skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one has been able to advertise paid applications on the iPhone platform and get a positive return from the advertising itself. The name of the game is to generate enough downloads to get onto a 'top paid app' leaderboard in your category, which will then expose you to a bunch of buyers who wouldn't have seen your app otherwise. In other words, you're indirectly paying for placement.

All cost-per-click networks will have abysmal conversion rates for paid apps. Cost-per-install networks shift this risk from you to the network, since you only pay per install. However, paid apps advertising on straight cost-per-install networks delivers minimal volume, which makes them not worth doing - while the risk to you is gone, the conversion rate still sucks. Some cost-per-install networks (Tapzilla, Apperang) require you to pay them more than the cost of the app, so they can bribe users to install the app. This works, but it automatically results in a negative ROI on the advertising itself - since they take a cut, Apple takes a cut, and the user gets reimbursed through PayPal. If your spend isn't enough to get you onto a leaderboard and get that sweet organic traffic, you wasted your money. Right now these user-bribing networks are still small, so this is a real risk. Buy from everyone simultaneously.

Happily, there's a lot more options for free applications. If you've figured out how to make sufficient money from your users through virtual goods sales (like one YC company, Addmired, although there are many others), and therefore can afford to advertise, there's many cost-per-install options you can use to effectively buy placement - Flurry (which is mine), TapJoy, MDotM, Free App A Day, many others. Again, the prudent-but-flush developer buys from a lot of sources simultaneously to ensure their application ends up on the front page of iTunes.
Hmm, I'll have to dig out the Oreilly Brain Hacks, see what was there

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101534/

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007799/
Firefox and Chrome will install Flash for you quite easily (or actually, Chrome has it built in, doesn't it?). However, I suppose 60% of Mac users prefer Safari. Does Safari have a plug in finder service like Firefox, if so, does it locate Flash for you?

Oh, as the article notes, Windows doesn't ship with Flash installed, either. Does this mean anything at all? No.
Glad you liked it.

Mobile is an interesting space for this content type. I can imagine a user getting relevant lists depending on their location. Actually location and localised content is going to be a big challenge for us - we can see patterns developing where users are creating lots of location specific content that may not be relevant to you.
You may want to check when the first generation of MacBook Air was released.
Excuse the delay... in case you're still reading:

No one's discovered a better method of representation.

Hmmmm... that's only half true. The text layout in a real program is already a tree-like representation: using vertical and horizontal space (blank lines, indentation) and providing syntax highlightling, we "paint" text to resemble the real structure: the one the compiler understand.

But syntax highlighters, "intellisense" and the rest of IDE tricks are just that: a patch over the text handling.

A true IDE would read code directly into a in-memory tree structure, resolving external references, making a first processing of the code on the moment the code is loaded.

A true IDE would eliminate the burden of writing annoying control characters (curly braces, semicolons, quotes) to placate the compiler, escaping delimiters, correcting indentation, etc. The editor could use some quick key combinations to navigate the code.

This is not really related with a Visio-like interface. It would look more like add-ons such as Resharper that "understand" the code to a point and make it easier to write code. Visually it would present the code already indented and colorized. It could be "skinned".

Unlike add-ons, it would be fully aware of the code meaning, so it wouldn't need scanning the code to support editing. The code would be fully loaded and cross-references checked.

BTW, there have been some proof-of-concept of "syntax-driven editors" or something like that. I haven't even seen them, so not sure to what point it's what I have in mind.
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCC_Plugins gives some background.
Why do programmers hate Microsoft?
Why do programmers hate Microsoft so much? A search finds hundreds of anti-Microsoft rants in source code comments, ranging from personal attacks on Bill Gates to frustration with supposedly not following standards and putting out buggy, insecure code.
Apple is getting power drunk :[ They might be the next evil empire.

What they really should do is ship with both flash and Click-To-Flash. That would be serving the users best.
"I wrote this film, and I am doing everything I can to prevent its release"
It turns out to be much easier to have ten virtual machines running one daemon each

It's funny, when you needed one OS instance per network server daemon on Windows in the 90s, everyone laughed at it. Now it counts as cutting edge thought.
Oh, as the article notes, Windows doesn't ship with Flash installed, either.

XP does. I don't know about Vista and 7.

Presumably some large percentage of Windows desktops and laptops are sold with Flash pre-installed.
The question I've heard is to just swap 2 variables, no restrictions.
Facebook Should Give Up on Privacy
This could be useful for people learning a new language. There are already plugins for getting translations of words/phrases, but if this service also stores the words I've looked up, I can go back and repeat.

Maybe I can even be quizzed on my stored words?

With device syncing, I can read and add words during the day, and then I can get quizzed on my Android phone first thing in the morning before leaving bed.

