skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I see it, manufacturers are going to flood the market with Android phones that just compete on price, while iOS will dominate the high end smartphone market. This means that while Android will win in the long run in terms of market share, the majority of people buying those phones are not likely to spend money on premium apps. iOS, on the other hand, will continue to generate the most profit for its developers, even with a smaller market share.

Which segment you want to target depends on what types of apps you want to make.

If you're goal is to make money from the app itself (like a game or utility app), you should invest in iOS where the ROI is far greater. If you are developing an app for a web service, then you are probably looking for the greatest reach instead of trying to generate profit from the app itself. In this case, you can just partner up with an Android developer to cover both market segments.

On the other hand, if you're fine with making a mass market app that is monetized through ads instead of direct sales, then Android is good choice since it is in need of more consumer-friendly apps. Finally, if you want to make something cool just for the sake of hacking, then Android obviously gives you the greatest access to the underlying system to do whatever you want.

All of the other mobile OS's are too young to really predict where they'll go.
Bank of America Online Exposes Customer Data
Tell HN: Rejected from App Store - "customer damaging their iPhone."
"We've reviewed Airborne and determined we cannot post it to the App Store at this time because it encourages a physical activity that could result in a customer damaging their iPhone."

I had a great and simple idea for an application a while back. It was actually a pretty cool game, and I'm certain it would have spread like wildfire - but its rather understandable why Apple denied it.

The game simply asked a user to keep their phone airborne (i.e. by throwing it / dropping it onto soft surface) and then measured the amount of time it was in the air for. I threw in a looping scream as well as challenges to push further for good measure. There was a high score table too :).

I've been trying to work out a way to get something out of this for a while, but unfortunately haven't come up with anything reasonable -- so decided to just publish the source code.

Its all available at https://github.com/qix/airborne as GPLv3 (to the extent I'm allowed to by the Apple license.)
The code is pretty shocking, I was just fooling around while learning Objective-C.
I'd read about the influx of artists and musicians, but didn't have a link ref to it, so I didn't bring it up. I'm not dead-set on Detroit, but it seemed a good match, the artsy and the geeky crowd. There is a big jumbled mix of modern hip culture which lends itself to new web style and start-up culture...

Thanks for the counterpoint.
This seems to support my hunch that far from planning to bet irrevocably on WinPho, Nokia is actually trying to keep its options open: pick up a sweet deal to be Microsoft's premium partner in smartphones for a couple of years, use that time to shuck off Symbian, keep MeeGo alive as a tablet OS. Then after that couple of years, when the MS smartphone exclusive expires, take a fresh look around and decide whether to go with one or more of WinPho, Android, MeeGo or whatever may be around at that point. Doesn't seem like a self-evidently terrible strategy, though there's an obvious risk that WinPho will continue to founder and that Nokia won't have the time or money or brand loyalty to tough it out through another couple of years of failure in smartphones.
What's your business focus?
It's worth pointing out that the default word order of English is SVO, and not VOS/VSO like the "word" order of LISP. Perhaps, John McCarthy is a native speaker of Malagasy?
Looks like Mi-8 after a facelift.
Boston Planning to Murder Potholes
But if CEOs and banker fail to please their customers, the company will do badly, and their boards will fire them. Government schools have no such constraints. They can waste money with impunity.
TechStars - Funding your startup
I don't see why Github couldn't be used to version track actual genomes of engineered small organisms... It would be great, you could curate changes that are 'virtual', changes that have been made, tested, and validated.
That was one hell of a downer to wake up to. I was in the sciences for a short stint (behavioral neuroscience) and could see the drudgery and political limitations from a mile away.

