skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My startup tracks pricing on iOS Apps (among other products) and its fascinating seeing how much pricing volatility occurs.

For instance, we've found that that Apps generally fit into two camps: those that change their pricing consistently; such as:

http://www.happybuy.com/product/Jog-Log---GPS-Run-Tracker/ap...

Versus those Apps which try to keep pricing stable and only have one-off promotions; such as bejewelled:

http://www.happybuy.com/product/Bejeweled-2--Blitz/apple-app...

The general notion and hope behind such price changes is to get an influx of people in to buy rapidly (to grab the limited time discount price). This in turn hopefully pushes the App up the sales chart where it will receive more visibility and in turn more sales from users who would not otherwise be aware of the product.
Say goodbye to traditional free checking
No offense at all, perfectly happy for you to be interested - just expressing my view that it doesn't matter, to me at least.
Maybe it's that. Or maybe they feel that clique-tracking in this environment is noise and doesn't belong here. Or they had a bad day and are taking it out on HN. Don't assume you know some anonymous person's motivations.
My main thing: http://jellly.com/

Also, a real-time multi-player browser game built on node.js and socket.io, but this is just for fun.
Again, you're extrapolating just to prove me wrong. I admit it may seem 'extreme' to some, but advanced tools aren't a threat to us. However, our current culture as programmers shows that we don't even trust other people's source code, let alone tools, to do our job. In this context of today, a tool that "writes code" (imperfect, of course) is not to be trusted any more than me, you, or our colleagues.

But do not downplay the importance of not producing, fixing, and avoiding bugs. It's just wrong.
We have a very interesting open source project that is actively looking for new contributors. It is an interactive art project. It started as a collaboration between Shawn Fanning (tech side) and Fernando Mastrangelo (art side). You can see Fernando talk about it here http://vidsf.com/2010/sep/27/fernando-mastrangelo/

We are having a brainstorming/work session at Shawn's (in San Francisco) on Thursday and we would love to have some more coders! Let me know if you are interested in attending and I will give you the details.
Ask HN:  Which is better to start with: Xen VPS or Amazon EC2
I'm looking into hosting options right now and I'm starting to get sold on Xen VPS.

This raises the question: which is best to start with: Xen VPS or Amazon EC2?

For Xen VPS, SliceHost and Linode seem to have the best reputation. I've also heard recommendations for prgmr, vps link, and server axis.

At this point, I'm thinking that a Xen VPS solution is best for development and then possibly moving to Amazon EC2 when I'm ready to roll out for real.

Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks.
- Can the market really decide whether the VC value-add is worth it? Seems like it would be hard to measure, and that a lot of the information would not be public.

- If the bottleneck for VCs is board seats, why hadn't VCs already stopped taking board seats? Surely they thought of this. Implicit collusion? Entrepreneur ignorance?

- What, would the "mouse skins" analogy from the SS talk have been too distracting? Alas.
I'm working on the new http://www.mcsquare.me UI and features.
Transcription Service | Transcription Services
How Can You Tell When A CEO Is Lying? - A Steve Jobs Story.
Current fun project is an RPG played over the phone. You can try it by calling (415) 689-9751 (while my minutes last). It uses Twilio and static XML hosted on GitHub. Adding to the story is as easy as forking and making a pull request.

http://github.com/abraham/audio-rpg/
I just disliked The Fridge the second I saw it.
Great, I will watch the video and read the article to see what can I teach them from there.
You're quite right. But after a lifetime of minor slights, forgive me a little paranoia :-) (I note said unknown has already downvoted your comment, too)
The lack of completed projects in the last two years is a blinking red light. This just makes it look like an unexplained job gap. Two years is plenty of time to have done something, even if it was not paid work.
Ask HN: How do geniuses think? How do you think?
I've recently been engrossed by the question of how geniuses and highly intelligent people think. There's bits and pieces of information online. What I'd really like to see, though, is (a) geniuses describe their thought process and (b) a smart person voicing is interior monologue while attacking a problem.

1) Do you know of any information like this? Link?

2) Otherwise: do you think in a way that's different (better) than the average person?
This is big news for web developers.
Actually I think gays are well represented in tech because geeks tend to be more inclusive than other subgroups. I'm gay, have been very successful in tech, and have never felt unwelcome in the industry.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the Bay Area is a mecca for both geeks and gays. Something about the culture here accepts people of all varieties.

