skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a developer, if my app doesn't make it into the main app store, I'd be throwing good money after bad by trying to run about trying to set up my own payment infrastructure and trying to convince people to buy and side-load my app (which, among other things, Android's openness would keep AT&T Android users from doing anyways). From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as a developer.

As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un-appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.

Openness is only a virtue if it has practical benefit. If Google is arguing for openness from a purely dogmatic, non-practical standpoint, then they should be honest about that instead of pretending that Android's openness is some kind of unicorns-and-candyfloss fun ride for app developers and end-users.
The point is locality: if you jump to the definition, then the site of the call is no longer on screen. Being able to easily bring up the definition or at least the prototype and a one-line description without losing the current context would be quite useful.
I am working on http://tradesalerts.com - email notifications of stocks to buy in Asian markets.
sounds a lot like janky, which is slang for slipshod
Ask HN: How do you decide what to use in building a product?
I got my BS in Computer Science in 2004. I'm now finishing my MBA at Berkeley but I've become very rusty.

In college, I developed some basic web apps on the "latest" technology with a FAMP stack (FreeBSD 4, Apache 2 beta, MySQL 4, PHP 4), some Perl on the backend and light client-side JavaScript. I tinkered some Ajax in 2005 but that's where it ended. RoR, Drupal, CakePHP, Django, Lift or any of the dozens of seemingly awesome frameworks weren't around. MongoDB, Hive (which I'm actually experienced with), nginx, SOAP, REST, JSON, git didn't exist either.

With so many new technologies, how should a developer approach building a new web app (i.e. most YC products)? Which language(s) and/or framework(s) to use?

Maybe this is a whole semester's worth of discussion. But any rules of thumb, rubrics or specific points of comparison would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Scott
Improving some algorithms and calculations that predict future energy scenarios. The prediction engine is programmed in Ruby, so performance is low (we chose ruby because of inhouse knowledge and it makes it easy to discuss with domain experts). Now, fine-tuning/micro-optimising the computation to optimize speed, so that it's fast enough for a web-request (< 200ms).

http://www.energytransitionmodel.com
My rant on this is here:

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/25d7dd5b59c77899

Perhaps particularly relevant to your sentiment. shrug
"Point I am trying to make is, Rubin bickering with Jobs is a farce, because both refuse to share the one thing that matters: control."

I would say the one thing that matters is a consistent and polished experience, and that the iPhone will always have an advantage over Android in that simply because Apple doesn't play this pretend "open" game.
its stackoverflow for everything else - i agree the design could be better
Android is no more open than Tivo

Does hyperbole make you feel good?

Just what, exactly, are you proposing happen in the sphere of source code that's going to affect manufacturers' warranty process, really?

Open source doesn't mean everything is amazing and you won't have to deal with logistics and deployment issues. You have the code, but if you want to get serious and get more than a dozen installs, you should expect to do some heavy lifting of your own and take care of some of the business aspects of the situation.

Not everything can be solved by source and a code license.
How "open" is a device whose OS has been configured so that you cannot remove certain applications from it?

Sure the original OS is open source (and "open" as in visible), but how open is the platform when some companies put chains and locks around it?

I can see how in Google's eyes the core platform is open - code is public, it can be forked, etc. But it's still an environment in which some vendors are free to lock down the system they sell to end-users to the point where a user is no longer free to uninstall programs they don't want. This dilutes the "openness" of the overall platform, since the lack of freedom and control on some Android devices reflects on the average perception of Android.
the other possibility might be that book publishers marry themselves to apple and or amazon, and use their tight controls over content distribution. although, it might end up eliminating some fair-use rights, but something like that has already been played out before.

ipad/kindle etc point a way to bring back the copyright controls into the architecture of how people read books. i think lawrence-lessig talked about this in the "code and other laws of cyberspace". building tight copyright controls into a closed device is much simpler than a general purpose computer. sufficiently motivated folks can crack the ipad controls, but it is an open question if it can be managed while still letting ipad access the various stores that provide the content.
Trying to build the best resource out there for learning organic chemistry. And tutoring online through Skype. Having a blast.
http://masterorganicchemistry.wordpress.com
>As a developer, if my app doesn't make it into the main app store, I'd be throwing good money after bad by trying to run about trying to set up my own payment infrastructure and trying to convince people to buy and side-load my app (which, among other things, Android's openness would keep AT&T Android users from doing anyways). From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as a developer.