I made a very clear decision to put all that stuff on hold until I could somehow get involved in the sciences privately. I suppose that might be a pie in the sky thought, but it's better than filling out (scarcely granted) grant proposals all day.
How to buy an Android phone
"Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. all were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged." - The Machine Stops.
Seems like he is hiding an e from his last name :)
Stephen Elope is his real name.
He runs away to marry a new company every other year.
VERY reasonably priced housing. Extremely supportive people who will help entrepreneurs in an instant. Lots more to do than the media would like to share. Fabulous live music venues. Great museums. A gazillion terrific restaurants. Four distinct seasons. A quick drive to Northern Michigan will give you views of some of the most beautiful lakes in the world. I'd never move away from here.
this is going to go over so well when auto manufacturers start jamming phones in moving cars.
i seriously doubt BDmicro was even seen by Arduino its Yet Another Dev Board. and avrfreaks is (if you read the article) the anti-hero. you missed the most important one which is Processing.

by winning, 'this guy' means that it has become a standard development platform and test bed EVEN FOR people who do not in general use AVRs. not having a standard test bed for devices is such a massive annoying failure in electronics, its difficult to explain how much not having it sucks. its like you know how every programming language has stdin/stdout with print(f)? ok, then Arduino is the printf.
I'm a native English speaker, and I prefer Japanese Lisp.
Given that imperative sentences in English map onto function calls rather well, and also have an understood subject, I think Malagasy is an unnecessary assumption.
Puisi maherna » Post kata-kata bijak
Symbians sales have been coming crashing down, and Nokia is going to discontinue it in a few years. And the app market (ovi store) for symbian is quite dead compared to even Android Market, and especially when compared to App Store.
I wouldn't have hopes that are too high for it. I attempted something similar with http://www.logilogi.org over the last few years, but for philosophy, and it was similarly successful (not :)

I tried most tricks in the book: fancy innovative hypertext features, badges for on ones blog, even got my GF to do a demo video, but I guess there is just no demand for such things (apart from the very few with too much time on their hands, whose work most people prefer not to read)...

(at some point there might be, but the feedback cycle of journals and tenure keeps academics out, while those that appreciate in-depth reading/conversation (on other things than news, which for a short wile gets the focused attention of a lot of people) either shift into academia (as I did for the last few years), or find other smart people to work with on a startup or something alike...)

Anyway, it is all (AGPL) Open Source, so if you want, feel free to check it out.

The reddit platform is (also) a good platform to consider, as the people at http://lesswrong.com seem to have got a community going (though their topic, singularity and such, is especially suited, as many tech-savvy people are into it, while at the same time it has not really taken off in most of the academic world yet...).
I've looked at Hipster and don't think their solution is stellar. It's more of Q&A for location which I think is too far away from a city guide. City guides just need a quick web 2.0 uplift in my opinion.
> Extremely supportive people who will help entrepreneurs in an instant.

Can you elaborate on this?
This is one of my many failed bootstrapped startups. I thought the idea of aggregating all the best tumblr reblogs (reblog count > 2000) was a winner.

Turns out there was no demand. I've put it up here to showcase how I executed the idea, in case someone else was considering it.

I've moved on to my next idea, but I still think this idea has a chance, though my execution of it has been poor. ie not targetting the tumblr demographic properly, or getting the word out.

How would you go about marketting to tumblr ADHD kids? lol

thanks yall
Depends how much you want to spend on it. Hex-Rays for example is pretty decent and not even comparable to the mess on github.
This nails my dislike of the phrase "never means." It never means that "it doesn't ever mean" and always means "nobody ever told me what it can mean" or worse "i've never looked for any other meanings."

"Best Practice" is a term of art within business and technology. It's a synonym for "conventional wisdom," and/or "common sense," which, as the man once said, is not necessarily common. That doesn't render it meaningless, though. Best Practices are not information handed down from God, so as best practices hold, it should not be relied upon as perfect.
Edit: As ladyada points out, I missed the paragraphs where community is discussed in the Make article. So let's say not that I disagree, but I disagree with the emphasis.

I disagree. The answer is not in unit sales, spec sheets, or software architecture.

