skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Offer HN: 100 downloads of your free iPhone app. Help solve chicken/egg problem.
Currently in the middle of relaunching and refocusing on my startup (www.adsreloaded.com) this winter quarter while taking a little less of a workload in school.<p>The site is much like Y-Combinator backed tapzilla. I provide downloads for iPhone app developers and pay users to try apps. Currently I have 550 people "signed up" but only about 30 who are active. In the next 3 weeks I would like to push that number up to around 100 active people downloading apps. So far since relaunch I have had 1 paying developer and have 2 more out soon but I really am having some difficulty solving the "chicken and the egg" problem here. Developers want more downloads and users want more apps before they sign up.<p>So here is the offer: I'll start a $10 campaign for your free iPhone app (That's 100 downloads) for absolutely free. If you have a paid app we can work out a special offer as well. You get a small number of downloads while helping out a young startup get its footing again.<p>Please contact me on adsreloaded.com or my e-mail address found on my HN profile. Thanks HN :)
That's a rather simplistic view of the article, don't you think?

You really think that none of the reasons are genuine, all just made up as linkbait?
Seems to be fixed in Ffox 4.0b8? On OSX, 10.6.5
Nice: lecture notes on computational complexity: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-405j-advanced-comp...
The way history is taught in most US schools, The Dark Ages are about the world. I would expect someone trying to overturn orthodoxy to start with that. This subtly reinforces a worldview that paints Europe as central, when it was not.
A second vote for Microserfs - it's very much beach reading, but I really enjoyed it (try Joop! too for a similar light reading style)
I was using WinXP as my main OS until one too many BSOD heartbreaks. I switched to Ubuntu with KDE3, which I had been using periodically via VMWare.

I had many of the same general annoyances related to "not used to ...". But I also found new things that were an improvement, such as moving windows with alt+left-click.

Later on I needed a Mac for development, and got a Mini. (I'd never seriously considered getting a Mac before because none of their 15" laptops have a proper screen resolution. I'd become hooked on 1920x1200 w/trackpoint for getting stuff done.)

Again, some things were slick and new, some things annoying because they were different, and some things were annoying because they were (as best I can tell) impossible.

Overall I prefer KDE3 to WinXP (or Vista or Win7) and to OSX. The lack of proper multiple desktops on Windows and OSX is a real problem. (Spaces just doesn't cut it; it's more of a kinda sorta sliced-up single desktop than true multiple work areas.)

And I still prefer Win7 to OSX, except for the poor shell. (Maybe if OSX's Finder had a proper tree view and let me just type/edit folder paths in an address bar I'd be happier.)

But obviously there are OSX enthusiasts, so to each their own.

I have to believe that if you can't find anything wrong with your desktop of choice you're just turning a blind eye.

And 14 days is barely enough time to figure out the pros and cons of an OS and desktop. (No mention of apt? That alone might make Ubuntu worth it.)
Apart from litmus test, do due diligence:

> Who else claims to solve the same problem? Examine them.

> How do those people who are unaware of specific solutions to the problem solve it?

> In theory is it easier to implement your solution, or to upgrade an existing solution?

> What are related problems?

> What's your user acquisition plan? (TechCrunch is not)

> Talk about your idea, both other developers and normal people.
Hi there

Thank you for your comments, I really like feedback to improve the way I'm writing.

After I read the article again today I noticed that it kinda sounds like I'm blaming Ubuntu. This is not the case. I'm thankfull for all the dev's spending their free time to develop open source software.

I regrouped the article a bit to split the Ubuntu and the application part better. Also I edited the conclusion a bit. The goal was not to rant about Ubuntu but to show switchers which problems I ran into and to share my experience.

Thanks for reading

nicam
I believe the grandparent commenter meant:

English does not have a unique[1], singular, gender-neutral pronoun.

