skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

- Thomas Edison

http://startupquote.com/post/3253285791
Hey people bought it for 2.99 right? What makes you think that more people won't pay that price? It has a nice ranking and all, why not just take nickythegreek's advice and add a upcoming features list.

You may also put a lite version out there which will cost .99. Just saying, not an experienced person here.
> Consider: what the government occasionally loses in judgements it may gain many times over in greater legitimacy and consensual cooperation from its citizens / contractors / subdivisions / etc.

Interesting point. I never thought of it that way. There is apparently the Federal Tort Claims Act. However a jury trial is not allowed.
Clearly legal, because you're a lawyer? Don't be too surprised if this lands Apple in court eventually. Leveraging their OS to disrupt competitors in other business markets is the exact sort of behavior that got Microsoft in trouble with Netscape.
So, what do HN recommend that Amazon do now? Or at least expect them to do.

* Leave the app as-is. (With what specific motive?)
* Jack up the prices. (Perhaps they'll include a notification when the user is on the relevant purchase page.)
* Leave the prices as-is and take the 30% hit.
* Let Apple kill the app.
For everyone's complaints about Microsoft back in the day, at least they didn't also control the hardware.
"Thus why you should only buy ebooks where you get easily transferrable formats, like unencumbered PDF or ePub"

But is there any big player in the ebook market which comes even close to Amazon (collection-wise) and sells non-DRMed books/PDFs? From what I've seen there are no viable alternatives for non technical reading... (and no, shopping at several small publishers' websites is not a viable alternative)
Not specifically. Facebook apps, mobile apps, software, all get traded there.
I still think this whole thing only applies to apps that let you shop/browse internally and then whisk you away to Safari to coplete the payment. And apple's reason for objecting to this is to protect users from fraudulent payment gateways. Just one customer who had their credit card ripped off after making a 'purchase on an iPhone app' would be extremely damaging to the reputation of the whole iOS ecosystem.
In support of unencumbered formats, think about how Apple became dominant. iPod/iTunes initial success + music labels insistence on DRM, lead to lack of content portability, lead to device lock-in, lead to iPod dominance, lead to music labels loosing power.

This is different from Kindle, where they write a player for every platform. But is what you get if you sell through Apple's store for Apple's reader.

O'Reilly wins with their deals. I buy books I wouldn't otherwise.

I bet broadcasters are glad Apple wasn't around when the first TVs were manufactured.
That would be a ~43% surcharge, actually. Quite a lot.
It's interesting watching rivalries/standoffs develop between companies that didn't seem likely to happen - who would've thought in 2006 that Amazon and Apple would be at each other in 2011?

That was before the iPhone or Kindle came out, never mind the iPad. Interesting to see how these things develop.
It's difficult to really expect people not to vote on the making money option, but at the end it's a mix of everything: recognition, making money (not being a millionaire maybe but just some good stability), to learn (educational purposes), if possible change the world.
No, I don't have a software background. I think one of the problems that many forums run into is that the folks qualified to write the software and deal with the technical support are frequently not the best people for dealing with people. Then they try to come up with technical solutions to people problems and it really doesn't work. The other issue is that most people I have met who are both people-person's and highly socially insightful tend to be master manipulators. This will get you some initial success but in the long run it is a poison pill.

I don't meet too many people who are both highly socially observant and have no goal of manipulating and maneuvering people. Fostering community requires you to be socially aware and also good at respecting people's boundaries. Those two things seem to not coincide too often. So I am not sure how well I could teach people to do what I do (though I know I could put some info together to help others with this and have done so on occasion for previous forums I belonged to). I sometimes fantasize about having people pay me to join their forum for a few months (edit: or review what they are doing and give them feedback on improving it). My experience has been that once critical mass is achieved, the culture becomes self-perpetuating. I can breathe life into it but it does not die just because I leave. On one email list, I returned after a two year absence and cultural things I had started were still there. (Technically, that's the only place I ever got any significant recognition for what I do. I was a moderator and people very much noticed how the place went from a cold atmosphere with anemic traffic to warm and lively in just a week once I began moderating.)

Someone told me today I have "no business sense". That's probably true. I can't for the life of me figure out how to turn this into a business opportunity in spite of how frequently this type of problem gets discussed on HN (or rears its ugly head in various forums).
That sounds like a good idea, I'll add that right now. In fact, some of those features are already available if you enable them using the website, but they aren't exposed in the app's UI.
Of course this is legal or Apple wouldn't be doing it.

But it strikes me as an unnatural state of affairs. This idea that I can make a computational device, then own the right for you to put material on that device, is technically correct -- if you think of the iPad as some huge proprietary version of a CD player.