Or support it with ads?

>As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un-appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.

This seems no different to me than any other free market. I buy the argument that Google should simplify your purchasing decision by being more selective with the trademark, but that's an entirely different argument than the one we are having.
I guess your account is active again, but this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809590 is still dead. Don't know why.
He's not happy about Apple's app store either. Are they doing something wrong too?
Why? Developing for Android is a pain in the arse, especially once you're done and testing in the field.

There are hundreds of devices, all different, all with their own bugs and all running different versions of the OS to deal with. This is J2ME all over again.

That doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means it takes longer. It also means you need to go out and buy a tonne of development/testing phones.

All of the above might be okay for people with money and/or investment, but makes it difficult for small developers. Let's not even begin to talk about the Android Market, supported seller/buyer countries, currency display, return policies, etc, etc.

Compare that to iOS -- Apple rolls out an update to the OS, it works on all devices, and they're all identical. There's far less testing required (version N, N-1), and far less hardware investment too. You pop your app up on the App Store and it all 'just works'. That's what Steve is talking about -- integration vs fragmentation.
2014 Fifa World Cup
They're out there. Does it really make a difference?
Thanks. Yeah, the front page is pretty messy/busy - any simple ideas to make it cleaner?

It's just me working on the game, part time right now, and it's the first game I've made.
"Because what his theory boils down to is that you can't predict the market."

Citation needed, please. By the way, my good sir, RenTech and others have shown over the past two decades or so that it's possible to predict the market... at least in the very, very short term. We have very solid empirical evidence of that, but some intellectual nihilists prefer to ignore that.

"Pointing out that the market is describable by a self-similar fractal froth is an interesting thought, but it basically means that if true, you can't predict anything with any effectiveness."

Please define "predict" and "effectiveness". If you have access to order book data, I guarantee you that you will find pockets of predictability.

A deep question would be: why is that the collective behavior of millions of agents acting in their own self-interest generate fractal patterns? Can that be derived from first principles? Moreover, what exactly would exhibit fractal behavior? The price time series? But they are only a very low-dimensional picture of a very high-dimensional beast, which is order flow. The mathematics that make sense in financial markets are not stochastic processes not fractals, but game theory.

"Who wants to listen to a party pooper like that?"

More like: who wants to listen to a pompous, bitter old academic who once did some interesting work in Mathematics and who is now trying to force his aesthetics on other people's fields of knowledge?

"Shall we say, the evidence somewhat suggests that pervasive underestimation of risk can potentially have slightly negative effects on the global economy."

And airplanes sometimes crash, and ships sometimes sink. From the very definition of risk, your statement is a truism.
I love RIM, I've been a blackberry fan for years and they're the only phones I want to use (currently have two Bold 9700s and one Bold 9000). But...

a.) Jobs pointlessly decided to bash a few rivals in his speech on Monday, which I thought made him look pretty petty (roughly speaking I agree with the author of http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/What-is-Steve-Jobs... though I wouldn't make the conclusion that his comments mean he is 'afraid'). Why did Balsillie have to jump in the same boat, rather than taking the high road and letting Apple have this argument all to themselves?

b.) "We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple. And by the way, [here's what you should actually think]." Really? Was that written by a 12 year old?

c.) "We know that 7inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market." Just saying the opposite of what someone else said isn't an argument...

d.) As much as I love everything about their phones... developing for them sucks. Hell, I don't think I've ever heard an opinion of a developer who prefered creating BB apps over iPhone apps. So why are they claiming to be the champion of developers?

As much as I love this company and their products, reading this blog made me cringe, and not in a good way.

edit: On a positive note, they slightly redeemed themselves by the fact that comments on that blog need to be approved before becomming visible, and they haven't decided to censor comments such as "Forbes should instate a new award category: Most Arrogant CEO of the decade. No points for guessing who the winner would be..."
Joel Spolsky and Peter Thiel. I didn't find out they were gay for a long time, though I guess it just shows that it's not/shouldn't be anything remarkable.
I am pretty sure that the carriers don't discount rates for non-contract phones.

T-Mobile is the only US carrier that does -- the smartphone plans are $20/month cheaper if you bring your own phone or buy at the no-contract price.