[1] unambiguous
Twitter is a communication platform. Quora is awesome for many things right now, but in no way does carry the impact of Twitter. If Quora maintains its quality, I guess it could become a "Davos-lite" of the interwebs, but that's still not the game-changer Twitter is.
"It's hard to see why, though: DST got in at a $10 billion valuation in May 2009. Facebook's user base has more than doubled since then. So its valuation should…quintuple?"

Good point, according to Metcalfe's Law [1], it should actually only have quadrupled.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law
Ok; that'll solve the chicken problem -- do you need people for the egg side of the equation? I, for one, would be interested in providing free feed back on iPhone apps. (150 - 200 words per app.)
Redstar, From ATG Founders, Reveals Funding Strategy, Sets Up Office Space
Firefox already has SEED for TLS in the crypto library we use (NSS). AFAICT, the problem now is mostly getting bank websites to change. I believe some Korean banks have indicated that they will start supporting the standard mechanism in addition to the ActiveX control.

People from Mozilla China have recently pointed out to me the crypto-related issues in China. My understanding is that you can make Firefox do what you need for Chinese banking but it requires unintuitive configuration and/or hard-to-get drivers. I am hoping that sometime this year we will make improvements to make smartcards plug-and-play on platforms (like Windows) that support it. This will be a nice benefit not only for Chinese users, but also for any other smartcard users.
JSConf 2011 Call For Speakers Open
Ha! I do the same thing. Mine are "wake up", "stop messing around online and eat breakfast", "stop messing around online and get dressed", "stop messing around online and go to work". All spaced about 30 minutes apart.
Cheers for the suggestions, the idea behind the billing is that if you share your Access point and lots of people use it, the service will be free - after all you're providing it! But I'll certainly try and keep it as simple as possible - the idea of a monthly cap is good.
Deep quick dive into Palm WebOS 2.0
There is a ton of evidence that people will give up individual gain in order to punish bad behaviour. The classic example is A gets given $100. He can choose to split it with B any way they like. B can accept the offered deal or refuse it, in which case nobody gets anything.

From simplistic game theory B should accept any offer (for example $99 for A, $1 for B) since B would have more money than he had before, which was nothing.

In practice with real people, anything below a 60-40 split gets rejected. People will indeed give up gain in order to punish anti-social behaviour. You don't have to think very long to see why we have evolved that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game

With kids there is an even bigger factor in play - control. Normally, a child is not able to punish its sibling. Under this adult-administered scheme, the child actually has the power to send its sibling to its room! If you know how kids crave to be able to control their situation, you realise this must be like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny rolled into one.

A long-winded way to say: I am so not surprised, and mildly confused as to why the Freakonomics blog would be.
I am not sure I agree with this. I routinely get frozen food from the grocery store that's $7.
The police do not require a warrant to search your immediate person (also your bags and your car) incident to an arrest.

They can't search you without arresting you, and they can't arrest you for literally no reason and have that stand (and, apparently, they generally won't arrest you for no reason if you don't provoke them while being detained and sound like you know enough to tell a lawyer what's happened). "Arrest" has a very specific meaning and is a big deal.

This guy got arrested, apparently during a hand-to-hand drug sale to an informant. He was screwed no matter what.

There are grey areas at play here, but if your phone has no security and they can literally just push a button to see your text messages, I'm not even remotely surprised that what they find there is admissable as evidence. They had the contents of your pockets and your bag. If you had "4 for 80" written in a piece of paper (and, damn, X is expensive!) in a notebook in your bag, that would clearly be admissable after an arrest. Why is your phone different?

If you don't want this to happen to you, PIN-lock your phone. They'll ask you for the PIN. You'll refuse. They'll get a warrant almost instantly, and then you won't be able to refuse anymore. So, also, if you don't want this to happen to you, don't get arrested.

This headline is extremely misleading. The police in California cannot simply dragnet cellphones. They have to arrest you first.
I think the more appropriate summary is that DuckDuckGo proactively guards your privacy. Google is completely aware of privacy issues, but allows privacy to slip through the sieve by being indecisive about what to do about it.
Sweet - I'll check it out. You might have saved me a couple of days coding :)
true... but what about yourock.gd (or other short URL). Rebranding as TIWYR could work, but people searching that: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=tiwyr&meta= will be told: Showing results for twitter. Search instead for tiwyr

Sure you would be able to gain traction with the name over time.

