get a feel for what the real, unhyped apps are doing, and why they are successful.

What I mean is, take a look at the apps at #75 to #150 on the app store chart. You get a good cross-section of apps in all categories _and_ price points. Let's also remember that, if figures from past blog entries about app store sales-to-rank correlations generally hold true from day to day, apps in that mid-section are generally getting between 400 to 1000 sales a day. Link that to a sales price of, say, 4.99, and you're looking at some serious money per diem, even after Apple's cut.

That's where the true beauty of the "Gross sales" chart comes into use. It's less of a popularity contest or crapshoot, because I've seen indie companies with little to almost no brand relevance clinging to that mid-section rankings for well over a year, and some of them are priced above 99 cents (in a few instances, well above).

What it really boils down to is quality. If you don't have anything worth selling, I guess no one will buy it. Furthermore, it's really hard to determine if what you're doing is worth buying to the general iPhone or Android smartphone user. Put another way, if you take everyone playing in your space, would _you_ choose your work over the competition? If not, why not? Because I can tell you this right now: Most, if not all, of the apps that have ever kissed the top 10 rankings on the app store were made by 2-4 person teams and took a few months of full-time work to complete. The ones that stick around update _constantly_ or are established brands. There are some flash in the pans that make it to the top but if you look closer, they are either building hype elsewhere (such as with a free facebook or flash app) or fills a niche in Utilities that heretofore haven't been well-served.
In the case of some of the lawyers I've worked with, 20 vineyards would be a conservative estimate.

I'm not sure the assumption that he's consuming less is accurate though. He's consuming differently but he's still earning, he's still eating and drinking.

He owns a keyboard, two ebook readers, a Mac and a rucksack full of designer clothes, a bike. The fact he's a DJ and the fact he has two ebook readers suggest that he still buys music and books (just digitally rather than physically). All of this ploughs revenue back into the economy.

In addition he has no kitchen so he likely eats out more, no car so potentially uses public transport more, maybe pays for a PO Box for mail, cell phone bills are higher than landline bills.

He's changed his pattern of consumption but he's not ceased it.

The only way in which it doesn't scale is that he tends to sleep on friends couches. Replace this with cheap bed and breakfast accommodation and it would seem to scale fine.
This sounds great in principle, but the visa situation seems rather daunting.

"Running a business" is specifically forbidden for visa waiver or B1/B2 visa visitors; besides, I suspect they won't be too happy if you repeatedly "visit" to the extent that >50% of your time is spent in the US. H1-B seems to be a lottery and infeasible if you own the company and are employed by it. I have no idea if we'd qualify for an EB-1, and E1/E2 seem more geared for owners/employees of bigger companies than recently-formed startups.

There seems to have been a string of originally European YC-funded companies that successfully moved to the US, yet there are examples where founders are "stranded" in Europe (e.g. Dailybooth). I vaguely remember an article written by one British founder of a YC startup some years back who got in via an E2, but I can't seem to find it. It would be extremely interesting to hear about past experiences with this; I realise it's possible that there's a good reason why everyone keeps quiet about it.
Do you travel only to places with good internet connection?
Ask HN: Is this even possible?
Every morning about 6 am, Hawaii time, the internet seems to slow way down. Is it possible that because it is 9 am on the West Coast and 12 pm on the East Coast that there is a surge of use on those coasts that slows it down?
At 20 I was running around playing GI Joe in the forest. It wasn't until 23 that I realized that shit was real.

At 35 now I certainly don't consider any of that time wasted. I would suggest if you are "frowning" now - as you put in your comment - to get out and do something that doesn't make you frown... the cup of coffee will still be there, I guarantee it.
I think of it as fraud. When I joined facebook it was well known, and advertised itself as a place where your private info was private.

Since that time, with no action taken on my part, they have exposed that private info publicly, breaking the promise they made when I signed up.

Classic bait-n-switch. I've stopped using facebook completely for this reason.
So it was easy to check that you couldn't add a int to a strongly typed list of strings, but only in source. (I think, I'm not as well read as javac / JVM internals)

You're right. Here's Jim Waldo's explanation from Java: The Good Parts:

"the inability to change the VM or bytecodes [due to requirements of backwards compatibility] meant that parameterized types could occur only in the source code. The type system of the runtime hasn’t changed, and doesn’t include generics or parameterized types. What we see in our code as a Set<Player> is seen in the bytecodes as simply a Set of objects."
I probably should have made this clearer, since others have asked the same question.

This suit is unlike the Sun v Microsoft suit in that Microsoft was building a licensed Java implementation, which they actually advertised as being a compliant Java implementation...and then they started making incompatible modifications to it. Not simply to the VM or by adding their own libraries off to the side, but by actually modifying some of the java.* core classes. This is obviously way out of bounds when claiming you're a specification-compliant Java, and as a result Sun went ape all over their asses.

