skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Used to be SW devs. I used to do .NET programming for a big DOD contractor, then worked for a local internet startup for while, but why talk about my old career? That would have been boring. Plus as we tried to explain, at some point you have to let go and not micro manage every individual stat and app. I'm sure if we did that we could make some more money by optimizing, but that's not what our business approach was about. We wanted simple, stress free which gives us time to do other things. We're not experts, we don't have a degree in business or anything like that. Just 2 27 year old guys from San Diego who wanted to make a couple iphone apps.
Cluelessness does not preclude pettiness, and people get all sorts of nasty when they get caught doing something wrong.
Dr. Felten Goes to Washington
Being good and being able to write secure software are very different, somewhat orthogonal, qualities.
not a tax expert so won't touch 1 or 3 but as for #2 the answer is that there is no limit.
Incorporating really just offers you protection. From a tax perspective filing as an LLC is no different that filing as a non-incorporated business. It's call 'pass through'. S or C corp would be bad as you would be double taxed.
If you are thinking of incorporating you should as an LLC. From there you can start doing deductions, etc.
Exactly. The same is true in films too.
It's not as outrageous as you think. Although the first month we hit big numbers we were VERY VERY surprised. Check out the paper toss guys that make 500K a month with just 5 free apps!!! http://www.develop-online.net/news/36155/Paper-Toss-dev-make...

Now THAT'S something. We're not even close to that!
Unemployed Entrepreneur Of The Week: 60-Year-Old Loses Job, Creates 12 Websites
We were recently profiled on Huffington Post.
Our CS has been compared to Zappos by a lot of people, but no we are not Zappos. We focus on email support right now and I think we are better than them so far at email :)

That being said, I really look up to them and hope to keep improving and becoming the best :)
Agreed. The UI of Skype 5 for windows is bloated and confusing, but the 5.0 version for mac kept things simple while pimping up the looks and adding some features, so it doesn't resemble the latest windows version much. So a new version for Linux may not be just about making the UI more confusing.
Javascript: is 'this' a code smell?
I have started to feel that Gmail is getting bloated with features. I want my mail to be simple and lightning fast.
I didn't know there was a number you could call to let the city workers know something is not right in NYC. It's one of the things I really want to have in my city because most of the times I don't know who to call.

Examples: dead animal, street sign on the floor, noise, etc. Sometimes I call the police but they just don't care about stuff like this...
We are and have indeed been winging the whole business. We're no business experts, we've learned a lot going through the process. It hasn't even been 2 years yet. This was our first "face to face" interview. We're not great public speakers either haha. Just going with the flow and we've been very fortunate so far.
I've had someone try (For a $1000 insurance claim against their business). I didn't mention it was registered post until they claimed they didn't get it.

"Oh, really? Well the registered post office said that there's a signature on this from you, and it was definately hand delivered."
Keep in mind, you can access Gmail via IMAP. There's a difference between Gmail Web Viewer issues and Gmail as a mail service. I haven't yet had a problem with Gmail as a mail server.

At our school, we've had by-and-large great responsiveness when addressing specific issues with the Google Apps team. There's definitely a deep buffer between support staff and engineers, but Google also has some of the most knowledgeable support staff at a "tier 1" level that I've worked with. They're also working with people who literally switched to Gmail because their mail servers crashed and the schools had no way to bring mail back. This becomes frustrating sometimes when you have to wait for the mail to bounce back from the proper person when You've demonstrated competence in the area you're trying to troubleshoot. (The year prior to moving students to Gmail, we actually had a higher uptime when scheduled downtime is excluded.)

It is hard to pin down the recent slowness issues. The most easily repeatable issue is domain-based contact 'auto-complete' went from taking seconds (3s-5s) to sometimes completely timing out. Also, the Google Chat connector recently seems to be losing connection more regularly. It hasn't been bad enough to create a ticket, but we do have a conference call Monday.

As far as free, non-apps usage: I hate to pull the "what do you expect for 'free', but, well, what do you? I get more transparency and uptime from Gmail than I had when I was on Yahoo! Mail (not sure if that's still the case).
Rubbish. I don't "self identify" with any particular political label. What matters is which candidates (or parties, if that's how policies are represented) best align with my priorities. And people who are driven to be "loyal" would simply be loyal to an individual instead of a party.
Same reason that designers mistakenly think that adding a bunch of whizzy shit to text is useful.

Design has its place. That place is not "everywhere."
XKCD switched their web page to such a pseudo-terminal on April's Fools day: http://uni.xkcd.com/

(And there was a cut down adventure game hidden in it).
I can't understand why anyone who is in the know would sign up for this. I work at a fortune-5 corp where Oracle was once king and is being replaced with Microsoft SQL simply due to the outrageous price gouging. It's as if Oracle is trying to squeeze every last penny out of it's aging database as OSS solutions chip away at its profits. PostgreSQL is, in my opinion, poised to do this. MySQL just pales in comparison to Postgres and Oracle is kitchen sink and then some -- even at a fortune 5 we barely use all the "features" in Oracle.