Alt ThisIsY.co/yourock - also gives you a miriad of spin-offs: ThisIsY.co/YouSuck /AreFired /etc.
> I didn't insult anybody and I didn't say that one race is more intelligent than the other.

I suppose you think want us to think you're being honest. It's interesting the way white supremacists treat others with contempt. Perhaps someone less stupid would write more sensible things.

Having read that paragraph, you might want to note that I didn't insult you or call you stupid -- in exactly the same sense as you didn't insult anyone or say that one race is more intelligent than another. In other words, I took care to make sure that the literal sense of my words contains no such claims, so that it's only what you need to add in order to make them make any sense that's insulting and unpleasant.

Just like your own comments which were, yes, racist even though you can chop them into fragments none of which explicitly makes racist statements.
1. Open up a website for students. Student EXchange = sex.com
2. Stack EXchange can get a shorter name or use them as a short URL.
> If a designer is interested in Ruby committers and wants to make it look pretty, then have fun!

And if they're not, they still have the option of not participating!

That's what drives me nuts about all this "no-spec!/crowdsourcing is eeeevil!" chat on the Internet. Nobody's forcing anyone to participate.

There's a very (very, very) large group of people who only have $500 to spend on branding their company. If someone can't/won't spend $10k to a "branding agency", should they not be allowed to have a logo at all?

There are even MORE people who are willing to do a little work for the chance of winning $500 and seeing their work used by people not related to them.

Disclaimer: I used to work at crowdspring. I've literally seen both sides of hundreds of these contests. Nobody's evil and everyone participating knows the risks of participating. It's a win-win.
To me the right solution is to have an 'umbrella company' - that startups can live under. By law, they'd be divisions (so bankruptcy law would never get involved). But, internal to the umbrella company, there would be a culture of experimentation & iteration.

Like rejection therapy, the 'umbrella' employees could be encouraged to fail often : Not enough failure implies not enough risk-taking / innovation.
The place you'll want to fork to get to work: https://github.com/tenderlove/rubycommitters.org

I am constantly blown away by how overly complicated rails is for getting a simple site set up. It almost seems like this site would be better as just plain html (or a simple sinatra site...). But oh well, I digress, sounds like fun.
Why Your Cell Phone Is More Private in Ohio than in California
That is because with x87 floating point, when the number is in registers, it is 80-bit, but when the compiler spills it to memory, it is 64-bit, which is why -ffloat-store works.
No. If you had read the article carefully, you'd find that the person who had been searched had already been arrested (and with very strong PC). Every ACLU-style "Know Your Rights" video makes this distinction clear: it is not like at the US border, where you can be searched for no reason; there are very specific cases where you can and can't refuse searches.

Unlike --- I might add --- large stretches of Europe, where police have far stronger rights to search personal property.
Cyber Defense League - Volunteer Cyber Army Emerges In Estonia
Culturally, filesharing is everywhere (as was sharing of videos, CDs and books before it), so approaching the question from that angle is not going to be useful to a stance favoring very strong copyrights.
Like calls unto like. Attracting genius-level talent like Kurt is a great sign of things to come for the Infochimps. :)

=h=
Only vaguely.
Look into chillispot.info or worldspot.net. Built this sort of thing yourself with a spare PC or an up-datable router.
Could you be more specific about the acting like a charming douchebag routine?
I remember how excited average investors were at the prospect of a new way of going public when Google announced its innovative auction IPO. "Finally, Wall Street banks wouldn't be able to crowd to the front of the line!" Their public auction, their "don't be evil", and their continued use of their power for good -- like their trick to get openness principles adopted during the wireless spectrum auction -- all exemplified a company thinking and acting like a good corporate citizen at all levels.

