skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Then you have to go somewhere else to get those apps?

Walmart doesn't sell Target's house-brand goods either.
It seems like this might cannibalize iPad sales to some extent, no? A $999 11" MacBook with 64GB of storage is an awfully good deal compared to the top-of-the-line iPad choice, isn't it?
Insure.com – Sold for $16,000,000 in Oct 2009 to QuinStreet
Fund.com – $9,999,950 – Sold in 2008
Porn.com - Sold for $9,000,000 sometime in 2007
Business.com – Sold for $7,500,000 in 1999
Diamonds.com – Sold for $7,500,000
Beer.com - Sold for $7,000,000
Casino.com – $5,500,000 – Sold to a private company in 2003
Slots.com – $5,500,000 – Moniker auction May 2010
Toys.com $5.1M sold to Toys R Us
AsSeenOnTV.com – Sold for $5,100,000 in January of 2000

See more...updated May 14, 2010
http://www.fka200.com/2009/01/03/a-list-of-some-of-the-top-d...
I would definitely pay off as much debt as possible...hopefully with a $125k/year job he has kept debt to a minimum, but just in case he has credit card debt, student loans, car payment, etc., I would pay these off.

If he's risk-averse, he probably has little experience with investing, so the money is probably fine where it is.
I really don't understand why people quote fiction in support of a statement about real life. This seems to happen a lot with Mad Men, for instance. How are you supposed to know the author knows what he's talking about, except that he vaguely agrees with you?
This is a key consideration. Reddit is pretty frakkin big and yet still remains relatively well balanced depending on your subreddits.

What I've been impressed with on many occasions is the community keeping in check the over-the-top commentators who are just being douches, regardless of which side of the debate they are on. The community really does moderate itself quite well considering its size.

If you hang out in r/wtf or some such, you kinda get what you would expect, but select your subreddits well and you can be part of some pretty interesting discussions and occasionally learn some really cool things. Reddit ftw in my opinion.
You need a compiler to build iOS and OS X apps. Once you have a compiler on your machine, how can someone else prevent you from creating or running arbitrary executables?

In order to lock down the desktop so as to make a Mac App Store the only way to obtain executable content, Apple would have to fundamentally re-invent the way people build iOS and OS X apps. I just don't see developers sticking with the platform once Xcode is a hosted web app. Chasing away their developer community would effectively cede the market for mobile apps to Android.

Apple's strategic, long term focus is clearly and unambiguously "mobile computing for the common man." Providing a dirt-simple app distribution platform makes sense within the context of mobile computing. Making it substantially harder to create iOS apps, relative to other mobile platforms, is contrary to Apple's strategic goals.
Oh, haven’t thought of that. It sounds as though apps are installed for all users, just as before.

I’m not sure whether I’m a fan of keeping both prominent file system access around and adding the Launchpad which would then presumably store all its folders and arrangements in a preference file and not in the filesystem. That’s just so damn inelegant!

What I would like, though, is if they gave developers who don’t want or can distribute their app through the App Store some way to easily hook up with the way the real App Store is doing things, i.e. you download a file, open it and the app is installed. You don’t have to run an installer or drag the App to your folder. That would be nice but I’m not expecting it.
The current HN title is wrong.

The article doesn't address Open Source. It states that the store will not be used for the distribution of beta versions of software. The tweet just says firefox betas won't be in the store.

Especially note: Free software is allowed.

There are classes of software that won't work in the store. The article mentions:

• Things that implement their own copy protection.

• Buggy software.

• Things that need root.

See the whole list: http://pastie.org/1236378 but you will go blind before you finish if your don't have readability plugin.

I would characterize the forbidden stuff as "obnoxious, useless, or malicious" applications. There is some collateral damage along the way, e.g. anything with a kernel extension, and there are some morality/legality driven restrictions e.g. encourge minors to consume alcohol or realistic human killing.