The Arduino "won" because of the helpful community that was developed up around it[1]. You could go to the forum and find everything from people reverse engineering some obscure interface to others that were wondering why about half their LEDs won't light up and getting a quick, helpful response that explains why one leg is longer than the other..

I think that made it possible for a less technical crowd to succeed with Arduinos and they paved the way for there to be a critical mass of internet articles to lure the rest.

[1] I don't think the community was an accident. It came from the backgrounds and goals of the Arduino creators. I think maybe "provide the tools to teach people to implement their XXX" would sum that up.
Ask HN:Anyone here not want an exit?
What if you are incredibly happy with your leadership position at your start-up, are not too concerned about living a wealthier life, and don't see yourself building something else?

This question determines whether I want to raise money since VCs / angels always ask, "What's your exit strategy?".

So you have to balance between two views:

a.) Raise money, allowing your operation to possibly grow more because of this, a broader network through the investors for partnerships/advice, and coming to grips with the fact that you will have to sell or your investors will push you for it. Understand that if you are acquired (low chances, but just saying), you will have to work for a behemoth company, and judging from the amount of founders that leave a short while after being acquired, being an employee of one of those companies can hardly be described as exhilarating. Also understand that if you were bought out, you will have more cash in the next 5 years (if you did nothing with it) than if you were to stay at your start-up providing yourself a salary for the next 5 years, even taking into account increased salary from growing the company (without VC money) during those years.

b.) Don't raise money, keep living off your salary (if any), reduce the direct and indirect transaction costs of having investors, and possibly lower growth opportunities (no money to hire more staff, etc..).

So anybody here not looking forward for an exit?
Management by metaphor, I'd say that's a red flag.
Rate My Startup: thebestoftumblr.com
One of my many failed boot strapped startups. I thought I could create a blog that aggregated all the best tumblr reblogs (reblog count > 2000).

Turns out there's no demand for it. lol. But i thought I'd showcase it here, in case someone else was about to implement the idea. Maybe they can better execute. I've moved on to my next idea, but would like to know how I could market it better to the tumblr demographic.

thanks yall.
SUMMARY: Japanese may seem like double Dutch, but it's actually more like reverse Polish. ;)
Cloud Business News Roundup: February 7 - 13, 2011 | Cloud Business Review
Although in this case, the object code may have been deliberately obscured. On reflection, I can't help wondering how much of the seemingly pointless diddling of local variables is the result of turning a naive decompiler on a bytestream where the actual instructions are somehow encrypted or masked.
tl;dr: I failed because I stopped working hard and I was unambitious. And once I got tenure, I thought I could slack off, play the cello, go horseback riding and be a full time mom. But the system failed me too - it should have come up with a way for me to not work hard, but keep my job.
Rework it for Android, no pesky risk of rejection there ;)

I'd most likely install it on my android phone, if it were free/ad supported. Could see it being a very viral game, with people finding interesting ways to game the scoreboard.

This is what insurance is for, right?
things don't have to last 20 years to be revolutionary. arduino has set the bar very high. basic stamp was good for a few years but it was closed, weak, proprietary and expensive. people should be happy/impressed/annoyed that in this case, open source is much better than the proprietary product and its still very young.
There was another app that got rejected on the same criteria some time back. It's just the way it is.
5k? 2K? You aren't going to find developers to work for that money for such a short timespan.

If you are two software developers, time to buckle down and build an MVP. Being 2 developers you are in a great position to do this. Once you have that, and still no money, you'll only have equity, so find a co-founder who believes in your product and give him equity. Build out the product, get traction and then go looking for capital, any financing round at this point should give you enough cash to make solid hires. Then it's time to really get to work.
What about platforms or frameworks like Titanium or PhoneGap?
tldr, don't be lazy, fail to network, and insecure in your abilities to the point where you stop trying.