As I like learning new languages myself, I'm thinking this could be quite useful. I realize this is probably drifting a bit from your idea though.. Just thinking out aloud.
Real-time heatmap example with Javascript and HTMLCanvas
I've heard - and seen - the same argument made with respect to Flash on one side and HTML4 + JavaScript on the other side.

I'm the biggest flash hater there is, I only started using it November last year for one specific feature that we no longer could talk our way around (video+audio) and it is really amusing to see history repeat like this.

Adobe isn't going anywhere, and, unfortunately, neither is flash. 'just' video is not going to suddenly make everybody drop flash.

> While I do think that this is bad user experience for those buying the MacBook Air, it should help foster an overall better user experience for the Internet.

Reducing the user experience for any group does not increase the user experience for the whole.

What it might do is foster standardization in the long run. But don't forget that Apple is not doing this from the good of their heart to help open standards, but simply because flash competes with the App store.

It is no coincidence that flash gets dropped from the MBA at the same time that the app store for the Mac gets launched.
The biggest loss here is the Mac specific GUI bits. Not only does Apple Java use native drawing primitives for ui (instead of requiring X11 like some ports), it also doesn't look completely horrible.

Unlikely as it is, I wish Apple would upstream that code to Oracle.

I guess there's potentially still SWT on top of a ported, open source Java7 from Unix/Linux if you need to do non-X11 UI on Mac.

Well, some Googling suggests that might work anyway...
GCC has always been a centerpiece in the plan for the "viralization" of the GPL, and support for its role in this plan has always driven design decisions in GCC. This policy has caused a lot of headaches even just within the free software community (eg. http://lwn.net/Articles/343608/).

I can't find a citation for this at the moment, but RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate into other tools just for the sake of pushing the GPL. For example, this was his explanation for why improvements to GCC's intermediate representation formats (GIMPLE and friends) were refused for a long time.
The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk
This seems to be even more interesting to compare the Ruby community (from what I've seen is massively test-driven and shuns use puts()), to the use of Python at Google. Of course, most Ruby stuff that I mentioned is Rails based, and there isn't that much concurrency happening and its set up well for testing- but just an observation.
Does anyone have any experience with Mono on macs?
Saying that, I signed up anyway (to add to the feature list :D)

I really like it. It needs traction to make it useful but it is fun and could be sociable. The idea is trivial, but that is nice: everyone loves top 10s.
Here are some more bit hack algorithms
http://www.aggregate.org/MAGIC/

The intersection of tricks on all those sites is quite large but on every one of them there's something you haven't seen before.

By the way if you like to wrap your mind around such tricks you might also find some gems here:
http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/asmexample.html
Fair, I'll try to be more clear next time. I was bristling at the idea that people think I was being misleading, when the reality is, that's the word I think in, cuz I am not an accountant. I pay somebody else to think about that for me ;)
Why is it so hard for developers to add copy/paste? What am I missing?
The main way to get Flash is through alternative content placed inside an <object> tag which should be displayed when a player is not found. So normally a download button would appear, in the screenshot though it looks like Engadget just wrote bad embedding code.
A Mathematical Model of Sentimental Dynamics Accounting for Marital Dissolution
many SWT apps, using native look and feel, still feel slowish (think azureus/vuze if not eclipse). Some AWT apps are perfectly snappy e.g. jedit opens a file faster than macvim on my box.

My belief is that apart form some overhead in AWT against native toolkit, 90% of the laggish experience in java apps is due to poor coding.

In turn, this is probably a byproduct of the java platform/language (abuse threads cause they are easier than an event loop, abuse locking cause synchronized is more obvious than util.concurrent, avoid thinking of memory management cause you have a GC, do not pay attention to proper data structures cause you can get away with builtin collections etc)
The Mac App Store - I guess Dashboard apps will be going away?

Launchpad - I firmly believe technology is to help save time. Launchpad doesn't do that. There's already an app called Quicksilver that will get your app opened, without you having to move the mouse or even swipe

Full-screen apps - Great. But have an option not to go fullscreen as well. Not all apps need 1080p equivalent resolutions to work.

Mission Control - Can't say anything much without using this. But meanwhile the CMD+Tab has been serving me very well.

----------------------------------

Voice recognition/Voice command, that's what I would like to see. The ability to launch apps or menu commands just by saying their name.
I'm still a full-time student. What math should I learn?
I met Dan at a local beer tasting, where he told he told me about this business model. It limits their sales capacity, but allows them to grow at a sustainable pace. Oh, and the brews are delicious.
And strangely enough if you have a feature request you can add it to the list here:

http://www.listgorilla.com/list/List-Gorilla-Feature-Request
True, but would you rather not have it at all?
Ask HN: Chicken and egg problem: Ideas on beating it?
I just launched a site that aims to solve a two-sided market problem with a simple newsletter-style solution (a similar approach is found in HARO). In this case, it's product placement.