The most alarming exception to me, is that the application can only distribute updates through the store. I would hope Apple doesn't hold up new versions like they have with the iOS stores. As a developer I cringe when I read of customers living with month old defects because the update is stalled in queue.

Customers will have a reasonable belief that stuff from the store isn't tearing through their computer looking for email addresses or credit card numbers to sell.

But that's ok, they have other channels for distribution. It isn't a Apple Store or nothing proposition like the iOS devices.
Not sure I follow you. What do you mean what happens? To me it means they won't be in the store and you will have to get them like you have been getting them this whole time. What happens when Shell 'curates' their convenience stores so Newsweek is no longer sold there?

edit:typo
One requires authentication from Notches sever.
This App Store isn't the same as the iOS one. If the iOS one didn't push your app, nobody could use it (practically speaking.) Obviously this isn't true here. (For now!) So, it's hard to give Apple flak for any rules they have in their approval process.
Alex Grey's artwork is very intriguing. I like a lot of the concepts he illustrates. Essentially, I think Alex Grey shows us how infinite and special humanity is.
Does tech school teach people to assert competence before they're ready?
Look into Esterel for some theoretical grounding. It will help you reason about reactive systems.
Perhaps that's why HN has yet to issue me a one way ticket to Cyberia. <wink>

(Cyberia: A cold, frozen wasteland of Cyberspace.)
In reply to your EDIT:, then people who are bothered by that switch to a different OS. Apple's OS isn't the only OS out there.
The idea is the basic indoor mall/store navigation thing: Each BT transmitter will send out a unique code tied to its location. An app on the phone detects the nearest n of these and determines location by triangulation.

If the sensors are cheap, they can placed dense enough to provide pretty good localization. The mall can pay for them. Say, if the transmitter is ~$5, we can place 200 of these in a mall for $1K, which isn't that much, I think. The transmitters should be low-power to minimize maintenance, e.g. go for a month or more. They should also be small to be unnoticeable.

What do you think?
Honestly, I think most people who "prove" things using induction don't really understand what they're doing

Can you explain what you mean by this?
Your grandfather is Gerald Weinberg? His books have been a big influence on me and I recommend them to lots of people!
> The Mac App Store

Think of apt-get that also includes commercial software. Convenience is king for consumers. And for software makers, they gain one more distribution channel besides Google.
No beta software? Great.

No license keys? Why do you need license keys? You're now in the iTunes ecosystem like apps on iDevices.

No optional add ons? For a start, java isn't optional on OS X. Apps on iOS are completely self-contained. I guess the same philosophy is coming to the Mac. Not surprising but there are potential issues I guess.

No root privileges? This one has potential issues but I guess apple wants to play it safe. Not surprising.

Same censorship as the App Store? I took this as a given when I heard about it. No issue here.

The author's bias is pretty obvious and expect the Apple-haters to roll out the predictable criticisms.

But apps don't need to be distributed via the app store on the Mac. You can still use download links from a website at which point it's a question of choice as to whether you want to be part of that ecosystem.

I see a bigger issue being the 70/30 split. 30% is a lot to lose when you can sell it yourself. Even small sellers can use third party payment services. It'll be interesting to see how the software makers big and small react to this.

I suspect that those in the app store will sell more units. This is probably why Steve pushed the discovery argument (with some merit).
This was definitely one of my favorite talks. I spent a long time looking for the video. Dalton's clearly on top of his stuff and pretty funny, too.
My experience with Routesy (a public transit prediction application) is that it continues to sell steadily over time, even when it's not updated for a long time, and even when it's not new anymore. I think there's a major difference between applications that people play with for fun and ones that they intend to use every day.

If I were in your shoes (and I sort of am!) I would recommend really focusing a lot on user retention, and make sure you have analytics set up in your application (I use Flurry). You want to make sure that the people who are using your app like it enough to make it a part of their routine. If not, you need a good communication channel to figure out how to make improvements.

