skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dunno. The graphic seems pretty straight forward. The entire width of the band is the total number of calls received, and the categories of calls make up the components of the band. Wider band of color means more calls received.

The x axis is time.

Seems simple enough to me.
This is a great point. Looking at these apps, they're certainly not anything like ConvertBot or Instagram. As an app developer myself, I think I could have easily made most of these apps in my spare time without a ton of design skill, yet they're really successful. Definitely food for though.
Ask HN: Taxes on App Store earnings
Hey HN-

I'm a software developer and have been thinking about getting some additional revenue each month by developing an iPod/iPad/iPhone application (game or util etc...) and have been looking at the number of downloads I'd need to break even, and one aspect that's still hazy to me is the tax implications.

I've read that the app store treats earnings as commissions, so my understanding is that I have to pay the 15.3% federal self employment tax and 4.xx% state tax on those earnings after apple takes their 30% cut.

1) do most folks end up paying estimated taxes on these earnings quarterly or do this wait until the end of the year?

2) At what level of revenue do I need to establish myself as a business (s-corp, sole proprietorship, etc..) rather than an individual?

3) if I change my revenue model to be ad based, it seems like a lot of the ad service providers will just send out a 1099 misc at the end of the year and deal with the taxes directly- is this "mostly" accurate?

I am planning on talking to a tax professional to get definitive answers here, but want to get a sense of what to expect from people that are already in this situation. Thanks for any feedback.
Just to contribute a data point:

We were lucky enough to be accepted to YC a couple batches ago. It took us about 2 months of constant pitching and investor wrangling to close our seed round after demo day.

It is great that the original post brought you some initial visibility. It is not clear to me that you have done much to proactively capitalize on that.
Replying out of courtesy, so you know the thoughts of at least one participant.

Yes, there are more people saying "it's all going to hell in a handbasket". The biggest problem - as I see it, personal opinion only - is items that people are interested in and believe everyone would be interested in, but which are not really limited in any way to hackers.

Items about stimulants are interesting, but not just, or even primarily, to hackers. Items about injustices, the TSA, virtual strip-searching, and even break-throughs in cancer vaccines are interesting, but not just, or even primarily, to hackers.

The net result is that this one place where I used to come to get news that was specifically of interest to me as a hacker, is flooded with other stuff that I get in other places.

It's no longer special - it's becoming ordinary.

And the major sign of that is the meta-items, talking about the direction HN is going, and how it's all going to hell in a handbasket.

And that's why, with all due respect, I've flagged this item. I just thought I owed you an explanation as well.
first 1-2 trips? Heck, I go 3X/week, and the first 1-2 months weren't very exciting.

but now I look forward to every session. I'm still in the 'rapid gains' part of the curve. (And I'm 48.)
No problem, glad it was helpful! The best thing for people who don't want to watch a video might be just some screenshots of the different states of the list: compacted, expanded 1-2 levels, and fully expanded with accompanying text explaining how the product works.

Another quick suggestion: "A better way to think" doesn't really convey what your product does, maybe something like: "Map your workflow to your brain, not your brain to your workflow." would work better? Something more descriptive might help people tell more quickly whether or not the product is relevant to them and worth checking out.
Aha, I thought it was just an IFRAME (and then thought the "arrow" at the side was rather clever and I'd need to go see how you pulled that off ;-)).

Oh well, that's a shame. One of the initial big wins (in my head) was that I like to see the original design of the item rather than the plain feed version (handy for these individually designed blog posts nowadays) but without opening 101 tabs over my session. This still works fine in NB for blogs where all the posts are held on the front page a while, it seems, but just not those that nest things on individual post pages I guess. (Hurrah for you open sourcing it though!)
Engineers vs. Bankers
I've been using http://bulletxt.zetabee.com it appears to be the same thing, but many times nicer and more polished.
A few months back I went thru just such a 'safety check'. It was on the state line between Alabama and Georgia. Alabama had ~15 units and a portable command post stopping all the traffic east bound into Georgia, while Georgia had ~20-25 units stopping all the traffic west bound into Alabama.

