skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You sell your app for 1.99 and get a bunch of customers, who speak to other people and in time sales in this particular market start to slow down considerably. At this point you increase the price to make up for lost revenue on new sales. Then after sales start going under a threshold of popularity, you come out with a free version to appease markets that have been untouched by your project yet, but it also happens to have the massive effect of a new type of consumer that's more concerned with the expected vale vs real money value is now interested in your app. Some of them will buy the 2.99 version, but most will probably not. Then you come out with a sale, and boom it's now in reach for all those people that though 3 dollars was too much. Now you have massive sales and publicity, and when it starts to slow down you're back to increasing the price.

Then comes a time where there are no new markets to exploit, so you build a a new app or a continuation of the old one, a sequel. At this time you also lower the price to 0.99 just to make sure you have the most exposure possible. Only now you have the advantage of past and present publicity and if rightly timed, momentum... And then off course you repeat the formula depending on your market and the viability of your app.
that game is cool... i think you might could clean up the front page a little... to make it more obvious... but the idea for the game is great! did you make it yourself? do you make lots of games? do you do this full time?
Rewriting my old site, http://www.timeline-x.com/VST formerly http://www.virtualstocktrading.com

Make it Object Oriented. Follow a MVC pattern. Give it a new look and feel.
Not necessarily in that order.
Wow, that sounds like a bummer. I'm really sorry to hear that. May the future hold better luck for you.
Ask HN: How Would You Negotiate This Deal?
Last Friday was a pretty interesting day. A friend of a friend's dad whom I have never met randomly called me out of the blue and said he wanted to have lunch with me to discuss some potential web development work. I went and had lunch with him and he's a great guy - we both went to the same school, same major, captain of the same sport, etc.

I can't really get too detailed, but long story short, he and a friend of his have an idea that will satisfy a fairly boring need for a fairly boring industry and as far as they can tell this idea has never been done before. I was skeptical, so I did my own research and it looks like they might be right. What makes this venture so interesting is that they legitimately know all of the key players in the industry and can probably rally them all to use this product.

He wants a prototype built (which will be pretty simple to do given the requirements he gave me) and eventually it came time to talk about compensation. He said that I could submit a quote, but he also started to mention that I could do it for "free" and have a vested interest (I assume a percentage of ownership) in the venture. That's about when we parted ways.

Here's my question: How would you negotiate this? As far as I can tell it's never been done before and I'm confident that they know the right people and would most likely be able to convince them to use this product/service. I'll be doing most of the grunt work (design, development, deployment) and his friend will be contacting his connections to use the product. As far as I can tell, my friend's friend's dad is more or less the middle man that happened to come up with the idea. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
There are about 1000 MBA programs in the US, for about 900 of those, this is true. However, I think it's worth noting that plenty of students who go to Boston College, Boulder, Seattle, or any other program in the lower ranks of the top 100 can expect salary increases of 40-100% for two years of study, and financially, it makes plenty of sense.

The MBA's easy to rag on. Trust me, I do, and I'm getting one as we speak. But the problems in business school are the same as you had in your undergrad. Half the classes are required and you already know the material, some of them are so fluffy as to be useless, and every fifth professor is hands down incompetent. However, a few are really good, and suddenly you understand in intricate detail how a couple headlines in the WSJ are interrelated.

Business management is a soft science, and like many soft sciences, a lot of supposed experts don't get it even after many years of focus. Similarly, a lot of not-so-well credentialed people understand it intuitively without lifting a finger. In instances like these, I think it's pretty easy to show the numbers not working out. Has anyone checked the 20 year return on a master's of fine arts degree lately?
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.

I may find a service that charges me less than the standard service can offer.

Take a look at the Apple App store: 30% for Apple and the Carriers? for what? ain't that a little bit too much?

My main point is: mixing financial stuff with technology is simply a dead end.
That's pretty much the opinion I found when I trained with the more elite powerlifters. The top guys only cut when they want to take a national or world record in a lower weight class, and even then they try to lose as much weight as possible by dieting months in advance.
While you're right that carriers will do everything possible to lock the systems down, there will still be channels to get "clean" phones out of the box; right now, you just need to sign up for the Android Developer program and you can order "developer phones", which are Nexus Ones.

That's a tangent to the main point which is that people will still crack the "locked-down" carrier phones and you'll be able to flash over the default image with your own. Once this happens, Android being open makes all the difference. With a jailbroken iPhone you can do a few new things, with a rooted Android you can do whatever you want and it's pretty easy to change things because the source is right there.