Your idea sounds really cool and buzz-worthy, so I would recommend checking out some of the recently posted articles here about how to pitch to bloggers. If you can pull it off, you should also create a spiffy demo video, and make it funny if you can.

Good luck Aditya, and please share your story and let us know how it goes! :)
It's pretty funny. I took it as just an ironic take/satire on the demeaning tone of job adverts. I hope it doesn't backfire on him (judging by some peoples reactions in here, it might. Reading it I had thought 'I wish I'd thought of this.' now I'm kinda glad that I didn't)
> I don't understand the geek self-flagellation that iOS has caused.

A product like the iPad, which didn't exist a year ago, provides an interesting reference for what computing could be outside the existing rules. My mom has a much, much easier time using the iPad than her Mac, and can do many of the same tasks with it.

Oh, orangecat. Look at these strawmen.

> OS X is actually completely unusable unless you're an uber-nerd.

Not really. It's just a lot more usable for nerds. And less so the less you know about technology. Again, compare this to the iPad, whose usability remains about the same regardless of where you exist in the tech savviness distribution. Once you learn how to use it, which is easy, you're fine.

> How does getting rid of the terminal improve the experience

It... doesn't. Liking the terminal, like caring about compilers or kernel extensions, signals being a technical user. Getting rid of kexts or gcc would be similarly irrelevant to the user experience.
Boston can try all they want, but what Silicon Valley has that makes it the most valuable is the community. It is a plethora of ingenuous talent no other city can provide. Everyone talks startups and almost everyone is an entrepreneur. I hope to move there full-time very soon
Marco Arment: The new MacBook Air
If you sell a product -- with no subscription & no support -- but customers wont buy unless you do several in-person sales meetings, it's still a product.

I decide when and where to put on workshops. Then people pay me to show up. It's a product.
It is only fitting that edw519 has now been member of HN for 1337 days! <wink>
that's a feature that ms-dos had!
I wonder if you've noticed but the rendered text on websites viewed from a mac is very different from the same on windows. On windows the fonts aren't as smooth as on the mac.

I always dread viewing the windows version of websites I develop after I did them on my mac. They make a good looking website into a crappy looking one because its headings, its text becomes more pixelated.

The good thing is... (There's always a good thing). Now I know how much typography matters in making things look good.
The title was on the basis of this part of the article "If an app even exhibits a bug, it will be rejected -- does Apple know how many apps, open-source or otherwise, have bugs?"

The point that this could make FOSS especially vulnerable, although am open to discussion otherwise.
net vs gross is a little ambiguous in english unless those terms are used.
Well, they can't change the law, for sure. And they're not the ones that control enforcement. They have some leeway to interpret open-ended parts of the law, but there aren't many of those left.
Not just sound archives, but film as well. Almost all of the silent films shot in Ithaca have been lost because they were left to rot in their containers due to copyright laws.
"Day 5 - Embarrassing Flaw #3: Making a stupid business plan, then ignore it anyway"

Awesome! (I lol'd) I love inventing. It's only recently that I've started to add business logic to my imagination, I'm no Jedi in this capacity, but the force was strong at startup school; and I want to train!
He might want to use some of it to buy a nicer house. Real estate is low priced right now. If he waits, the house prices may outstrip his after tax cash gains from investing.
Yes and no. Mozilla's a bit screwed on this front, because they use XUL to render their interface - and, critically, the browser can render XUL pages. I don't have FF installed on this machine, but you should still be able to check it out at http://www.faser.net/mab/remote.cfm to see a demo of the feature.

It's a pretty cool feature, but it means that on Firefox, attackers should be able to emulate basically any chrome they want to.
Also known as: Invoke the (extended) Euclidean algorithm on 1 and x.
Am I the only former Performa owner on HN?

Launchpad = Launcher (with a bit of a facelift)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tg.online/apple_cps/applemenu/i...
My consistent position is nothing more than that Android is not open in a way that is consistent with any of the claimed benefits Google or other Android promotors have asserted it provides.