However, this is not true for old-school business types. Golfing to network, sports talk, trophy wives, talking about Entourage... all that is very foreign to me and yes I feel out of place around it.
A thousand times this. If you can't get someone to pay you to improve yourself, do it anyway. "I contributed significant patches to Major Open Source Project" sure as hell counts as experience to any hiring manager. Programmers have it damn easy compared to a lot of people - we don't have to be hired to get experience, and the barrier to entry to practicing our trade is non-existent. If you download a programming language installer and a text editor, you can get experience.

Find something you're passionate about, and work on it. For example, in the WoW community, there are a lot of people writing addons for the game. They don't have any appreciable economic value, they aren't world-changers, they aren't the Next Great Instant Millionaire idea, but I've personally seen dozens of people hired out of the community because of their hobby work (and I've gotten probably 6-8 job offers as a result of my similar work). As it turns out, there are Real World Problems to solve behind the shiny game veneer, and that counts for a lot.

It doesn't have to be a game. It can be a Javascript physics engine, or a database driver bugfix, or an experimental compression algorithm, or anything. Find something on GitHub you're interested in, take a look at the issues list, fork the repo, write tests, fix the issue, push your code, and issue a pull request back. Congrats, you're now a bit smarter and a bit more experienced. Repeat. In no time, you're going to have experience and perspective that will blow away the 98% of your hiring competition that you used to belong to.
Crocker's Rules: Reduce Your Resistance to Useful Feeback
Of course, if a few peasants are in the way of development in China, the gov't can boot them off their land without a second thought. They don't have to worry about NIMBYism or environmental concerns either.

I think a lot of the developmental sclerosis affecting America comes down to the relative affluence of the people impacted by development. Poor Chinese may be just as unhappy about development, but the government can simply ignore them in a way the US government can't ignore its citizens. California is one of the most affluent states; it makes sense that development in CA is particularly difficult.
This is cool and all but the company has obviously gone through a significant shift the last three years, with the iPhone and iPad. Comparing 2008 with 2005 does not give the same ratio.
Because it's not equality to be happier about something good happening to someone who's gay/black/female/etc than to someone who's white/male/etc.

Does a gay man deserve anything more than a straight man?
Sounds like "Crocker's Rules", from the SL4 mailing list. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810123

The problem is that a lot of techies default to doing this to other people, without understanding the others' conventions. Hence the stereotype of the insensitive hacker.
One problem with this line of reasoning is that an embargo will cause a trade war, which will reduce demand for Chinese manufactured goods. The end result would be unemployment and social instability, which is the most important thing to be avoided as far as the Party is concerned.
There's an old William Morris quote that I tend to live by: Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.

In the past 2 1/2 years or so I have been slowly paring down my possessions. As a result my living space has decreased from 960 ft2 to 720 ft2, and now to 670 ft2. In 4 months, I could consider downsizing again, probably to 550 ft2 or so. Less space means I can get a nicer space for the same money (though usually less), in a better location. Maybe I'd consider staying put if I had a live-in girlfriend, as there's plenty of closet space for someone else's things.

It's amazing the amount of stuff you tend to haul around with you. What do I miss that I've gotten rid of? Not a thing. I now know where everything is. It's getting increasingly easier to get at everything Cleaning is simple. A smaller space means lower utility bills (i.e. electric going from $80/mo to $35/mo). Fewer clothes (that I never wear) means less laundry to do. I still have some useless things that have sentimental value, and it'll probably take considerably more time before I consider passing those along.

Though most importantly, it leaves more money available for the things you really care about. Money is ultimately a tool, and I'd rather have it available for more worthwhile things.
You are correct; it does not reflect equality. But, unfortunately, it does reflect reality. In addition to being outraged at our distance from equality, I believe it is constructive to celebrate each step we take towards that goal.
Whoops, you're right. I'm guessing $5.6.
IRC Or Chat Room For YC Winter 2011 Applicants
Is there an IRC or 37Signals campfire for applicants of the YCombinator Winter 2011? Would be cool to chat with other applicants.
First up, i'm using CouchDB, so my data is pretty fluid. Everything is organized as a set of 'fragments' which have a variety shapes; its duck-typed data basically. I havent looked at clojure's SQL stuff at all so i cant answer there.

Working with these fragments is real simple. Clutch deserializes the JSON from various couch views into native clojure data structures (maps, vecs, etc). From there i just use multimethods[1] to work out how to handle each fragment at various points (url generation, various aspects of the templating etc). I should note that cgrand created a great little macro for me to make working with enlive and multis easier, http://gist.github.com/432752

The hardest part about migrating the nominal schema is changing the JS for the views. Clutch does support running a clojure view server for couch which i think would actually alleviate a lot of my pain points but I wasn't on the ball when i got started. I store all my views in little JS files in the project and have some shamefully rough clojure scripts to update the views in the DB.