FWIW, even though Android doesn't claim to be "Java", they've kept the core classes they ship API-compatible (and no supersetting) with Java 1.5's.
Selling iPhone/iPad Game Source,Images,Sound for $500
I am selling the non exclusive license source/images/sound/gimp files for my game at

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/missile-o-mine-defender/id338323991?mt=8

let me know if you're interested
jimmy@inodesoft.com
This is awesome. I will send him the program which runs every Turing machine simultaneously on his problem instance, and checks the output of each to see if it is a correct solution.

If he manages to prove that my submission doesn't solve his problem in polynomial time, I'll refund his money, but I'll also send his proof on to the Clay Institute.
Learning from Five Years as a Skype Architect
Stop limit orders are a good way to determine when to sell, which is the toughest decision to make. Even if you are dollar cost averaging into a position, you can set a limit order to protect profits, or prevent a large loss. I've seen some recommendations to put a stop limit order of a certain percentage on any new position for stocks/ETFs as a way to keep emotion out of your decision. A trailing stop limit order allows you to sell only when a stock/ETF goes down.
Eminently true. Even with the acquisition of Sun's portfolio, Oracle is still dwarfed by Big Blue several times over.

Suffice it to say, IBM has had the most patents granted of any American company for the past 17 consecutive years as of early 2010: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/011210-patents-2009.ht...

Certainly an unknown quantity must be quite specious, but the sheer cost of fighting the number of patents they could counter-attack with would probably bankrupt Oracle, not to mention however many turned out to have merit.
Intel planning SSDs for smartphones
Wonderful.

I would like to propose, in addition, the use of 'Zucker Punch' to denote a terrible, unexpected blow (emotional, usually) experienced by someone after being zuckered into sharing information intended to be private.
You do realize that you just challenged vagueness without substantiating your argument.
You can create actual polls by going here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
> what if I don't want a username of 30 characters? What if I want OpenID authentication instead?

contrib.auth

Django is as minimal as you want it to be. People seem to have a hard time not using everything.
The current model for free flash games (licensing + ads) does make money for devs alright, I just think that devs charging players can do even better.

I think it goes like this, very generally:
1. Free game w/ licensing + ads
2. For-sale game (backed up with free version for distribution)
3. Persistantly free game w/ usual freemium hooks

You can make more as you go further down, but there's also a lot more work involved.
for real meetings, if it is on existing contract I'm working on, I bill accordingly.
If it is a meeting to get new work, then it is not billed and an overhead cost of doing (getting) business.

For phone calls, it depends. I have a few clients that I'm working on their project when they call, so the time is already being billed to them.

If it is just a quick question, then I just answer it and not charge.
So, does this mean the Times' paywall is a way of protecting netizens from becoming stupid? ;o)
but wouldnt that also include uploading 35gb of data and finally downloading xxGB (result size)? i think when you add this time you can just take your multicore desktop and let it run over night.
Let's All Hire Awesome Programmers
Great. Is there anywhere on HN or YC that elaborates on the general day-to-day activities? I did a fairly thorough search and was unable to find anything.

Is it correct to assume "one on one" means that there will be someone from YC that will be helping each start-up with their respective issues on a day-to-day basis? Thanks in advance, pg.
Appreciate the prompt reply.
Larry Ellison (2006): If an open source product gets good enough, we'll take it
> a radical change in the way it had hitherto been produced

No, it was made the same way.
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. ED
In search of Corporation 2.0
IBM is safe, since they've played by the rules and since they have an even bigger patent bat than Oracle does. There may be tensions, but probably nothing we'll ever see from the outside.

I think other OSS Java implementations are safe too, because: a. they don't harm Oracle's business in any substantial way (nobody's using them), and b. there's no profit in going after them.

If you start to look at everything Oracle does through the lens of "profit above all else" the clouds become a little less cloudy.
You should reinvent the wheel.
It was hotbot or webcrawler for me. And, yes, Altavista will always be remembered, especially for babelfish.
Good analysis of problems using Clojure agents for operations that can fail. Also, Mark McGranaghan's new clj-http project looks good (BTW, I had a slight problem with one of Mark's old projects over the weekend and he was helpful - good to see on open source projects).
Yes harddrives wear out, but you can easily get a new harddrive and copy the stuff across seamlessly. It's like shelves for records. If you shelves that your records are on break, just get some new shelves and copy (i.e. move) your record collection across.
Use Your Brain - Camera Fails
Don’t you think that they have to use their brains a little bit more?
Dubai was trying to buy and monopolize the luxury market. Yachts, planes, real estate, jewelry, fashion, etc. They were simply trying to divert all of the world's luxury consumers to one place (Dubai) instead of other places (Paris, Monaco, New York, etc.).
It is a bog-standard technique in the mod_perl world.