I'm just astonished that a company like Oracle being around as long as they are could be so dumb. At the fortune-5, Oracle has a similar practice of gouging us on Peoplesoft licenses due to, in my opinion, lost DB sales.

Charging a customer a license by CPU core is just unethical.

It's a no wonder... Go riddance
clickable: http://wikitorrents.org/wiki/ycombinator_applicants
Maybe he likes his job?
Denying human contribution to global warming is like denying the laws of physics
I don't consider my goal of 500/week to pursue the idea much the equivalent of people throwing money at me.

That's about minimum wage to pursue a technical idea that might payoff big. $500 a week is nothing by silicon valley standards.
When typing/editing an item, ctrl-left/ctrl-right doesn't jump the cursor to the front of the closest word.
So about 5 years in software development?
What the f**k has Obama done so far?
SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide From SEOmoz
My final comment about the value proposition before I go to Thursday NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences ( http://www.calacademy.org/events/nightlife/ ):

The value proposition of WikiTorrents.org is that you can easily find a continually evolving list of videos about whatever topic you're researching, no matter how specific or obscure the topic and no matter what sites actually have the videos.
Will Netflix Doom Net Neutrality?
For some time now, net neutrality has been a ’cause celebre’ for web geeks.

The idea – that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, regardless of source, content or intent – is one that’s pretty compelling. It speaks to the democratic ideals of the web as a place where anyone can get their message out as long as they have access to a computer.
No issues here either, however perhaps with only 1200mb in my inbox, i'm not enough of a power user to challenge gmail...
> 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.

In that case, just as a friendly note, you might like to consider whether your "How to become a Smashing Magazine Author" page really says what you mean to say. For example, it starts with:

"Who can become a Smashing author? You. However, you need to have experience as a blogger or an author."

and it asks explicitly for URLs to existing articles/examples.

Personally, I have an interest in many subjects you cover (and do some of them for a living for various companies) and I participate in various on-line forums under my real name so I suppose you could see my writing there. However, I don't run my own design blog or publish books on the subject. I would imagine the same is true of many other people reading this discussion on HN. Your post here suggests that you would like to hear from those people if they were interested in writing for you and had relevant experience to share; your guidelines on your web site suggest otherwise.
Let's say one in three succeeds. Then 1 of mine will succeed, and 2 of the 6 investments. But mine are owned by me, the investments are only owned in a small part by me. Still sounds like a better idea to create my own.
Apparently he's quoted as saying it's not the OITC.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/security-bullet-in-10000166/lor...

Although why a more mainstream news organisation hasn't picked it up, I do not know (too wacky?)
MUSIC SEARCH - TXT JUNKY
Get it out of the house.

You're unlikely to ever get rid of that "it's late, just one beer to take the edge off" (that rapidly turns into 6) if it's just a trip to the fridge away. Having to actually go out to slowly poison yourself raises the bar high enough that you realize what you're doing, and makes not doing it far, far easier. It's much easier to control yourself on shopping trips than at the moment you really want that beer (this also applies to bad eating habits, drugs, etc.)

Get it out of the house.
Did you make that site? Thank you, thank you, thank you.

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, please do yourself a favour - http://73primenumbers.com.
Previous gen MBP: Core2Duo 2.8, 9400M.

Not that I like Flash, but that's for different reasons.
It's very impressive and responsive but takes about 55% on both of my 2.8GHz Pro 2 Duo cores on OS X 10.6.

I don't know why our numbers are so different. But I do know that on both my G4 iBook and G4 mac mini, any flash meant that I was maxing out. Since it was a G4, I wasn't surprised. What I was surprised about is that when I got my intel iMac (CPU as above) flash wasn't slow but used most of my CPU power.

Edit: removed typo
It's not quite a 1:1 correspondence. For example, high quality video came to Linux somewhere in 2.x, when Windows got it in 4.0. That said, I believe it took about a year to get it on Linux after Windows.
I know that this is rather cynical, but could the purpose of this appointment be to subdue Felten? His advice could certainly be ignored for the most part and his activities outside of the agency will receive less attention.
Hey TechCrunch, Penny-Arcade called and they want their burn back.
Time to Ship, Enough Framework-Orgy (November Startup Sprint)
It definitely creates a lot of noise and worries me as someone who is just about to enter the mobile app market.

I just finished some iOS training and am working on my first paid app. What would you say is the key to getting where you are? Apps with true utility–or something else?
“Checking for mail…” on my iPhone takes forever, on 3G or edge[1] but works mostly fine when on Wifi. In comparison, while waiting for new emails to be downloaded, I can download unread articles from Instapaper and fetching 200 new tweets on Twitter for iPhone. And most of the time, I don’t have new emails… it’s just the connection that takes forever.