The site: http://productplaceme.com

I've gotten some modest coverage so far but I'd like to build up the list more before I send the first one out (Tuesday).

I've seen some clever solutions to the chicken-and-egg problem here on HN. What did you do? Or what would you do for PPM?
...it will only be a matter of time before the percent of Flash enabled browsers falls enough that web developers need to start using more appropriate standards-based techniques.

I agree with your prediction, but I'm not sure it will be a good thing. With the exception of a few popular domains, I'd say 90% of flash content serves to annoy me and waste my computer's resources. I love using clicktoflash because it filters so much. Imagine if band websites started using HTML5 instead of flash. Instead of a big gray box with a "skip intro" link below it, you'd get bombarded with loud noises and stuff flashing on your screen.

I say this half-jokingly: How long until someone makes clicktoHTML5?
> Apple is deprecating their own version of Java on OSX

Isn't it also the only version of Java known to run reliably on OSX?
7 also doesn't ship with Flash.
There are lots of programmers who like Microsoft, mostly those whose primary (and often only) target is Windows. Most of the comments are about cross-platform issues and kinda boil down to "…because it's not Unix". Which is the "The whole world's a VAX" of our times.
200k - 300k cores... a comfortable order of magnitude larger

I would assume Google has well over over 20,000 cores. Or did you mean something else?
How Food Affects Our Body: Carbohydrates, Fats and Proteins
"This happens all the time in mathematics where a theorem seems to be true when considered in a less abstract simplification, but counterexamples can be found when a more accurate but less intuitive and more abstract conceptual model is used."

That's exactly the place where asking yourself "That would mean that..." is a good idea - this provokes searching for counterexamples.

Edit: When learning math I always try think of a few examples that would fit each definition, and that would not - it makes thinking about that definitions later much simpler.
You know what I wish Go had? Compiler-enforced immutable state. It is inexcusable that a language designed for concurrent programming in 2010 doesn't support immutability [1].

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr...
Sure, can I have your email id to send invite?
Show HN: A command line interface to smush.it
I have written a command line tool which takes in a directory of images and smushes all the images in that and it's sub directories, downloads the smushed images and replaces them in their respective directories. Read further in my blog post - http://abhirama.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/a-command-line-tool-to-run-smush-it/
Start by reading this: http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op...

Realistically there are two main parts to SEO (from what I can fathom) - on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Your on-page SEO is all about putting the right content in the right way. If you use Firebug, consider download SenSEO for firefox. This will let you check your own pages and give you a checklist for on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is really all about links. That requires a bit more thought and effort.

I would suggest that you find a decent book (bearing in mind that much of the advice may be out of date) on the principles of SEO, and/or start working through the SEOmoz site (http://www.seomoz.org/).
Definitely. Unusable software is as bad as none at all. Unless someone is paying well, I'm not going to deal with the issues.
I read a lot on my Kindle and use the kindle notes/highlights feature to mark & collect interesting words (generally words I had to look up in the dictionary). So it's certainly a feature that is useful, in the right context. Although for me I guess it's still only a nice to have, rather than something I would seek out. How would you monetise it?
Social Entrepreneur's Challenges
Simple yet great stuff
...but hearing about all the random things that don't quite work right (or at all) is disconcerting.

Is that actually surprising though? I think I'd have been more surprised if they got everything right on first release, and in any case it certainly looks like they've made a good start.
What year? What experience do you have? What math have you done? What are you interested in?

Number theory.

+ What is modulo arithmetic?

+ If p is prime and 1 <= a < p, why is a^(p-1)-1 a multiple of p?

+ If a prime is conguent to 3 mod 4, why is it never the sum of two squares?

+ If a prime is conguent to 1 mod 4, why is it always the sum of two squares?

Topology

+ Find examples of why path-wise connected is stronger than "not disconnected".

+ Show that in 2D if you consider parallel lines to converge at infinity, and that they all converge to the same point, then what you have is a 2-sphere

+ Show that in 2D if you consider parallel lines to converge at infinity, and that non-parallel lines converge to different points at infinity, then what you have is a Moebius strip with its edge glued to a disk. (projective plane, or RP2)

Analysis

+ Understand why the sum 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + 1/6 + ... diverges (and what that means)

+ Understand why the sum 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... converges, what that means, and what it converges to.

++ Note: most undergraduate mathematicians get this wrong.

There's a bunch of stuff, and this is all straight from the top of my head. It's not necessarily good advice, but they are a few things I found interesting when I was 12 or 13.
Tales from the Lunar Module Guidance Computer
Ask HN: To switch from Flash development, what features does HTML5 need?
I often hear Flash developers claim that HTML5+JS doesn't have all the same features that Flash provides them.