But if you think of it an extension of your brain -- as a prosthesis which helps you share commonly understood experiences in common formats, which it is -- then Apple is basically saying it has control over what you think. That it deserves a cut for any experience you have.

Certainly it's still more of a player than a mind-extension device, but this line will get more and more blurry. It's already making many uncomfortable. My belief is that some sort of change in law is required to clear up this confusion. An iPad is not a record player.
One thing to add is our test wizards have also conjured up a system we call the "try server", which allows the execution of all the test suites asynchronously on fast machines before you commit. So, you don't have to wait for your laptop or machine you're working on to run the tests, you just kick it off and get an email with your results in a few minutes. This makes it so it's painless to be sure you'll never commit a red build.
What is interesting that are all these players discrediting and releasing each others documents: Wikileaks, Manning, HBGary, Anon. If you were to make a list of their fate from worst to best: Manning > Wikileaks > HBGary > Anon, it look like Anon very much come out on top of this pile.
Ask HN: practical git process for teams with frequent deploy?
We've been creating branches for each feature and building it into a release-x.x branch every day to deploy, basically following the guide at [1].

We've got 2 new developers who haven't used git before, and I'm burning lots of time (and making lots of exceptions) trying to get them on this process. At the same time, I've heard that one of the mantras of continuous deployment is that you always work on the trunk and keep it stable[2,3].

Can anyone describe in a bit more detail why this is desirable and how it works, on a practical level? Do you still have developers creating individual feature branches for organization, or is it literally a single branch operation?

I should clarify that we don't have a full deploy system in place, and the releases, while daily, are still pushed manually. Does working off the trunk only make sense once every commit is being auto tested?

Big thanks.

[1]: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
[2]: http://aptoma.com/select.star/2010/01/21/notes-on-continuous-deployment/ paragraph 2
[3]: Ash Maurya's recent ebook
> if you have to tell somebody that something is fun, it means that you have lost the argument.

Couldn't agree more.
Ask HN: How do you find stuff to do in your city?
Building out a new start up to compete with City Guides. I want to focus it on things to do rather than just venues.<p>For example: Restaurant X vs. Friday nights at Restaurant X with a Jazz band and ask for Dish Y.<p>I just got a launch page up at UpOut.com. Just want to ask HN how people find stuff to do.
Scratching the itch. Definitely. Im a student so I have all the time in the world and money is not too important to me.
I'm tempted to call the 30% the AppleVAT at this point...

What makes iOS purchases different are two things:

1. Apple has oversight of content being sold (helps avoid malicious software in many cases, and age appropriate content).

2. Ease of use - one password to buy stuff, not multiple accounts everywhere.

That's what you get as a customer. As a developer, you don't have to deal with the payment processing and other consumer financial issues, to a great degree, and they provide marketing.

There's nothing to stop an end-run around any of this - you can still make totally open web apps, content in PDF and ePub formats, etc.

You just can't provide the identical guarantees Apple provides with the oversight of their store (which necessitate a locked down device and limitations on what 3rd parties can do outside of their system).

(edit: formatting fix)
cut -f1
"Unemployment is just a byproduct of progress."
HP TouchPad: Slide. Shuffle. Stack. Share.
Although Amazon then don't have to pay their own credit card fees. But yes.
I'm interested. How can I get in touch with you?
When you know you can't really rollback, I'm sure you're helluva lot more sure that your code won't take down the site
I'm betting we'll get there in a few years, the same way it happened with music - DRM for a while, then once people get used to paying for stuff, the DRM goes away in most cases.

Unfortunately, if history is any indication, the last place this will happen is in school textbooks which is honestly where the ebook revolution should start.
Incredibly low tech, but printed newspapers. I'm in NYC so there's an abundance. amNY (the free one) and Newsday are pretty consistent with a small section listing concerts and comedy and other performers, usually in the Friday editions.
I am sure I do have the story wrong, if only because I was not there. I just went on what was posted so, could the original author of the story either correct the story, or correct PG?

For "We didn't push to apply to YC", the original posting had said "I hadn't really considered an incubator like YC because we already had a product, customers, and whatnot and I thought I really just needed cash to hire a bunch of people. But one of the guys at breakfast really liked what we were doing and wrote an intro email to Harj, one of the partners at YC. It was mid-May so the application deadline for the Summer 2010 session had already passed. But Harj and I had coffee the next day, and he liked what he saw so he invited me to come interview for late acceptance."