[1] this happens equally in bad network reception conditions and excellent network conditions.
I've actually been doing development since senior year high school. Started with ASP then PHP, .net, c#, java with gwt. I don't know if I'll ever do any of my own development again though. I do enjoy programming, but I enjoy doing other things more honestly =).
I don't think 1m is enough to retire on if you are reasonably young. Malaysia is not that inexpensive to live in.
You're assuming that you're only taxed on what you "take out" and that's wrong. You're taxed on taxable income, whether or not you "take it".

Yes, income inside tax deferred accounts is not considered income until distributed, but other accounts don't work that way. If there are sales, dividends, or interest, you've got taxable events even if you leave the money in the account.

Let's look at that $100k in earnings. $10-20k goes to taxes. (The marginal rate for $100k is higher, but you don't pay it on the whole amount.) $30-50k goes to inflation, leaving you $30-70k to "safely" take out.

However, it's hard to get 10% these days - even 5% may be too high. Fortunately inflation is currently low too, but $5k for taxes and $20k for inflation leaves you with just $25k to safely take out.
I've seen Derek's design abilities grow over the last couple of years, and I think his post seems to sum up many of the steps he took to improve.
... where "The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. [...] It is now thought to have been built about 150–100 BCE."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
I would have really liked to have seen a video sample at various stages of the evolution :-(
Business management was my major in college. Management science revolves around this type of thing.

All you really need to remember is that "a group is not a team". You can put people in groups all you want, but that does not mean they act as a team.

Groups result in each member behaving more effectively and efficiently, but the sum of their work is not much, if at all, greater than their individual productivity.

Teams, on the other hand, have a synergy that result in a much greater performance (outputs) as a team than each member inputs individually.
Interview of Andrew Warner (Mixergy) on creating money-making interview content
I've been in a similar situation before but not from the App Store. Since Apple basically collects all the sales revenue and pays out 70% to you at a later time you might actually get a 1099 from Apple as well, so it might be no different than ad revenue. Hopefully someone with App store experience can confirm or deny this.

1099 is the same as any other revenue, you'll have to file federal, state, and city taxes on it just like any other sales revenue, so don't let that affect your decision.

1) Once you're incorp. and have been in business for at least a year the IRS will want you to do quarterly estimated payments, but as an individual, you can stay on the normal April 15 schedule.

2) I would recommend S-corp when your showing revenues of 100K/yr on your schedule C (non-W2 income). With an S-corp you will not be double taxed as you would with a C-corp (at corp level and then again at personal level). With an S-corp all the company profits come to your taxes on Schedule E and you pay taxes on it like you would with a schedule C. But as an S-corp you might be able to get away with more expenses and deductions at the corp level than as an individual
I just did in the cold. The heat that your body accumulated over exercise really does make everything warm.
That is something I like about cities getting Twitter accounts. I love being able to hop on Twitter and type up a quick message to @CityOfAmes to complain about construction or trees down in parks.
Part 2: http://blog.interviewincome.com/creating-money-making-interv...

Part 3: http://blog.interviewincome.com/creating-money-making-interv...
Wireless carriers need new marketing campaigns to reflect not-quite-4G status
Image manipulation using audio and vice-versa in realtime.
Sonify is a JACK plugin I hacked together that encodes images into audio and vice-versa, in realtime. This is my first project on GitHub.

https://github.com/markandrus/Sonify
I still don't know if this is to be taken seriously. What exactly could be going on?
>But the initial comment sounded like I should stalk people, corner them, and in general be a jerk. I refuse to do that.

Thats a pretty big leap from my initial suggestion of asking one of your existing LinkedIn contacts to introduce you to one of their existing LinkedIn contacts that may be able to help you out.

You've got some good food for thought and advice from others throughout this thread. I'd suggest taking a time out, coming back and reading through the 30ish posts here with as objective an eye as possible.
Non-US Android developers unable to access revenue
Is it illegal to send a false DMCA if you aren't an American citizen (and aren't living in the US)?
I'm not sure what's involved, so maybe that's not possible, but still...
Ask HN: What martial arts do you practice? What do you recommend?
Given some of the recent discussions of fitness/exercise on HN, I've decided to try taking up a martial art. Aside from a couple of years fencing in my late teens, this will be a new experience.

What martial arts do you practice? Do you have any recommendations? Advice for beginners? How did you get started?

Thanks!
I'm with you on that. One of the things that made me switch to Google's search engine back in the day was that it's page was free of garbage and bloat (versus Yahoo and MSN, in particular). I'd hate to see Gmail get lost in bloat.
I'm not a marketing expert, so correct me if I'm wrong here ...