They also have an installment plan where you can pay full price for the phone, but spread it out over 20 months with no interest and pay it on your phone bill. This seems like the best of both worlds.
automatic trading based on Black-Scholes acerbated the crash != the Black Scholes model contributed to the crash

Unrelatedly, is there anything wrong with, say, a mortgage-backed security accurately priced according to a particular model, so long as the limitations of the particular model's assumptions are properly understood? This applies to any model in economics or finance. All are obviously just simplifications of reality.

The technical assumptions of a mathematical model should not be blamed for the actions of ignorant or reckless investors.
Most of my current spare time goes into making a Common Lisp bot for the current Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars. See http://ai-contest.com
As for resources, have heard about this organization dedicated to helping lgbt entrepreneurs: http://startout.org.
I went the opposite route in the Android Market. When the lite version of my game hit the top 20 in its category, I made a few nice updates, and I felt the full version earned its higher price (~$4). After making the change, the number of sales barely went down, but revenue went up.

But now you have me thinking. Are MORE people in the the $0.99-only crowd seeing my app, and are there enough of those people to make DROPPING the price more financially beneficial???

I suppose I could run a "sale", but once you start getting comfortable with a nice daily income, taking risks becomes harder and harder.
Nah, id need mongo or dev null for that. i havent got to those yet
The alternative to being a web developer is don't be a web developer. Really, there are an infinite number of alternatives. Don't do something you don't want to do.

You're graduating with what, a B.S. in Computer Science? There are plenty of areas you could go into if you narrow down what your interests are (which college is great for.) Maybe you want to go into science, or finance. Use the time you have left to get involved in research that interests you, take an internship or part time job, get some experience and figure out what you want to do.
This is awesome. The story, I mean; unfortunately, I do not have an iOS device, which means I cannot play the game (I would if I could!). It gives me hope knowing that there are great success stories out there like this still. I know the chances are slim, but it's still really cool to hear these sorts of stories.

Congrats on the success of your game!
Illustration on an electric guitar and a few submissions for national / local art competitions. Also designing an org structure for a local Roller Derby team.
Hmm. Maybe go to a LEGO fan site like lugnet? There're always people showing off this or that differential geared thingie.
UGG Casual Snow Boots Oulet, Cheap Uggs Online Store, Discount UGG Kids Shoes
The new Google Search Appliance—a bridge to the cloud
I'm learning C++ so I can get a job. I've been programming since 1976, doing C since 1987 and embedded C since 2001 but there are more job ads for COBOL than C programmers.
I would say yes, although his issues against the app store have been somewhat remediated by Apple's latest easing up on developer restrictions.

I don't see this as an either/or scenario. As a developer, I can be dissatisfied with both Apple and Google. As someone who is pragmatic and not espousing a philosophy what matters is which I'm dissatisfied with more. There's no right or wrong answer to that question, each developer has to decide that for themselves.
Windows Phone 7 Is the Real Facebook Phone
Hi! Gay co-founder of awe.sm here. I've considered posting exactly this Ask HN a few times, pleased to see somebody else did.

My side project http://gaygeeks.org is also probably pretty relevant here, if you'll excuse the (second) shameless plug :-) It's not specifically for hackers, but there are a lot of tech people in there, unsurprisingly.
Yes, it does make a difference.

Finding a community of "People Like You" can make or break someone's journey into a new field. That means the hacker community at large needs to be equally supportive of queer hackers, or a queer hacker sub-community must form.

I'm all for the former, but let's face it: historically, us straight white males (who make up the vast majority of contemporary hackerdom) are pretty awful at making people who "Aren't Like Us" feel comfortable & welcome. (Hell--we have a hard enough time staying comfortable with eachother.)
I know Matt doesn't want to get into revenue specifics but based on what I've heard and read from other developers top 3 on the app store is > 20K/day in sales. If trainyard manages to maintain a top 10 position for the rest of the year, I think Matt could probably net > 500K after Apple's cut, especially considering the holiday season.
A few comments on Paul Graham re superangels
Don't personally see any reason questions such as "Has Y Combinator ever funded a startup with a GLBT founder?" matter even a tiny bit (unless there was some reason for a discussion along the lines of "Are YC people homophobic?")

Side note: I'm bi, and still don't care "where the gays are at".
Lorenzo Thione, the technical co-founder of Powerset (-> Bing), helps run StartOut.

I've been to a few of their SF events, but they are usually sparse on hacker attendees.
It isn't hyperbole. Like Tivo, Android can only be installed on hardware from manufacturers that are hostile to unofficial software. Most handset manufacturers go out of their way to make installing unofficial builds difficult. They all void your warranty if you try.