And for "he definitely didn't split up the company for us", I was going on "So the day before YC started, I sent Paul and the gang an email letting them know that my team was changing. I didn't think it would be a huge problem. I (naively) thought that they'd just give me advice on how to navigate the new situation. But alas, Paul was not happy with the changes and told me it might put us in jeopardy of getting funded by them." In other words he did not say that you had told him the company should stay put, you had told him you would not fund him, now that the company had split up in trying to fulfil YC's requirement for SV location.

By the way, I am entirely aware of a third possibility, i.e. that you are both right, and that two different people can have correct but different memories of the same situation. But the story as it was written did not make YC look good, even though the author is promoting it with cheeriness as coming through adversity.
Use caching as a last resort, not as a fundamental design strategy

Resist excessive abstraction

Set performance targets for yourself

Excellent points for making any software perform well. I am working on performance in a non-web app that suffers greatly from over-abstraction, and over-caching to hide the overhead. Since design is subjective, railing against this got me nowhere -- but setting performance targets truly shifted the focus of the team. Now instead of debating how many internal layers we need and how to name them, we focus more on our runtime budget, and how to make the hardware solve the problem in that time.
I think YC here demonstrated that type of resourcefulness is not what they ask for. Looks to me they are more on the side of reliable, steady, old-school business with team values vs resourceful ingenious type of people that stop at nothing. Makes sense business-wise to rely on steady signals vs riding the wave, but in any case YC is just a business.
Thanks a lot for point it out!
I haven't fully analyzed it but my gut instinct would be to raise the prices by 30%, then explicitly state to the end user that the 30% surcharge is because of Apple. This way its transparent to the end user, and it could put some pressure on Apple to lower its fees.
The way you're describing this extension of the brain reminds me a lot of Andy Clark's onion model for th extended mind.
Ask HN: How do you avoid distractions like HN?
I am a student and work part time on my own projects. Because I am self-employed and have no real schedule, I sometimes find it hard to concentrate on my work. I sit down with the intention of programming, but very soon end up with tabs open on Hacker News, StackOverflow, and Planet Django. Even when I am concentrated on my programming, I sometimes regress and start reading interesting articles if they are related to my current project or programming language. In part, this is due to the fact that I spend a lot of time on Google looking up programming questions.

In order to overcome my distraction, I use "mediums" to trick myself into focusing. I have found that having a cup of coffee on the desk will put me in the right mindset, because I always use coffee when working. This works well, but I don't enjoy being dependent on hacks like this.

Do you have any tips for becoming and remaining productive?
I use Olark...but I like to think it's more of a sales tool. Then again, some of you will argue that support can be used as a sales process; I don't care how big/small of a company you run, customer service is probably the single most important factor (from a consumers standpoint) next to the product.

I've tried Zendesk and while they're great in parts like ticketing and assigning tasks to individual support members, I think they fail at recognizing at the bases of customer support. THERE IS NOTHING MORE THAT I HATE when I have to register twice. I already have an account at xyz.com, why do I have to create one to fill out a support request? It's very confusing, especially when they tune the design to be pretty similar.

LiveChat rocks, the guys at Olark are doing it really well..snapengage is pretty badass for that automatic messaging(sending a msg like: Hey, hwo are you liking the site? <-- typo put on purpose) can really start engagements as I don't really want to send the same message every time a new visitor comes to my site.

Btw, I'm building a support system which is targeted at sites which have customers, which is really meant to cut down support(VisaulWebsiteOptimizer is expecting to cut theirs down by more than 50%), and provide a natural interface(both for your startup and customers) which basically creates a powerful help page(and no, unlike zendesk, you dont have to rehire your designer to spend a week triming it to fit your company's brand). In case you're interested send me an email at hajrice@gmail.com and I'll make sure to include you in the private beta.
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Kindle books are purchased through a WebKit view of Amazon.com in the iPad app now. That's what Apple is saying can't continue and that there needs to be In App Purchasing support. While it has been implied, I haven't heard specifically that they require the pricing to be the same (so you can't charge more for In App purchases to cover the 30% Apple VAT).
Great German Ad.
Currently, to scratch an itch I have and hoping others also have said itch. Also to add stuff to my portfolio which I let stagnate for four years.

Hopefully when I’ve accomplished those goals enough I can create web apps that have a more profound on people’s lives without caring as much that is solves a problem I have (but still enough that I can dogfood my own product).
OkCupid Demystifies Dating With Big Data: Tech News and Analysis «
Agree. I know some people who think that the profits will come after they'll get funded; my guess this is one of the reasons so many fail.

I wish I could up-vote your comment since I find it insightful, but it looks like I don't have enough karma to do so. :)
You'd probably find it easier when the deployed changes were extremely small. Our last automated deploy was a single line change. Most are bigger, but not huge.