Drop by xda-developers sometime. There are lots of different kernels out there for Android phones and lots of different ROMs that wouldn't be possible if it weren't for Android's openness. Can you run something like compcache on your iPhone?
Yeah when I first read it I thought the same, but you do have to admit that the title made all the difference in regards to exposure. I even think i could have made a better job of the title had I actually though about it more, but since this was only a little experiment to prove the importance of titles in HN I guess it proved a point ;)
Spoofing emails? How about pranking a BBC interviewer? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiWlvBro9eI or impersonating the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/oct/19/chamb...
That sounds amazing. Link?
Yep. Haskell is a perfect counterexample (everything is inferred).
I have never gotten a job because I was a specialist in the specific language they wanted. From what I have seen the most important questions are can the program and will they flake out. After that it's just a question of how well they fit into the team.

PS: Outside of a tiny startup few people really risk much with any given new hire.
Jeff Skoll: Becoming Superman
Yep that's a great summary.

"Then comes a time where there are no new markets to exploit"

The crazy thing with iOS development is that there are 250k new users every day who are always looking for a few apps to put on their new phone, which is how a game like Angry Birds can stay high in the charts for months.
the site looks good very well laid out. i did a search for ipod and mac book pro and didn't get relevant results.
We can debate whether it's open or not all day long... If one of the most respected engineers around isn't happy with Androidm Google's doing something wrong.
I prefer the objectivists view of morality.

"Morality is the study of optimal action, and a moral system must tell us what actions are desirable and which are not, by value-judgment (understanding which values are implemented in a potential action). We need morality because we are volitional beings – unlike most animals, we can choose to act in a certain way instead of another, and in many cases we must choose to act in a certain way." [1]

My last experience with the expression of anything related to objectivism was met with down votes, so I'll say this. Before you jump to conclusions about your own moral code, consider the story Baby Eating Aliens [2] by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

[1] http://www.strongatheism.net/library/philosophy/introduction...

[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/
K&Rv2! Since I had issues with University (got admitted into one, but had visa constraints and missed the resumption date), I'm at home for a year (yet, again).

So, I'm going to spend this time (against my mother's better judgement, until she finds me some work or something when she's tired of me being in the house) learning C properly, learning assembly, and so on.

But, so far, just K&R :)
Here's a fairly recent post, and in the top comment pg exposes those hidden tweaks:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
We can fork and alter the code, and deploy it to our devices. I'll grant that it is not easy on some devices, but you can't argue against the carriers' right to change the code without compromising your own.
Well, it would totally suck if we were carrying any unsecured debt. Luckily we live below our means so we have (some) money banked.

So I'm considering taking the family for a 6 month world tour (while I'm still young enough to handle it)... if we're frugal we might be able to stretch it out to a full year.

Guess I better put "get homeschool materials" on my todo list eh?
GazeHawk GazeHawk GazeHawk

Sometimes I sleep, but not often.
I know the these are "essays," and not blog posts or articles, but it always niggles me that they aren't precisely dated.
Whenever I deal with SVG these days I use Google's svgweb project for near-universal compatibility: http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/

It uses native rendering when available, but falls back to a flash plugin that emulates SVG support when it isn't (meaning pre-IE9 Internet Explorer). This ends up covering ~95% of the market.

Also, I'd disagree that SVG is languishing. True, canvas is getting a lot of attention, but SVG is more than sufficiently mature to support projects like this.
The Open Source Definition, written by the folks who invented the term "open source" a few months previously, doesn't say anything about the stuff Joe criticizes in Android. He's simply mistaken about the meaning of the term.

Also, the Android development policy that Joe criticizes is essentially identical to the way Emacs was developed up until the last decade. Emacs was the example "cathedral" in the original version of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," for those who don't remember. It's well-established at this point, 13 years later, that bazaar-style development works better for a wide range of projects, but that doesn't mean that cathedral-style development doesn't qualify as open-source. It's just inefficient and frustrating.
I was gonna ask just that question when I saw your comment. Indeed. Where is the Google announcement? Anybody?
RESTAS is actually one of the CL frameworks that I can sort of recommend because it doesn't try to do too much, and it doesn't have any continuation brain damage in it.

I don't like web frameworks, here's what I currently recommend: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778708

The RESTAS documentation just got translated from Russian, I'm actually supposed to proofread it this weekend.
Jason Scott Schools Pirates On Correct Way To Rip His DVD
I'm doing some Blackberry dev at the moment for an internal app, not a pleasant experience.

Have a read of http://versatilemonkey.com/story.html for a really good in depth look at what it was like developing for BB and indeed any mobile platform before Apple entered the market.
That may be so on your case, but I've found in my experience that generally if a phone call is more productive than email it's because the topic at hand has not been developed enough to use a quick action based method to deal with the communication. I believe there are three situations in which a phone call is better than an email. A sales pitch, which would be a gazillion times more efficient if done face to face; a brainstorming conversation, which would be a lot better if it was divided in a solitary work period followed by a cumulative peer based review in person; and when there's a imperative need to switch directions ASAP, which will hinder productivity anyways however you look at it.