Migrating existing data (which i've only had to do once) is a simple case of writing a map (and or filter) function and running it over all the content and doing a bulk update with couch.

I havent had to do much migration though because i largely ported over my established python/django project.

hopefully that answers your question?

[1]: http://clojure.org/multimethods
Also, the requisite mention of the PIPE ORGAN he built.

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/organ/organ.html
I find the first one really surprising for some reason.
The way we become equally supportive of each other is by not forming little "sub-communities" based on race, religion, gender, orientation, eye color, hair color, car color or anything else. I don't care if the person helping me with some code is black or gay or from an alternate universe where ducks invented the transistor, but if Mr. Quackers only feels comfortable in his interdimensional hyperduck clique, he won't be able to share his knowledge with me and vice versa.

Basically, why would we want to section ourselves off? We have reddit for that. (http://www.reddit.com/r/interdimensionalhyperducks is still available!)
>How "open" is a device whose OS has been configured so that you cannot remove certain applications from it?

Is linux not open because the PS3 exists? It seems like all of your arguments apply equally well there.
I agree completely. One of the biggest problems for anyone, anywhere, is the culture of praise that has developed. Nobody gets told their work is crap anymore, and when it is, it's in a compliment sandwich as you say.

There are many instances where I could have done with someone calling me out on something instead of fence sitting or bland agreement masked as praise.

The other problem is praise inflation : if everyone gets a 'good job' then it's difficult to know whether you're ahead of the pack or just middling.

As long it's not bullying, vindictive or just plain mean, negative criticism is worth 10x positive. It's also better to be drip fed negative feedback from trusted people, so when you get out into the real world, chances are you've heard any negative feedback before and are prepared for it.

In a strong individual hurt feelings are going to produce better outcomes. I'm sure that's why the military has boot camp.
You're mostly paying for labor, and they generally charge for an hour -- so get as much done at once as you can.

You can also use either process with Aluminum sheet. both have their advantages.
What I want to know is: how many people on HN would publicly describe themselves as a "genius"?
How does fewer clothes that you don't wear mean less laundry?
So, if you get high up on the charts, do you plan to put the price back at $2.99 or stay/go back to $0.99 since everyday will be like you're featured?
Call it personal growth.
F# + Mono.

F# is derived from Ocaml and you can compile Ocaml programs using the F# compiler (if they adhere to the -ml-compatibility subset)
Finding a community of "People Like You" can make or break someone's journey into a new field.

I can trace my current job situation back to a boyfriend I had in college. Job prospects were low in 2002, but he knew someone who could use a CS intern. The acquaintance created a job for me and I've been in similar fields ever since.
This might be good advise for somebody trying to go through a career transition where the role they currently have and the social network attached to it doesn't give them an opportunity to talk to people that can help them through a lunch conversation.

For people that have lunch access to talented resources they can learn more from that hour and can it be the best hour of your entire day.

To summarize, don't waste time on non-productive activities... everyone will agree with that... for all of the readers lunch has the opportunity to be more than just the latest office or industry gossip... find those good lunches and capitalize on them.
When's the last time you downvoted every single comment in a thread because you thought the conversation didn't belong on HN? Never, because there's a flag button that actually might accomplish your goal of getting the discussion off of HN, takes way less time, and doesn't harm people that choose to take part in off-topic conversation.

If there really is someone downvoting every comment here, they're homophobic. I promise.
Obsession is more valuable than genius. If you accept IQ testing at all they call people over 130 on the WAIS very superior because genius implies a social or intellectual impact many very superior individuals never achieve. Very superior scores correlate highly with success in a career. But other variables matter much more. I have met few accomplished people who work less than 60 hours a week.

Example: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/...

"Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, came to a similar conclusion. He spent decades following a large sample of “gifted” students, searching for evidence that his measurement of intelligence was linked to real world success. While the most accomplished men did have slightly higher scores, Terman also found that other traits, such as “perseverance,” were much more pertinent. Terman concluded that one of the most fundamental tasks of modern psychology was to figure out why intelligence is not a more important part of achievement: “Why this is so, and what circumstances affect the fruition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent importance that they should be investigated by every method that promises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance."

Kurt Vonnegut Quote:

"Novelists . . . have, on the average, about the same IQ as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time."
To an extent, sure. To use Obama as an example (black instead of gay, but close enough), the fact that he proved a black man can get elected is fantastic, I have to admit that (I'm English) my views of America are very strongly tainted by the large amounts of racism there, both historically and today, and it's great to know that it's not quite as bad as I feared. But that's just a footnote in my mind, the fact that he's black didn't make me want him to become president - though as it happens, I did/do support him, but for his politics rather than his being a minority.
Yeah, its really a pleasure seeing all these people (Jobs especially) argue for the GPLv3 and against tivoization. Where were they in 2007..
Maybe. So far, China has been able to get away with some stunningly protectionist policies. Keep in mind that there is a significant mercantilist/nationalist faction in the Chinese government that sees the US as a declining power with little leverage over China and a history of accepting one-sided trade with Asian states.