Also, while they don't do full rollbacks, I suspect more than one fix has been "remove the offending code until we can figure out what's wrong".
I've been at this for about 10 years now, off-and-on.

These past two weeks I've been stuck in the grind with a mountain of projects, just growing tired of clients and growing scope and blah, blah blah.

Seeing your enthusiasm is helpful to me. It reminds me why I started in the first place. I do love what we get to do, and I hope you file what you've written away and look back on it from time-to-time to remind yourself why you're doing what you do.

Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin have a great podcast out called "Back to Work" (http://5by5.tv/b2w), and Merlin had a great part around 20 minutes of episode 4 where he talks about getting bummed by deadlines, and by how much work he has to do, and how hard it is, and then he says:

"Then I caught myself and said 'waaitaminute', I dick around on the internet for a living and write about whatever I want. Oh my God, I am so not allowed to be that sad about this. If I can't figure out how to be happy doing what I'm doing, I might as well give up."

Good reminders. Thanks for posting, and for your enthusiasm. :)
Which NYC newspapers do you typically use? Also, what's the coolest thing you do in NYC?
> Of course this is legal or Apple wouldn't be doing it.

Right, because corporations never do anything illegal in any country.

Microsoft has been fined hundreds of millions for including a browser with their OS (not even restricting other browsers). Something Apple and every other OS manufacturer does as well. The problem is, neither Microsoft, nor Apple cares about fines of that scale.
https://github.com/dandean/express-form and https://github.com/caolan/forms are two good options. Out-of-the-box validation for model-based forms is a little bit trickier — there are many persistence options and each has their own way of doing things, which isn't always model-based.
If you tried to hire in the past few years in an area like Boston this wouldn't require further explanation.
I actually liked the green. Even though the color was slightly jarring, it made the site a lot more memorable.

What didn't you like about it?
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I'm building one to generate interest in myself as an employee. Like an item in a portfolio basically. I want to be able to get a job that I want when I get out of college.

I'm also building it to learn. I think you learn more by doing than just reading so I couple my reading with doing.
Paul: you are absolutely right. I think it is hard to find a better way to differentiate the barbershops from the startups short of having smart folks in the government who subjectively examine each application - and we all know how likely that is. Also, if we go that route, the startup visa will take years just like the current green card application which IIRC requires an in person interview.

Vivek does have a point as well though. Currently, employers who sponsor "green cards" have the power to get the sponsored employees and their families kicked out of the country simply by firing them. I don't think you'd want to replicate this with the startup visa. Using investors as an 'entrance requirement' may be o.k., but once someone qualifies for a startup visa, the path to a permanent residency should either be really short (months, not years) or independent of whether the investor continues to 'support' the entrepreneur.

I am in favor of strong filtering up front, but anyone who qualifies should then be treated just like an American citizen or permanent resident.
But how many cases there have been (and won) accusing the government of torture, bad budget decisions, and others?

There is the Federal Tort Claims act in case a govt employee injures someone. But that is very limited and a jury is not allowed to decide on the case.
My point was that I have no wish to argue what the current status of the law is, not that corporations do no evil.

I am not a lawyer.
Along related lines, Tim Gowers (a Fields medalist in mathematics) has started the Polymath Project, which has produced several excellent, massively collaborative, research papers in math.

http://polymathprojects.org/
Agree, it seems to me that an emphasis is on time production deployment takes rather than rollback vs fix
Yes, this approach is ideal when you are one person working consistently on the same project, and have much of the design in your head, which is feasible when you keep the code size small.

It suffers when you have multiple people working simultaneously, or if you have to take a break before returning to the project. In those case, a secondary automated statement of what the system should do is quite useful.
Node doesn't have "batteries" out of the box.

This is a good thing. All the batteries are provided by the community and made available through the package manager 'npm'
You are right. As a phone it (and the 6210) scored a flawless victory. I've never had a phone since that was as perfect for it's purpose. Sure, I like my iPhone but it's not without it's flaws (like putting mute on because the screen comes on mid call, or not being able to hold it in my left hand without a cover) but the 6210 and 6310 just worked. The day I found the exposed bluetooth profile I threw up in my mouth a little, because my perfect phone wasn't perfect anymore.
i am into F1, but more into MotoGP.
Have to add. Sekrt is not a Groupon clone!
I'm wondering if the OS X Lion edition is going to have these encumbrances as well.
as a researcher I am completely on board with this idea-but to work it has to be built into the culture, the grants, and the way hiring is done. even demanding code be open source is an uphill battle, no major grants in my field provide any money for support, maintenance, hosting etc. or demand code be open-sourced for funding.