Of course your millage may vary and I'm not trying to convince you your're wrong, specially because you aren't since this is a a topic very influences by personal preference. I just find that every instance where the telephone could outdo an email, is because either the parties involved where not properly prepared with the required resources in their possession, or because the type of communication was not meant to be written in the first place. Generally this last type works better in person. Almost always.
This is great. Does anyone have examples of simple machines that can be built with gears like this?
Document sorter, in perl, written with fuzzy searches, data extraction, and Baysean filtering, along with various other tricks that I haven't seen used in other document categorization systems. Should help with my paper load.

Also, and XML based (actively using namespaces/xpath/xslt, so json wouldn't cut it) network documentation and configfile creation system, as everything else I've seen out there sucks or is limited/nonextensible.
And a critique: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/19...
I recently started a new project but had to go for 2.7 instead of 3.x due to the lack of 3.x support in Django.
I would have loved to use 3.x. Oh well.
Tons of stuff around Hackety Hack. It's got a new blog, http://blog.hackety-hack.com/ . I also started a blog for the Shoes project, http://blog.shoesrb.com/ . I've been working on wrapping up the 1.0 release for Hackety, and tons of other bits that are currently a secret, but will be reported soon. :)

The last 90% is the hardest 90% in any project.
I gotta say many people i know were easily fooled by the looks of that screen, especially this female friend of mine who was panicing so badly after she saw the screen and quickly clicked on it, and I wasn't even fast enough to stop her.
Many of these arguments strike me as particularly weak, none more so than slide 36, where he claims that China's urbanisation rate is being understated because they have a much higher population density threshold for what qualifies as a "city". He seems unaware that average farm size in China is absolutely tiny compared to America --- I've seen figures as low as 0.04 hectares (400 m2!) for Guangdong [1], which is how the province as a whole manages to achieve an Israeli-level population density of 486 persons/km2. For the whole of China, something like 0.2 hectares seems more reasonable.

But even then, if you take the definition he suggests for a "city" (400 persons/km2), every single farming village in China would qualify. That's why China has a much higher population density threshold for defining urban counties.

[1] e.g. http://www.agecon.ucdavis.edu/extension/update/articles/v9n1...
http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/agsaaea05/19565.htm
My review of the Strange Loop Developer Conference 2010
A complete translation of all the 'Spot does X' children's books.

Yes. I am a student.
so buy the rooted/rootable android device from hacker-friendly company X, and run it on VZ's LTE network.
Do it. My parents took me (and my siblings) out of school at age 14 for four months in Asia (three months in China, rest of the time in Thailand, Malaysia, HK) and it was a great experience. Already had an appreciation of it but grew up with a massive appreciation of travelling to new places and seeing different parts of our planet. Will always be thankful for my parents having done that for us.

Have been back to China twice since, Thailand a few more times, etc.
For work, I'm building websites with Drupal. My latest project is http://dateunknown.com . As a side project, I've started to build a Drupal wrapper for Phono, a jQuery front end for sip calling, sms and xmpp chat in a browser.
Teaching Kids about money management
Thanks for the feedback. I'll need to look into improving the search relevancy. Sometimes if you filter to a specific store or department you'll get more relevant results - but I understand this isn't completely obvious at the moment.
Oh yeah totally right, but there comes a time where no matter what you do, you're going to keep making less and less money out of the game because even though there are 250k new users ever day, the people that where interested in buying your app have already done so, and now only the passerby's and window-shoppers of the iOS world are looking at your app.

The cool thing is that now that you've been the developer of Trainyard, when you do reach a point where you should be releasing a new game, you have gotten so much credibility it isn't even funny. And off course that translate to more immediate sales at the beginning and a big chunk of extra steady clash flow at the end.
Looks good. Best of luck with the venture!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965
What are the problems with current web apps that this tries to address? Let's say I have a web app, how will this make my life easier?
Working on a logo (you can see it at the dragthelake.org coming soon page).

The site will be my take on curating interesting content.
Remote Database Access from the Browser Made Easy
Haskell has a lot of other quirks, for better and worse. Harrrrrdly perfect, but not touching that one.

The main point is that modern static typing eliminates those stupid, tedious, verbose type annotations, as well as the stupid Python "I decided to crash because calcVaule(input) does not exist, but OMFG how could I have possibly known until I got there" errors.