The fact is that there are no Android forks worthy of the name and never will be so long as hacking is required to install it. Open-source software that can never be installed is only 'open' in the most technical sense.
Getter Setter: To use or not to use
We'd be in a very different place regarding railways if GM and Ford hadn't done their absolute best to kill public transportation in the 50s. In the town where I live, the well-used streetcar system was purchased by GM and closed after two years.
Designing APIs with the Java 5 language features
REST and the missing link
https://opensource.motorola.com/sf/frs/do/viewRelease/projec...

The Android repo will not contain all the platforms, I think usually Google are only interested in putting the source for their GEDs there. But the above is probably a good start.
Developing and testing on Android wouldn't be so bad if the damn emulator was actually usable. AVDs sound great in theory, but useless in reality. A hobbyist can't afford to buy a couple of dozen phones to test out an app. No wonder Android Market is full of comments about apps not working...
TDLR:

RIM -> Jobs "7 inches is enough"
I think the best way to play the China bubble is to go after luxury retailers in the country. For example, I found one company that you can short which basically imports Swiss watches that they then try to resell. Property brokers like E-House might be good shorts too, although they have secular growth since they are taking out mom & pop operators.

I used to think that using Australia as a proxy, such as the AUD or some of the commodity miners would work as a means of shorting China but I'm less enthusiastic now. While there may not be demand for some of the luxury developments, there is probably adequate demand for lower level buildings.

I imagine that the state owned enterprises would shift their construction projects from luxury developments to critical/needed buildings and infrastructure, potentially keeping commodity demand stable.
Java's biggest threat is Microsoft
I'm building a contact import script for a hip hop artist's newsletter. Essentially its what powers the "invite your friends" button on the newsletter.

I am dealing with yahoo's contacts api at the moment. It seems that althought yahoo! provides a php sdk, a direct fetch of email addresses from a user's address book still requires a restful get request.

The yahoo php sdk makes the oauth stuff really easy though.
Hey Laurie! I didn't count you out, of course -- I'm surprised you didn't recognize me by name. :)
Somebody is going through this thread systematically down-voting every single comment. So, yeah, gays in tech could still use a little extra support.
http://profquotes.feedladder.com - funny prof quote app

Similar to an idea I showed earlier on HN (http://laughlitmus.feedladder.com), I'm basically trying to generalize this as a "Reddit for tweets" to create a collaboratively made twitter feeds. Idea being others could make a group-administered feed on a particular subject.
STT_GNU_IFUNC
Yep, that was exactly my dilemma. I was making a huge amount of income, so it was a pretty big risk to drop the price, but I knew I would only have the opportunity during the week I was featured. It very well could have dropped and failed.

I'm not sure how the Android charts work, but in the App Store, it's ranked by units sold, not by profit. This is the KEY thing that is crucial to how the market works. Even if I make LESS money than I did the day before, I will be higher up in the charts, which will get me more exposure, and eventually more sales. Going high in the App Store is all about upward momentum. The volume of sales doesn't change linearly with rank either, it's quite exponential.
I think of it as being similar to the questions about other types of minorities as startup founders. The gay community is pretty distinctive, and I'm curious to see if there's any overlap between that and the tech community. Didn't mean to offend you.
Microsoft Research Asia Gives Glimpse at Future of Computing
Enhancing Multilingual Content in Wikipedia
Just moved to Boulder, Colorado a few months ago to start working for an agency. Doing lot's of frontend work as well as some PHP using Cake.

In my spare time, working on an implementation of the classic mac game bolo using HTML5.

http://hbolo.brianwigginton.com
I believe you need to be aware of your markets behavior first. There will come a point where your revenue will start stalling and even decreasing, and that's a great moment to release a major update or start a sale. You want to increase your exposure to level decreasing revenue and it has the benefit of marketing your app to a completely different market with different rules on pricing. When you get this people on board and you take the price up again, you'll be taking some of this customers with you, for any next iterations updates, or even your other products if you decide to make another.
Show HN: Encode images as audio, and vice-versa in realtime: JACK/Aubio/GD
This is a project I have finally documented. I hope it might inspire someone.
I disagree with that stance on "equality".

I want to be outraged when someone isn't treated equally because they're gay, I don't want to celebrate when someone who's gay isn't treated negatively.