They are also playing the long game on this one. It may be enough for now simply to own the resources, and only exploit their control on specific issues like the recent spat with Japan and American pressure on their currency.
Really, it's nothing but a company who has hired employees who "get it".
Wow, that's terrible. I've offset one bigot :)
Less closet space being wasted. It's nearly 2AM, so I'm not as coherent as I'd normally be. Though if you have an overly packed closet, it could result in some garments needing to be ironed more from being crammed together all the time.
My theory is that people browse Minecraft wiki / forum during work hours, in lieu of playing Minecraft, leading to a 13% share. Is there any way you could provide a browser by time of day graph that would support or refute my theory?

Sorry if I'm asking too much; it's really great when people post "private" statistics.
Not sure it reflects on the entire community. Proposition - that the majority of users are well intentioned and participate by either upvoting or not voting. The minority aggressively downvote for whatever reason. In this circumstance, the aggressive downvoters are misrepresented simply because they are more active / their behaviour is more recognised.

Additionally, due to a generally positive bias (supposing we all generally like YC, HN and have a common positive attitude towards startup culture), the downvotes are more noticable / memorable than things that are frequently upvoted.

Same reason all you can focus on is that chip in your windscreen when realistically its only 2% of the entire window. =)
You don't get a very big explosion with just a fuse, and no combustible material. Without the combustible material, the fuse just fizzles out, no great harm done.

It's a separate thing to blame a bad idea, versus blaming the people who thought the bad idea was true. Language is ambiguous; trying to weasel one's way out of "this idea is bad" by saying "the people who think this idea, they're bad; it's not the idea itself", is IMO trying to rely on the imprecision of casual language to refute an argument only for a single formulation, but not in spirit. Ideas have no life of their own outside people's heads. The same argument can be applied to say that there is no such thing as a bad idea.
"Does a gay man deserve anything more than a straight man?"

Yes, one more penis in his life and the man attached to it. That is all.
I am not even surprised this is cool - Jeff Heer is behind it http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/ and he's written some crazy cool frameworks - Prefuse (Java) and Flare (AS3). I'm setting my gitHub watch on this one :-)
"..but that's no problem, I can just cut that off with an angle grinder."

I'm going to try to use that solution for some of my daily problems...
There are gay people everywhere and they are welcome here. But does it really matter if there are some here or not?
Joel was a real, honest-to-goodness role model for me when I was 18 and still wondering whether tech was a place where you could comfortably work as an out gay person.

He doesn't seem to do much in the way of gay activism -- his blog bio used to mention his partner by name, but it's been dropped. I sort of wish he'd do more, but on the other hand, his quiet, unassuming but unabashed acknowledgement of his sexuality is really the ideal I feel we should be aiming for.

Me, I overcompensate, but that's because I'm still angry about high school :-) It gets better, kids!
While I empathize with the purpose of this posting, I don't personally see why it matters. I want to surround myself with smart people, be they gay, straight, or somewhere in between.

Someone posted that Joel Spolsky is gay. I remember hearing something about that a while back, but had honestly forgotten about it. What matters isn't that he's gay, but that he's smart and gets things done. Same goes for everyone else!
Well, many/most pro-lifers aren't pro-life anymore when it comes to the death penalty, or gun-control, or what have you. Then the sanctity of life isn't that uncompromisingly important, anymore.
I think the fact that this made it to the top of HN is unfortunate. This was precisely what the author of the reverse job application intended. Yet, creating a reverse job application web site clearly does not take any significant skill. It is not a ground-breaking idea, or an idea that a common job applicant cannot conceive. Yet, he is now claiming on his resume that his idea went to top of HN, which, ironically, will be viewed by some as a worthy achievement...
FYI, there's a project called JSNES where someone ported a NES emulator to JS / canvas, complete with audio!

http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/
"Has Y Combinator ever funded a startup with a GLBT founder?"

Yes, definitely. Considering YC has funded hundreds of companies, I expect there are quite a lot of them, but one of the characteristics of hackers is that we tend to talk about ideas instead of personal lives, even at social gatherings, so it's not something that comes up often. The ones I know of were friends of mine before they did YC.
http://www.frid.ge/php/group.php?g=7636

There is now!

Edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810174