Let's assume an iphone app gets CPM of about $1 [1,2]

So if their first app grossed $100k, that means about 100M impressions. That sounds insanely high to me - 100 impressions each for 1M users? 10 impressions for 10M users?

When I then see that they're trying to sell books for $99 a pop so you can cash in on their winning techniques [3], it rings of late-night infomercials telling me how to get rich buying foreclosed homes.

I don't have hard numbers, but my impression is that @tferriss took the same approach - making the bulk of his money off of book sales (and his prior supplements business), pitching virtual assistant techniques that never would have made that kind of money for him.

So the real 4-hour work week strategy they're copying is to give the impression of success with little effort, and then sell people books detailing your special technique.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/greystripe-ups-the-ante-in-the-iphone-ad-network-wars-launches-guaranteed-cpm-program/
[2] http://blog.jwegener.com/2009/07/26/debunking-average-iphone-cpm-ad-rates/
[3] http://www.freetheapps.com/create-iphone-apps/?hop=tdrone
A crucial difference is that browser vendors can actually do something about JavaScript performance.
Have you considered the possibility that your awful attitude, inflated sense of entitlement, over-attachment to a poor implementation of an unfocused idea, etc. are contributing to your lack of success finding this all important fabled VC money? Let that sink in.

Now, I gave you encouragement and a legitimate suggestion on how to take what you have and spin it into something that would probably generate some money. Others have done the same in this thread. You responded with a delusional claim that people should provide money for you just because your idea "might" pay off big. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence on HN that speculative words like "might" are pretty worthless. If you think your idea is that good, commit to it, prove us all wrong.

It is however counter productive to complain to fellow HNers, who are most sympathetic to the frustrations of trying to build products people want, about some bias against you because no one wants to give you jobs or money for your talents. That is not how it works.
My regular Gmail accounts seem unaffected by this problem, even with three accounts logged in at once. On the other hand, my email that is tied into Google Apps is definitely slow. Initial loading is slow, and then there can be some delays when actually reading mail.
The GA safety record also includes student pilots, weekend pilots, crop-dusters, and other high-risk flight operations.

Scheduled airlines are operated under FAA Part 121 rules, charter operators work under Part 135 rules, and everything below that is under Part 91 rules. Part 135 operations are much safer than for all GA. It's safer than driving, though not quite as safe as flying a scheduled air carrier.

From the NTSB (http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/table1.htm), in 2009 scheduled air carriers had 0.006 fatalities per 100,000 flight hours, on-demand carriers 0.07 per 100,000, and all GA 1.33 fatalities per 100,000 hours.
<sarcasm>Even more significantly, it was found that not turning on the MacBook Air increased its battery life by 36 hours! Using this amazing data we are able to infer that not using your computer saves battery life. The less you use it, the more you save!</sarcasm>

This is more an argument for tools like Flashblock to be built into browsers (like they are on Android) than it is an argument against Flash itself. You can argue that Flash its inefficient but it's just as true that the tasks Flash is used to do are intrinsically complex and power consuming.
Nice, thanks for the positive feedback! I hope it continues to be helpful.
One bit of data: seems like we've had a conversion rate approaching 50%, so we're definitely doing well.
The RSS feed as it shows up in Google Reader is also delayed, just so you know.
Notch I am currrently writing a game called the Source and was wondering because when I was halfway through the book I discovered you're incredible game minecraft and noticed the crafting square which I already had in my game but was wondering if I could, Use it with you're permission and if you do allow me I will and have planned on tweaking it a little but what Im asking is "May I have you're permission to use you're idea of the crafting square in my game The Source?"
What food for thought? Choose to throw your life away on meaningless shit so you can say you made some money, or do something you care about?

Most of us here could easily make a $200k consulting a year.

Does it make you happy?

No.

Would making shite apps and essentially scamming people make most of the people here happy?

No.

You gotta remember that the kind of person who does this kind of shit is basically a bit of a social pariah, a social retard. They're no different from the internet 'marketers' or the online pharmacies or any of that crap.

They don't care a bit about supplying shit and calling it gold.

To me there's not even a moment's thought about this kind of stuff, I have no respect for people making crap like this, only pity. To waste your life conning other people is a tragedy, not a triumph.
I of course mean Berne Convention, doh!
Yeah, that's a good idea. We messed around with that, but didn't quite get it right. People got too engrossed in that and never really got around to creating their own stuff. The jury is out on it, though. We're definitely not happy with our onboarding process as it currently stands.
To put it simply, your value proposition doesn't exist. Maybe after years of seeding the site with content, but right now I cannot "find a continually evolving list about whatever topic." In order to gain traction among users, you must provide me value _now_.

I know you might feel like you're getting beat up in this thread, but every comment I've read has been constructive criticism. Take it in stride and don't discount anything offhand. I can almost see your vision for WikiTorrents; it has merit. You're certainly passionate so I believe you can do it.