They took my license, insurance, examined them carefully, then walked around and looked at my license plate, handed them back (with a smile) and said to have a nice evening. I've never seen so many blue lights in one place in my life.

A few days later I described this to a Florida Highway patrol trooper. He chuckled and said it sounded like someone wanted to look good for the 11 o'clock TV news.
S4 processes streams of data, one element at a time, as they arrive; outputs are produced incrementally. MapReduce and its derivatives (Cascading, Pig, etc) are batch-oriented.

Stream processing jobs can be massaged to fit into the MapReduce paradigm, but S4 provides a more natural solution.
there is always the option of not returning through the break.
What exactly is your project?

I looked at your link, but it seems like it's just a collection of videos. I went to the main site, but it seems like it's a blog.
I would ask for a good mobile web version way before an App (android or iphone). If you have a good mobile web version, people can pretend it's an app, and if it works -- feel free to use PhoneGap to make a real honest-to-god app out of it.
'lack of thought'? I find weight-lifting at least 1/3 'mental'. More mind: more recruitment.
I strongly suspect it'll be better performance than Flash.

There is absolutely no empirical basis for assuming this. In actual comparisons between the two -- at least the tests that I've seen -- Flash take the lead.

Removing Flash and being saved the overhead of endless and overbearing ads is good, but as has been said the advertisers will move to HTML5 (they already are), and they're going to do the same full motion video, moving dynamic multimedia, etc, that causes Flash to be such a beast. Worse, it won't be as easily segregatable because to the browser it will be no different than the rest of the web application.
It does. Processing is distributed across multiple nodes. See http://wiki.s4.io/Manual/S4Overview
Well... that's what this particular thread is all about.

What exactly should I do "to proactively capitalize" my "initial visibility"?
More fun with Canvas - a JavaScript Starfield in
Big steps in creating small chips
I don't understand why people think Flash itself is somehow responsible for content that is CPU-intensive (as evidenced by the number of upvotes on your comment).

Flash is a Turing-complete runtime that executes 3rd party content, and the environment that hosts Flash doesn't place any restrictions on how much resources it can use. With such liberties, it's completely expected that some people will produce banner ads that consume 99% of CPU time.

CSS+JavaScript has the same exact problem, so getting rid of Flash wouldn't solve anything. (You may think it does because you're running a Flash blocker, but that's just because the offending content producers haven't migrated to your preferred solution yet.)
...it isn't a flattering comment on Flash's efficiency that having it display ads on webpages requires that much processing power.

Amusing of course, but not even close to being accurate. Take a look at this for example:

http://www.unitzeroone.com/labs/alchemyPushingPixels/

That's rendering about 300,000 particles in 3D, in realtime. On my four-year-old macbook pro, the cpu usage is barely noticeable.
That's some interesting math you have there.
I'm not sure that "browsing the internet and being shown advertisements on web pages" should be considered a task whose intensiveness is on-par with 3D rendering, 1080p decoding, or encoding.

Browsing the modern web is an incredibly complex activity.

Many of those Flash ads feature high bitrate videos, sound streams, and complex interactive elements. Of course, maybe advertisers shouldn't be building such overbearing creations to try to grab your attention, but don't blame Flash for their excess.
Now I can't upvote you enough.

"The answer is to get inspiration from sources outside". There was a figher pilot in the 60's through 90's who proved very formally that this is the case. Life and death, creation, and existence (and modern military theory) is based on pulling inspiration from the outside.

Destruction and creation
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.168...
Election Fall-Out for CleanTech
I didn't know that was happening.

For some reason keeping my itunes up date has been a struggle. Thanks for telling me.
Not if weighting is below 1.0, i.e. threads with lots of comments get less karma, but sparse threads get close to 1.0.
That's why Javascript interpreters have, blessedly, implemented "Unresponsive Script" warnings that let you kill off those scripts.