For instance chapter 10 of Practical mod_perl is titled, Improving Performance with Shared Memory and Proper Forking. Guess what that was about? This was published in dead tree format in May 2003, before the December 2003 filing date for this patent. And it appeared in online documentation before that.
Again are you speaking of an eCPM of 1.50 per channel or the entire page?

My page eCPM is well above $1, even £1 and per channel it is well above 16 cent and even 16 pence. So I guess it depends on the site.
This looks nice, but I have a small nit to pick: the expression problem concerns static type safety, so discussing it in the context of an untyped/dynamically typechecked language is a bit off.
Which Tween Actor Took His Boyfriend to a Gay Strip Club?
It's not completely impossible in theory (lots of people all doing something at once could have an effect on common infrastructure), but since nobody else seems to have ever noticed the phenomenon — even those for whom the effects would be occurring locally rather than diluted by distance — it doesn't appear to be the case. Maybe your ISP takes the time to do maintenance and diagnostics. That seems more likely.
Ask HN: Most unobtrusive time tracker?
I want to start seriously measuring my productivity, or time on task. I'm running OSX. I have an iPod Touch and an Android on my desk as well. Between those platforms, what is the most unobtrusive time tracking application? (e.g. hit button start work, take a break hit button to pause time etc) In addition to unobtrusiveness, it would also be useful if it kept a tagged/labeled history of the time for me (otherwise, I suppose a simple stop watch would suffice).

Any suggestions?
The best patent ever
This article is wrong. Apple has released an iAd SDK and featured many sessions at WWDC relevant to people developing iAds, including two that specifically covered the SDK.

IF advertising agencies want to make iAds they don't need to wait on Apple.

It appears that many of them want Apple to be involved so they get the "Apple magic".

We're not seeing Apple slow things down, so much as demand exceeding Apple's supply.
Is the physically closest data center always the closest wrt routing? I'd think the more important metric is number of hops and ping time over sheer geographical proximity.
Tell HN: List of Hacker News Resources
I'd like to offer an alternative perspective on the order of paying off accounts. While it's true that you will save on interest payments if you pay off the higher-interest accounts first, if you really are hell-bent on paying off as much debt as you can as fast as possible, it won't amount to much of a savings.

Couple that with the fact that large amounts of debt can be extremely daunting (and downright disheartening) I'd recommend paying off the accounts with the smallest balance first. The psychological reward you'll get from that is (at least it was in my case) enough to keep you going until you've paid all the accounts off.

With the way the economy is going, I believe that those of us with debt will be the ones who suffer most, so make hay while the sun shines, so they say.
Get someone who can do some decent Copy, and Web design; the layout makes my eyes bleed. But looks cool.
I don't even think you can make it last beyond a single generation, try this when you're 60+, when you are in need of a stable environment due to medical issues and so on.

It's great in theory when you're healthy, in your early 20's to early 30's, when you are independent and have no dependents, when you are living in a climate that is favorable, and when you're living in a city.

If any of those circumstances are not met you'll be either in a lot of trouble or you're most likely going to change.

Those that don't have the option to change we call street people.

And living off other people's couches and/or fridges and such does not make you an independent.

I can see a good reason for doing with 'less stuff', but this extreme is simply not realistic on anything but the smallest of scales.

It'd be tough if all your friends decided to do it tomorrow and you'd all want to sleep on each others' no longer existent couches...
I've found that taking Vitamin D seems to absolutely boost the immune system. Especially important if you live somewhere with little sun, like Seattle.
I'm not generally in favor of new laws but this should be illegal: http://darkpatterns.org/silent-credit-card-roll-over/
I have a feeling they're actually separate cables that are laid at the same time. Maybe they're even bound together in some way. It would be interesting to know for sure.

EDIT: it turns out the cables do actually branch, using one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_branching_unit
Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
I have a unique opportunity on my hands, but lack the ammo to execute with.

In my senior projects class at CU-Boulder I have been given the go ahead by the professor to forego the standard curricula of CSCI 4308 and create my own project as long as it has "substantial business influence". This of course directly translates to building a startup.

I have six months, a team of five senior cs-majors, and the support of the university, but there is still a glaring hole.

I don't believe I have a good enough idea to run with.

Some that I have been contemplating are a comedy-mashup site (basically a last.fm for stand up comedians), a Haskell web development framework (which I asked for feedback for in a previous post and was pretty much told not to do it) or trying to edge my way into point of sale restaurant software/hardware.

I am not sold on any of these and am looking for some inspiration because I only have a couple more days to write a formal proposal or else I default into the standard class and must take a project from the industry.