It's certainly open from a perspective of "you get the occasionally tarball of source". Nobody is debating that. This isn't about whether Android is open or not; it's about whether the way it is open is at all consistent with the way it's openness is marketed to end consumers.

For the vast majority of users that openness, from any practical standpoint, might as well not exist. The popular, high selling handsets are simply too locked down for them to benefit from anything anyone does with those tarball drops.

Which is fine, but it's certainly not the way people paint the platform when they talk about how much better Android is for the user thanks to its openness, because the openness is primarily for the benefit of handset makers and carriers who can use those tarballs.

For what it's worth, I think this whole game of treating a thriving market like its some kind of horse-race is ridiculous. 90% market share was an aberration in the PC market; there's going to be room for multiple competitors for decades to come. There are no sides. Nobody is going to win anything.
License keys can be really useful for institution-wide software licensing. Imagine an advertising agency trying to buy 30 instances of Photoshop. How are they going to do that with the App Store? Without some support for bundle purchases, the Mac App Store won't be very useful for developers of software for a professional audience.
Scarier idea: Charging, or restricting access to Xcode only for those who have paid the developers subscription.
The exclusion won't apply in this case, because as some indicated below, LLC's are not corporations and most angels invest alone or as a group under a LLC.

After some thought, I just don't see this bill creating any additional investments outside of those that were already going to happen.
Sure.

In my experience, most people who go through math classes at a University, not to mention classes in High School, are mostly "blindly" following a template of how to do induction. They don't really understand the principle behind it, why it's a valid proof technique, etc. Put another way, if I used induction incorrectly, I could probably still trick them into thinking it's a valid proof because it looks like induction.

The same goes for a lot of things in Mathematics. The same also goes for recursion - most people don't really understand recursion (unless it's used at a "simple" level, like in Tree Recursion).
He could have pulled a Kevin Rose and shot himself in the face. There are people who are good at certain things, knowing when to walk away is very important.

There are entrepreneurs that are great at creating startups, but beyond that they are horrible. There are countless stories of founders who dont know how to lead companies pass certain points and refuse to hire anyone else, watching their business fail.
Thanks for great insights and suggestions! Yeah, retention is key for my app, as it's sort of subscription based model. So thanks for analytics suggestion. Will cook up demo video as well.
This article came up before (original http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053753 ), I'm going to quote Eliezer Yudkowsky ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054201 ):

"Look, I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but if you have difficulty with any programming concept, you must not be a supergenius. You're just an ordinary genius at best. I'm sorry. Life isn't always fair.

Of course, I say this as someone who hasn't yet tried to learn Haskell. On the other hand, I know someone who competes at the national level and I never saw him have trouble with anything including Haskell, so...

The sad truth is that there are some people for whom programming comes as naturally as thinking, with code formed as easily as thoughts; and if it takes an effort to understand any aspect of programming, you have just learned that you are not one of those people. Alas."
Personally if I where to purchase it, I would make it a high end lifestyle magazine. In between the old GQ, Bazaar and Robb Report. The branding for that is phenomenal. Not worth 13 mil though.
Hmm. I figured you were depending on people's phones to do the reading. I assume you're doing this in order to help the customer navigate the store?

If you could have the customer pick up a handset RFID reader (with your app on it I suppose?) that they return when they leave, RFID could work. I suggested RFID because the tags don't need any battery or power supply. The readable range might be a little less than with Bluetooth transmitters, but I have seen read distances of 50 or so feet. And tags are cheap and readily available, too.
Embedded and firmware engineering questions expect this as an answer. Anyone following your advice will not be taken seriously. This is true regardless of whether you're correct factually. Readers of this thread deserve to know that.
William Zinsser: An Interesting Life
I wonder what percentage of Reddit users run Adblock - I imagine it's much higher than your typical site.
I've been waiting for 256 colour support for so long. I've given up now though, and configured iTerm2 instead. iTerm2 also lets me use my mouse in vim over ssh, which is a nice bonus.
Well your advice is pretty much dated...but I wish you good luck. It'll be interesting to see how you rank by having a nice looking source code.