The article is complaining about the problems that have been thoroughly solved for decades. Which is totally cool; if you want me, I'll be here in the corner howling about Nixon and Disco.
http://www.glancely.com/ Instant Etsy Search

Also: http://www.bigcrumbs.com/ Cash Back Shopping

Oh, and I work at a bank. I don't sleep much.
I've enjoyed his site for a while now and I think I posted this on HN before, but my favorite post is him making his own bandsaw (this is the second version): http://woodgears.ca/bandsaw/homemade.html

I bought the plans and hope to start on my own next month.
Ask HN: Where are the gays at?
I posted a message on the Startup School Fridge wall looking to see if there were any other GLBT entrepreneurs going to the event, and got no reply. Working as a software engineer, I'm generally used to being the "token gay guy" at the office, but I'm curious as to whether any of you guys (or girls) are roaming HN wondering if you're also alone out there. Has Y Combinator ever funded a startup with a GLBT founder? Are there any other GLBT hackers out there? Am I missing some other awesome resource where we should all be metting? :) Thanks!
Teaching people the essentials of business and entrepreneurship at http://personalmba.com - an urgent need for many people, expensive alternatives, and a huge market. My first book hits shelves on 12/30: http://book.personalmba.com. Learning a lot about marketing and PR during the launch - it's a whole new world. Next step: live seminars.

That, and my wife and I are expecting our first child around the time the book comes out. Never a dull moment...
I was working on a caching problem and it reminded me that caching requests for a resource with standard pagination sucks.

You cache Page 1 with some set of objects, by the time you cache Page 2 you have Page 2 of a different overall set. It's inconsistent and wonky.

I was hoping there was a more clever way to tease out an elegant solution here.
Mostly doing client work but put up a personal site to summarise my side-projects and also built this one afternoon the other week:

http://languagesplit.com/

Had never built a bookmarklet before and not sure if it's too embarrassingly basic to try and promote, or worth doing more with. Would appreciate any suggestions/feedback.
Also, check out his "eyeball game" - a test of your visual geometry ability:
http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html
I don't see the point in this article.
quote: "The developer has to figure out what the return types are for any methods that are called"

The developer has to figure out the return type in Python as well, since otherwise he wouldn't know, if the returned object provides the method he is calling on it next.

fido = puppies[0]

If puppies[0] doesn't return a "dog" the following call will fail. At run time!

Anyway, you can alternatively break up the code in several lines without creating a temporary variable for each step, if it's only about readability:

string fidos_name = spot.get_puppies()

.puppies[0]

.get_name()

.upper() + "!";
Arch has the least amount of breakage of any distro I've ever used. Slack, Redhat, Gentoo, all of them would occasionally shit all over themselves, and it would sometimes be tricky to fix. The couple times that Arch did that, it was really easy to fix, because things were "normal". The Arch philosophy seems to be to defer to upstream as much as possible, which makes things easy to fix.
The magic numbers (what the hell is 22?) are also not a good sign.
Are you sure stocks & bonds are a substitute for angel investing? It's an interesting question. Maybe it is to some extent, a hobby, a substitute for golf or travel.
Because it's a lot easier for most people to justify dropping $200 now and paying out the rest over time in a plan that you'd be paying for anyway than it is to justify dropping $600-$800 now. I am pretty sure that the carriers don't discount rates for non-contract phones. People just don't have the money to justify spending that much on a phone when there are so many cheaper alternatives.

Excepting developers, most people are happy to save $400-$600 even if it means they have to deal with a Blockbuster app cluttering the menu.
Really? Which businesses? And how do you avoid the obvious legal liability issues involved in crowdfunding?
he wants to start a cargo cult, apparently.
I don't mean to be snide, but in what universe is basic socket programming considered a 'dark art'? Has programming as a whole really fallen that far? Socket programming isn't deep or complicated, it is pretty straightforward and most anyone with a vaguely decent amount of programming experience ( 1 year at most from my experience ) should be able to pick up the basic right away.
I'm building a results based website builder at http://www.netmate.co and iterating photography shopping cart software http://www.photographyorders.com
Sounds like an intriguing offer.

I'm not sure where you are in life (job, family, et al), so let's just assume you are in a position with nothing to lose besides your time in this situation...

I would consider the vested interest.

If it's as seamless as it sounds with these connections, it sounds like you are set up for success (it's rarely as seamless as it seems but all things considered, this sounds pretty good).

Just make sure they give you a decent cut -
I absolutely agree, as an Arch user, with everything you say, except for the "expendable" part.

Seriously, some distro had to be first, and which one is better positioned than Arch both technically and philosophically to take that hit?

All the other distros can watch and learn.

(And I can finally learn all the stuff I have to do to make my scripts work with python3.)