Sadly, Adobe hasn't seen fit to offer comparable functionality for dealing with a Flash application that goes berserk. But again, I think that comes down to browsers being in strong competition creating a lot of incentive for them to work hard on efficiency and UX, where Adobe is content to let usability stagnate and bugs fester.
If you're moving to LA, send me an email. I live here, been living here for a while, and really enjoy it. I'd be happy to help you out and get you acquainted with the place!

rdegges@gmail.com
The project is user-created lists of downloadable videos. The main page looks like a blog because I'm presently redesigning the main page.

"User-created lists of downloadable videos" may sound simple, but it's deceptive simplicity will make it the twitter and/or instragram of its day, I am entirely certain of it.
No surprises there. Flash on a Mac is a sick joke.

People who think Apple is just looking for excuses against Flash have never used a Mac. The only time the fans kick in on any of Macs I've owned in the past decade is when Flash is running. The only time any browser crashes it's because of Flash. Flash eats memory, CPU and anything else it can lay it's hands (okay, it leaves the disk alone) on until your Mac becomes either unusable or it has drained the battery.

Flash is the closest thing to malware on a Mac. Anybody who thinks it would have even been possible to have a usable version of Flash on an iPhone or iPad grossly underestimates the incompetence of Adobe.
How to Web event in Bucharest
Just came back from the event. Any other HN's here who want to comment on it?
I tried timesvr.com last year. They were usually quite quick, even with the standard account. If you throw more money at them, you can probably get arbitrarily good response times.
Flash actionscript runs faster then javascript in pretty much any benchmark, javascript can only go so far before object typing is required to gain parity with other language. As for video, you're trading cpu power for gpu power when running flash vs quicktime, but I'm not sure the gpu will be any less of a drain on battery.
I have to say that any application intended to allow people to manage, say, four intersecting sets of items of any sort is going to back rather hard to use, unless someone has come with some incredibly clever UI metaphors I don't know about.

Will there be four (or five) checkboxes next to every normal action? It would seem to complicate things by a few orders of magnitude. Remember adding elements is often a multiplicative rather than an additive affair - just adding a few extra checkboxes to a given page can take it from clear to "head-spinning".
Just to offer another data point: I almost never watch videos but was interested enough to do so in this case. It was brief and offered enough to convince me that this might be my go-to application for managing my projects and tasks.

After playing with it for a few minutes, I am excited by its simplicity and ease of use. I've bounced around from Google docs to omni outliner to paper and pencil with just about everything in between, but I'm glad to have this tool at my disposal.
Is it really that hard?

Actually it is. Think about how few people actually categorize people in their IM client, or bookmarks, or virtually any other service.

There are a couple of ways to try to deal with this:

1) Put the onus on the contactor to specify the relationship. This is what LinkedIn does.

2) Actually have several different mechanisms that users can use. I really like free form tagging. I'd like to be able to send status and then have a tag field where I just list the tags of the various groups I want to send this status update to.

The oddly nice thing about how Facebook does it today though is that since everyone is so used to getting random weird status updates, no one cares. Imagine if you got an email from a friend that said, "Eating pie, watching Glee. Bored, might go to sleep early." You'd be like, "WFT? Is this guy gonna kill himself or something? Why did he send me this?" But on Facebook, you don't even notice. Heck you might even say, "Yeah, Glee is kind of weak in season 2".

I don't know. How people interact on the internet is weird.
Maybe your project just isn't interesting enough, or has little commercial potential.
For example...