3.Metadata is not relevant.

SEO is seriously one of the things every startups has to consider, especially in many niches it's essential for growth.
You are right, it is little more than a todo list(In fact it's a little less in some cases) I think the reason I like the idea is because it does a few things I think people will find interesting: it displays a chore (task) for you to do right then, it chooses for you (you do have the option to skip) and it kinda of "hides" all the chores you have to do. Instead of being overwhelmed with a lot of tasks it gives you one to complete, only one.

Also, unlike a todo list, a "chore" only requires 3 inputs: 1, Name; 2, Description; 3, re-occuring{yes/no}. Sometimes users feel overwhelmed by the amount of options they have when using task managers. ChoreRoulette would do away with this feeling by offering a simple clean 3-input interface.

Any other suggestions/comments

P.S. Yes I know convincing users to input data is always an uphill battle. I'm hoping my simple quick way of inputting a chore will solve that.
I wonder If EA knows the independent developer owns the Angry Birds part, If not they have a couple angry EA managers pulling out hair and asking themselves now "How did we missed that?" :)
It's my impression that this sort of "fun" work is still done in firmware engineering at Broadcom for instance.
*Chore #1 :)
Uh, right, but why would you run an authenticated v. non-authenticated server? Just to prevent pirates from connecting to your server because you support notch? Is it like Battlefield or those other games with ranked v. non-ranked where ranked offers persistent stats? I am curious if there is any benefit in running an authenticated server other than moral support for appearing on notch's list of approved players.
Start here http://www.seomoz.org/blog the tools are pretty good too
Mac App Store Guidelines full text
Retrevo 2010 Gadget Census Reveals Some Interesting Facts
"Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected"

So many OS X apps today use non-public APIs, this would exclude the vast majority of applications in use today.

"Apps that install kexts will be rejected"

There goes VMWare and Parallels.
This is actually possible to do dynamically[1] so you can keep your costs down. I found this post last week and implemented it over the weekend, and it's pretty neat to watch it work. So far I've only implemented this for workers, but it's certainly possible[2] to implement it for dynos.

[1]: http://blog.darkhax.com/2010/07/30/auto-scale-your-resque-wo...
[2]: http://github.com/ddollar/heroku-autoscale
You know what, as a user, I quite like it. It's a really convenient way to get software. I like all the categories, featured apps, simple payment & deployment and the good signal vs noise ratio. I just simply don't care whether developers like it or not. (Having said that, I'm a software developer too but I understand that my convenience is less important than the customer's convenience.)
I don't think Apple is aiming to provide a means of covering every possible kind of licensing deal a developer might potentially want to strike. They're aiming this at average, small developer to lone buyer sales.

If the bulk of your sales are site-licenses to labs and universities, this app store probably isn't the correct venue for your product.
An old acquaintance of mine owns at.com. I can't help but wonder how much that would go for....
I will definitely try Mac AppStore. Out of these 30%, you will spend at least 10% on billing, hosting, etc. if you distribute yourself, and you will also spend some time doing that (or posting PayPal horror stories to HN). I think the AppStore's wider audience reach will more than offset these mere 20%.

Also, we should expect significant price drops for desktop software (competition), and ignoring that will make your app less competitive, whether you're on AppStore or not.
That domain really gets around :-P
I guess it's underwhelming because I've already had this for years on almost every window manager I've tried. Support is even better in awesomewm, which I am currently using (you can fullscreen apps that have no native fullscreen mode). I fullscreen something and can just Super ← (or various other key-combos) to another desktop. It's nice that OS X is getting these features now I guess, but shouldn't they have been included with Spaces?