For all the Flash developers on HN, what current Flash features do you use for which there is no solution in HTML5 and JS?

What would it take to make you switch?
"Once you have constructors and you can statically ensure that every variable has a chance at initialization, you can start to escape one of the most unfortunate language misfeatures in wide use today: null"

Question, can anyone think of a case where the lack of pointers being able to point to null will make it more difficult to implement something? That is will you lose expressivity if this becomes impossible?
Maybe something like Mozilla's Open Web Apps? http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/10/19/prototype-of-an-open...
Nice execution.

If you get enough traction you could make a book once a year.
I find it almost impossible to read the sentence your way because you'd have to split the phrase "acquired after September..."
What’s the use of sharing code nobody can read?
How are you going to prevent this from being gamed?
Not quite expedience. This is a tradition that dates back to the very earliest years of the Church (c.a. 160 AD), starting with Justin Martyr and his writings to the Emperor of Rome (known as "apologies").

Justin was a philosopher convert to Christianity and was known for using the language and reasoning common to philosophers of the time to defend the early Christian Church. He reasoned that if he was going to make a case for the Church, he would have to frame his argument with principles familiar to his audience. This was a novel approach at the time, but it has been emulated by countless people since.
I thought they had already done this? or are seriously planning to do it. The "Social web" concept Zuckerburg brings forward includes a total lack of privacy, and is based on a desired social change. He wants to bring forth the "Brave New World" of privacy, where there is none. And when he does it, the vast majority of people involved will think it is a great idea. Perhaps it is a good idea, but it scares me.
My comment was intended less as a critique of Tufte or HN than to point out that the parent post's criticism on Tufte's site is a little off base.
do not pay attention to proper data structures cause you can get away with builtin collections etc

Specific examples from your experience?
I hope the Mac App Store is not "just like shopping the App Store on iPad", because I've found the organizational approach of the iPad App Store to be very frustrating.
Spread that cost over 3 years, and it's not that expensive. If you're buying a notebook that you intend to use for work or move around constantly, you have to budget that cost in.

Even if I was buying a Thinkpad X series for work, I'd invest in the extended warranty.
Upvoted solely because one of the authors is named "Axel Rose."
> That means Apple can extend them all they want without ever giving you, or their competition, any sources.

It mostly means that they can use the libraries without having to open-source Xcode itself. A compiler is not exactly a competitive advantage for a company as big as Apple.

> And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.

Uh yes and?
> I don't really think you know what I did and didn't do.

Actually, I do. Your original comment did a fair enough job declaring what you didn't know. Simple things that were mostly answered by doing a bit of reading. You also ignored people's responses as if somehow, despite your ignorance, you knew better.

> Really?

Yes, really.

> I was pointing out the problems of the app store model.

No, you didn't. Your original question was one of ignorance. You said:

"I don't really know...", "I don't really know...", and "What problems are these app stores supposed to fix?"

You weren't pointing out problems. You were declaring ignorance of the service. People provided answers, which you discarded without reason.

For example:

> I don't want no payment standard for that, heck I may not even want anyone to know how many users paid for my service.

That merely says you don't want it. It says nothing about the service or the validity. You weren't pointing out problems, or demonstrating anything. Just waving your arms around crying out.

> How much do they cost? do they add up to the 30% of the price I would charge? :)

That's the first reasonable question you've made. We'd of course want to look at similar services, so we'll look at Steam. I can't find exact numbers, but going by this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_%28software%29#Profitabil...) it suggests a 40% cut by Steam, and a much greater cut via normal retail. So a 30% cut is much more reasonable.

> Next time read the comment I am replying to and don't take my words out of context. Thank you.

I did. I also kept in mind what that comment was replying to, your original comment declaring your ignorance on the topic. Threads of conversation here are not just limited to immediate parents.

You're also ignoring the vast number of services that already do things akin to App stores and subscription services.

Essentially, you are challenging the need for these services and questioning their viability when these services have proven both successful and paramount in the success of many smaller developers.

You might not see the benefit for your own application. That's fine. You might try to explain that, rather than question the service as a whole. But then you can't discount the value it imparts upon others. Anyone can question. It's easy and safe, but provides no lasting value.
The importance of math in programming is directly related to the domain you are working in. The strong logic background math gives you is important for anyone who programs, but advanced concepts just don't matter that much to most programmers.
Totally agree about Unions, and I think that one of the reasons that nil is there might be because there aren't any yet.

I'm not sure I agree about overloading, though. Maybe something like Haskell's infix notation (1 `add` 2) would be good enough.
Despite being one of the commenters you mentioned, I agree with you that the discussion should not have been killed.
We know the odds of evolution are low; the point is that the number of stars in the Universe is astoundingly huge. With at least 10^20 stars in the Universe, those low odds get much more reasonable, especially now it's starting to look like planets are common.