I just looked up your LinkedIn profile and you have a contact that is connected to 5 entrepreneurs that I happen to also know who have raised seed funding. Have you tried reaching out to that person to get intros to those entrepreneurs (4 of which have raised money in the last 3-6 months)?
I like it. It has the simplicity of mytextfile.com which I've been using since I saw it here on HN months ago. I was hoping I could also access it on iPad with Safari but it says no "smart phones" yet. Signing up and in with my Google account would be great.
I'd spend it on hackers, designers, marketing and hosting to aggressively launch my 'big idea' with a head start on anyone who tries to copy it. (It's an idea for a website with low costs but universal appeal and clear money-making potential... but if I just built it now there'd be nothing to stop a bunch of richer more competent people making clones. So I'm sitting on it till I figure out what to do about that. Which is a pity cause I think the world could really use it)

Ok, I probably wouldn't blow it all on that.
I would start a Y-Combinator Branch in Atlanta!
Cherokee is actually pretty good at following .htaccess and mod_rewrite for the big blogging/cms engines (like drupal, wordpress). It is much easier to configure, though perhaps a bit more tedious, as it is all done through the web gui.

Other than that Apache is pretty much king with compatibility and nginx is pretty hard to get to similar qualities off the bat.

But if you have the space something like a reverse proxy for Apache with sane times set would probably be the better option.

I use cherokee on VPS's though and it works great.
I didn't down vote you, sorry that happened.

> Obviously you can put enough of anything into your body that you can't stand up, but for normal amounts it's safer than driving drunk, on your phone, texting, etc.

The problem I have with what you are stating is that you hand wave over "normal amounts". What is a normal amount. I've seen one toke of weed be enough to lay someone out for a half hour, I haven't seen that from one sip of a beer.
Does anybody else's brain still parse "!important" as "not important"?

Perhaps I have been programming in C for too long.
Very nice!

I really want to attach screenshots to items. I'm going to use Workflowy while programming... whenever I notice a small tsak (such as refactoring a hack, reformatting some code, etc), then I'll add it as a Workflowy item.

But rather than type out an item description, it would be way easier for me to simply screenshot the code. (I do alt-printscreen, paste into MSPaint, save to dropbox, copy public link.)

Of course, each item could just be a dropbox link to the screenshot...
Just came back from the event. Any HN'ers here who want to comment on it?
No doubt extensions will be created (or more likely, support will be added to the existing Flash- and/or ad-blocking extensions) if this becomes a significant problem.
FTC Appoints Princeton's Ed Felten Chief Technologist
It actually transliterates to something closer "old-schoolnyi photoshop". I love it, too.
If you have a lot of money there might be better options but for someone starting out with very little EC2 and S3 are great.

I'm a fan of AWS but I'd argue it's only viable if you have more money or very specific requirements. You can get a reliable VPS or even dedicated server for less than Amazon would charge and get significantly more performance and included bandwidth. Even a 1GB VPS at $40 or so a month (from, say, a Linode or Webbynode) can reliably cope with a significant amount of traffic to a non-crazy webapp.

AWS has serious pros for certain use cases but with the learning curve, the necessity to tie together so many pieces to get something reliable, and the lackluster performance on the cheaper instances, I couldn't recommend EC2 to anyone starting out or on a budget (assuming they want to run something 24/7 - EC2 is great on a budget just for short term testing).
I've seen some posts about wikitorrents the past few days; finally went to see the site. Perhaps the amount of unique page views (especially on that page) is a side effect of ycombinator brand and timing of events and investors trying to see what kind of companies ycombinator wants to invest in (in an effort to better their own investments).

What are the unique page views from other pages? Or the entire site in general? Why should someone use this site as oppose to something like facebook or del.icio.us? Aside from combining two buzzwords together (wiki and torrent), I can't actually tell what the site is really about (and there's nothing that would point me to some description...) or the value it would provide. Also, I don't really see what it has to do with bittorrent except for a banner on the right side.

Hope this feedback helps.
Oldest known stone axe found in Arnhem land, Australia
They could have done worse. E.g. implement their own operating system.
Beautiful phyiscal model of the Antikythera Mechanism
At a glance, for sure- there's a few where they didn't, but for the most part they did a solid job of it.