Contrast this to FB. They are actually cozying up to Wall Street rather than eschewing them. "Don't be evil" was replaced with a series of privacy gaffes, a flurry of lawsuits surrounding the company's founding, and a CEO who has called early users dumb fucks. It's sad to see how Google's pioneering isn't being emulated by the next big tech company.
how to get a packet of data from here to there without a central mediator

One interesting idea in this space is the Hardy/Tribble 'Digital Silk Road' concept:

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Bionomics/Extropians/HardyT...

Alas, such discriminatory routing by per-packet payments and reputation is probably illegal under the FCC's recently asserted 'neutrality' regulations.
Brilliant! Now if I can only get it to work on my Blackberry (They run only legacy Java Script), then Blackberry games would not suck, and I'd make a million dollars without having to go through their app store! :)
Locking down my development machine would cause my resignation. I'm always amazed that people will put up with stuff like that.
Oh, never mind. I misread the article - I thought it was promising films before they come out on DVD.

My point still stands though - there is absolutely no way this doesn't get cracked.

As long as watchable images are displayed on a screen, someone will figure out a way to "archive" them for later.
What circle?
With regards to public transportation, all I know is, after five years trying to make do with it, I am never going back to that hell. It's only barely cheaper than owning a car, and the trips took 2–10 times as long. (The city where I work has property very close to the businesses, but that property is ridiculously expensive.)
It's not breaking even, right? The domain was 13 million. It makes "almost 7 figures" a year. So in 13 years, assuming that people still keep visiting a bogus site, it will have paid for the domain registration.

If you just want to break even, you should probably just register a google.com typo domain for $20, and then you need a lot fewer visitors to break even.
It's not a grammar mistake, I have trouble when I type quickly. Another error that I make: I often type a word that sounds similar in place of what I actually meant. Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2067123.
Ask HN: Thoughts on Facebook
There's been a lot of news lately regarding Facebook. I'm curious to hear what people think about Facebook the company -- its current and future potential as a company, etc. (i.e. possible enduring business models).
>I just usually avoid recommending Crypto, due to its sheer size and density.

Good point. And you can hook someone on Snow Crash by reading them the opening bit about the Deliverator.

>What did you think of Anathem?

I love it. It pulls in hard science, philosophy of science, epistemology, geometry, geek love, sociology...wonderful.

>but pretty much agree with the XKCD comic

I really didn't have any trouble with the vocabulary. There was a lot of it, but it was introduced gradually, and most of it was from European roots. And I don't consider it gratuitous; it was a big part of setting the mood of the book.
“You can do everything that the iPad can with existing off-the-shelf technology and hardware for probably $300 to $400 less per device,” Professor Soloway said.

Really? This is why they refer to it as the Ivory Tower!
CSS editor built with Cappuccino
Cadaver Turned into Soap (National Museum of Natural History)
The Dave Matthews Band shows how to make money in the music industry
Actually it may work. The only ones deterred by this notice would be those who donate to feel entitled, but not those who do it to show genuine appreciation for his work. And I doubt former kind even makes it to the donation form in the first place.
When being pedantic, it's best to be right: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innocuous.

1: producing no injury : harmless

2: not likely to give offense or to arouse strong feelings or hostility : inoffensive, insipid
Someone started a wiki on this a while back: http://svstartup.com/w/Main_Page
Video: CouchDB, MongoDB, RavenDB and SimpleDB Compared
You're probably right but it's an excellent opportunity for a startup wanting to use Android. I listed a lot of the bad stuff but the advantages were pretty significant. Touch really is a more natural interface.

Kids as young as 3 take to a tablet in a way that's almost unbelievable.
But Apple does sell (and rent) content. I'm confused. Jobs' quote even seems to say that — they plan to sell content and sell it well.
Stopwilson.com: a website reimagined as an MS-DOS program
I would go with a reoccurring membership porn site.

125k daily visitors x 1% conversion rate = 1250 new customers per day

1250 new customers per day x 365 days in 1 year = 456,250 new customers per year (reached at the end of the first year)

456k new customers per year x $120/year in revenue (assuming $10/month) = $54.7mil per year in revenue

(though the math isn't fully accurate since it doesn't take into account churn but it works to illustrate a point.)