Any ideas that are within the scope of this project?
Sexp.js
I wonder how long it'll be before the decision to go that direction is made?
The HTML5 parsing algorithm in JS
Look for a job where you can work remotely. Many US-based companies are striving for an increasingly remote workforce in order to reduce their cost of doing business. At my first job out of college, at a large tech company, they actually wanted us to be remote so they wouldn't have to pay for office space.
I would be interested to know, simply because I wonder about it for my own projects, how you deal with (the possibility of) server/db/other problems with your site when you are going somewhere that has no internet access.
"China Has Long Been the World's Second Largest Economy"

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/china-has...
I could be wrong, but isn't that the case for most everyone on the planet?

Looking at this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system

it seems that with the exception of China, Japan, and Korea (which has very limited use) the whole world uses some form of a phonetic writing system.
Not intentionally. It has sorta happened to be that way so far. Apparently this internet thing has been adopted widely.

But the intention is to be able to be fully productive with only an occasional or intermittent internet connection.

Really developed countries: We have internet where we stay. This is more common than we expected.

Developed countries: We use mobile broadband for occasional net connectivity on demand, and use email and SMS to notify us about important events. So far all of our services are manage hosted so I've never gotten a "the server is down" message.

Undeveloped Countries: Plan is to check in once a week with a cybercafe or wifi hotspot.

GSM is a global standard and so, with an unlocked iPhone you can get pre-paid SIMs with dataplans.

Fortunately for everyone Apple is now selling unlocked iPhones as a matter of course in countries with multiple iPhone carriers, like Canada, France, Germany and the UK.
Hacker Events this week (in Silicon Valley & SF)
I use the same method across (most of) my platforms.

Linux - KeePassX
Win 7 - KeePass
iOS - MyKeePass {manually updated from database in Dropbox)
Blackberry - KeePass for Blackberry (manual update of database)

I've luckily not had issues with concurrent database access.

(Doesn't help
At least they did better than Lycos Europe which liquidated last year.
Hey everyone,

This is a quick site I threw up to help keep track of the many resources that keep being posted to Hacker News. Every week someone posts some HN-member-list excel, or an extension for HN, or whatnot.

Please add any resources you find useful when using Hacker News, and feel free to give me any and all feedback on the application itself.
Pwdhash is another option. There's a firefox plugin for it that I use.
I used Copernicus for that.
7 Key Principles of Lean Software Development
> You will pick up all that biz stuff easily anyway, especially with all the other entrepreneurs out there to help you.

I give that a maybe (at best). I've seen many companies that had two tech people going at it that forgot the business in favor of the technology. They eventually had an amazing technology that nobody cared about. That, IMO, is the biggest risk of not having a dedicated biz guy.

> My suggestion would be to just find another tech person who can talk to a room of people and has some level of confidence.

I like the idea of finding somebody who was a tech person (in fact, I think it's a requirement for a tech startup), but their focus in the startup should be 100% business. Now, of course, every startup member is giving 150%, so that leaves time left over to help on the tech stuff. ;)

Depending on your startup, I think you need somebody with at least some experience in the sales and/or marketing. Engineers often trivialize these jobs, but they are not easy and can't be picked up in an afternoon with "Sales for Dummies."

I'm a former tech guy who moved into product management and then into my current role as the biz founder. I spend most of my time talking to potential customers, potential partners, doing research to make sure we have a competitive differentiator, and, on the side, building the website (we are a B2C product) and testing.
We're using AppEngine and it hasn't been a problem at all. This is part of the reason we chose AppEngine.

I'd be very hesitant to choose anything where I have to manage the host myself.
Dogpile FTW.
4) Lazy marketing: Hm. What steps would you take to promote an iPhone (or Android) app, assuming it's a well-made app that doesn't fall into the categories 1) to 3)?
Lessons learned switching our web UI from stock fonts to a proprietary font
Kudos for not pumping your own stuff, but...what are these programmer focused networks?
Vegas isn't in any danger of being replaced by Dubai of all places. Vegas is vegas in part because it is shielded by the laws of the USA. Unlike Vegas, Dubai is controlled by the laws of Sharia as interpreted by the ruler of the day.
Ask: Recommended Technology Stack for a new startup (web app)
What technology stack do you recommend for a new startup that is building a web app:

Possible Choices:
A. ColdFusion
B. PHP
C. Django
D. Django + Google App Engine
E. Other?
From Canada and for a B2, it's more of a wait until you've bought your tickets. Even with a TN (which I don't believe you can get with YC Funding), you just show up and hope for the best.

Of course, your mileage may vary, but this is what I've read from other people.
Cleese almost directly referenced the book "Hare Brain Tortoise Mind" ( http://www.amazon.com/Hare-Brain-Tortoise-Mind-Intelligence/... ). I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a deeper explanation of this topic.
Wow, I had no idea Daum was the owner. Daum is huge in S. Korea.