For the ones where they didn't, I'd guess (based on nothing but a glance) that they depended on cross-selling to get rank traffic, instead of search to get rank traffic.
With all due respect also, I feel the way you do but if by "flagged", you mean you felt my post should be deleted, I don't understand anymore. Don't you think that topic should be discussed if the problem is to be resolved by, say creating other HNs with dedicated topics such as "hackers-only" HN...?
Ok,
what is it sustainable competitive advantage?

How do you plan on getting traction?

What are the legal implications?

How much have you personally invested both in terms of time and money into this project?

What previous projects have you completed?

Can you get a friend to co-found this with you?

Show us something that would indicate you punch above your weight class, eg Academics, Social, Hacking.
InnoDB is still part of the community edition http://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/2010/11/mysql_community_editio...

The support chart is (deliberately?) confusing on this matter.
Hi Andrew, I'm no VA - just a buddy of Mike and Quoc's helping out with BD/Mktg/PR lol. Great interview btw!
Still.. which part wouldn't they understand or be confused by: 'text' or 'editor'?
> I used to use backpack from 37signals, but ended up favoring my Moleskine.

Would you be interested in doing a video testimonial for 73primenumbers.com ? :-)
My personal belief is that a broad "anybody want to help" approach is better than a creepy "in your face" approach to a particular person. I would think that singling-out a particular person and harassing them would result in burning all sorts of bridges. That's just my particular belief.

Seriously, What other suggestions you got?
I could see that but a friend has no bond and a few k in good poker winnings might not get the same result as 100k of losses.
Zeus Attackers Deploy Honeypot Against Researchers, Competitors
Thank you for your feedback, I understand what you are saying. If you compare Smashing Magazine's article from a year ago with the recently published ones, you'll notice a big difference. We haven't been publishing "N beautiful pictures of Y" articles for almost a year now. We are trying to make SmashingMag a high quality publication for designers and developers. You won't find photography posts on Smash any longer (only maybe once every 3 months or so, over the weekend, but they are not our focus).

Please do check Smashing Magazine and its recent articles. We have changed a lot, and we are aware that this is probably a long process, and we are willing to get better and become more useful and relevant for the design community. Comments such as yours help us find the right direction and stick to it.

For instance, we created an experts panel where we invited experts of various fields to review articles published on Smashing Magazine before they get published. Every expert gets paid for his/her review. We would love to have you as a reviewer in our expert panel, to improve and maintain the high quality of the articles. Are you interested? Or maybe you or some other readers of Hacker News would like to write a rebuttal, explaining what's wrong in the article and what the real "proper" rules are? We would love to publish it on Smashing Magazine. We really want to help out the community. It was never about just pumping some (good, bad or average) content out there, it never was. We want to publish high quality articles, and only high quality.

I like the idea of having a series of articles on one particular aspect of design, and we've had such series in the past, and they usually work well. So I will definitely keep that in mind.

Thank you, matrix, I truly appreciate your time and your feedback.

— Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine
Flash has had 'Unresponsive Script' warnings as long as I can remember, maybe since 2000?
zerohedge.com (sucky Wordpress style comments after article however) ; minyanville.com ; and many more, depending on the focus - what exactly are you looking for? Your scope is pretty broad.
I used it for signing up with stackoverflow and tend to use it when I begrudgingly sign up for something, if it's an option.
GunUp - Seattle-based Startup for Gun Enthusiasts
I would try to generate many small, focused apps, try to make them better than average but not obsess about perfection. I would aim for one app every 2 months. You can't predict which ideas are going to take off, so if you generate a lot you have better chances, but be honest and self-critical and don't make shovelware.

You really can "feel it" when the market responds to a good idea, if/when that happens then shift gears and put most of your energy behind that one (for a while).

That's my iOS game/app strategy anyways. I'm a little new to this myself, and it hasn't "taken off" yet, and I've got a lot of work ahead of me, but that seems like what has worked best from watching successful peers.
Unresponsive script is different then slow script, flash offers the same unresponsive script warning when a thread gets caught in an infinite loop, and neither environment knows how to deal with a slow script.