With a tiny bit more brains, you could take that up to $100mil/year, prove the stability of the revenue and sell for 10x of revenue at a cool $1 Billion Dollars (Dr. Evil pinky finger lift)

Obviously it's much easier to be an armchair quarterback and pull numbers out of thin air than to execute and create real value.
This is what I thought too- they can't be profitable if they are raising more money. But then I read it wasn't Facebook selling equity, but early investors selling their private shares.

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/04/five-reasons-why-i...

So maybe Facebook is not getting the cash infusion.
Facebook is very similar to vmware. I expect it would follow a similar path in stock price. Currently vmware is trading at 140 p/e ratio. People are afraid to miss the next Google, Microsoft, etc.. SO they are willing to buy the latest trend. If facebook made $2 a year off 300M users they would have a market cap of 60B with a 100 P/E ratio.
Business Blunders of the Year
I seem to remember last time someone tried something like this (Trusted Platform Module) a researcher burned the top off the chip and read the private key with a Focused Ion Beam workstation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk73ye2_g4o (WARNING: extreme hacking ahead!)

You would've thought people would have worked this one out by now.

Who fancies running a HN pool on how long until the root keys are public? (I'm serious - how funny would that be. We just need someone with enough trust from the community to handle the money. And someone who lives where online gambling is not regulated...)
"Like it or not, academia is a meritocracy. It may be a highly flawed meritocracy susceptible to overvaluing labels or fads of the day, but ultimately tenure is bestowed on those who earn the respect of their peers..."

I wonder whether these flaws are in fact fatal to this guy's thesis. My understanding of academia (based solely on an M.S. and indirect observation of friends in the Ph. D process) is that academia is every bit as political as industry. It's not enough to have and publish good ideas, as one would expect in a true meritocracy. It's about having the right sort of ideas - ideas which are unusual enough to attract attention but not so unusual they get dismissed without real consideration. Branding and marketing are words I hear my academic friends throw out far too often to make me comfortable with the assertion that academia is, in fact, a meritocracy and not just a highly esoteric rat-race. A true meritocracy is either objective or as isolated from subjectivity as possible (e.g. a round-robin sports schedule where every team plays every other team in the conference). A system that requires the subjective approval of others for success (publication, employment, tenure) isn't much of a meritocracy at all.

tl; dr - This guy's admission that tenure is based on the "respect of peers" is a pretty big hole in his argument.
There is indeed evil at Crowdspring and 99designs, though it's not on the offer side; designers routinely submit plagiarized work to contests. It's something you always have to be on the lookout for and it's a major downside of using those sites.
Nope, they sell convenience.
Make your computer imitate you
Auto Transport Napa, California
I have a DI as well (with an undervolt/overclock kernel) and while the stutters are quite short, they're definitely there. As an easy example, scrub left/right quickly using the optical joystick on the stock home screen. If you're looking for it or paying attention, it's not that difficult to notice 2-3 frame pauses elsewhere but those are intermittent so I assume they're GC pauses. It doesn't hinder my enjoyment of the platform, but when you're looking for something to criticize it's an easy target.

As for battery life, it depends entirely on where you live. I experimented on it for months before finally figuring out that well over 50% of the power draw on the system is the data network (mobile network option when you hold down power). If you have it on when you have really weak/no reception, the phone will burn through the full battery in about 4 hours and it's pretty simple to lose 20% battery in 15 minutes. If you always have a decent connection, your battery life will be fine, if you happen to live in a place where you have holes in your coverage (e.g. NYC urban canyons), battery life is terrible.

After realizing that, I set up a set of Locale rules to shut down the network when I'm on the wireless network at home/work and to shut it down when I lose signal. Combined with the undervolted kernel, I normally get 48 hours on a charge for my normal use (~350MB/mo).
"Cost" (in the grocery world) usually refers to the wholesale cost to the store.