Nothing specific to Academia there.
direct link: http://www.thebestoftumblr.com
There was also Omnicore's Codeguide and X-Develop products back in the early 2000's. They had a feature called back-in-time debugging.
The market thinks Qt's owner Nokia made a bad choice: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=NOK&t=5d&l=on&z=...

Nokia should quietly spin Qt off to avoid making more enemies.

IBM beat Apple by promoting an open platform : the PC. The eventual winner of the smartphone/netbook/tablet wars will do the same.
Good summary. However at the end, she decides it's not because she lost interest, but rather because "the system" doesn't make allowances for women in science who want to pursue other interests.
Obviously the winners in this game would be those who damage their iPhones by throwing them from 1000 ft buildings. :)
How to Get a Raise
Always suspect the "common knowledge."

Not just this, but if anyone uses "common sense" as an argument, run away in fear.

As far as I can tell, "common sense" is just code for one of (A) "I'm too lazy to provide a rational explanation"; (B) "I don't think you're worth explaining to"; (C) "I don't think you're capable of understanding"; or (D) "I don't have a real explanation, but I still need to assert the truth of my claim."
The problem is that normal humans don't USE social bookmarking sites. Nor do they tweet/share much of value on facebook. Google is VERY good at serving up great results for things that you could imagine the "linkerati" might link to. Start drifting into travel, home remodeling, etc., and it gets pretty grim.
That floating StockTwits bar is fucking annoying.

It looks like the Firefox popup blocker notification box; I tried to kill it and ended up closing the tab.
I've had a good amount of success with jQTouch as well. Built a full app with it last month which works quite well in offline mode with HTML5 cache manifest. My only complaint about it would be that some of the theming is incomplete: the pressed styles don't work for buttons. A small thing which would be easy to fix - I just hadn't bothered.
Cool, I had a similar idea, which was to make people throw their phones into the air and try to make it do as many flips as possible. Great to see that you actually built something like that.

I was well aware of the "risk your phone" aspect, "iDare" was my working title...
The Mitre Challenge: Demonstrate your hacker skills
Sending people to Mars would be intentionally creating both an emergency and a rescue operation an order of magnitude more complex than Apollo 13.
why are you disagreeing when the middle of the article is all about the great community. its easy to say 'community!' the point of the article is that community isnt something that just -happens- magically because you have a forum, there are concrete (and sometimes technical!) things were taken care of first in order to allow a critical mass community to form.
I really don't think so. The decompilation result is genuinely silly. For example look at:

if (*(int*)(local2 + global0) == 0x4550) {
local5 = *(unsigned short*)(local2 + global0 + 20);

Either local2 or global0 are pointers to a structure. Neither is detected. Most sensible decompilers would change the names and just make it `local5 = global0[local2].blah` instead. Advanced decompilers also can avoid gotos in almost any case. It also uses function calls without parameters or output, assuming some stack layout probably.

It's a really really bad output, not a result of obscured compilation.
You don't have to make an account to answer questions on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/faq#login
Chapter 11 for Borders, New Chapter for Books
I think her more important point is that to be a "successful," scientist, you have to be a domineering, workaholic, self-promoter with connections. Perhaps there are other ways to do science that don't push out brilliant people who want broader lives.
Using Small Projects to Stay Motivated through Large Ones
I would say the only startup worth working on is your own.

Working at someone else's startup is a recipe for getting exploited - overworked and underpaid. And the worst thing about it is that it's all couched in an atmosphere of guilt trips and taking-it-for-the-team.

Perhaps there are exceptions. I just haven't seen any.

I'd rather work for The Man in my day job in a cold corporate environment where everything is explicit from the get-go, get well paid for it and crank out code for my own startup in my free time.
This looks like the output of HexRays [1], which is the best C decompiler I've seen. Defining some structures and typing the variables would make it a lot more readable in some cases. I've used HexRays to make sense of C++ games several times, after investing enough time to define and use data types, the result looks [2] much better, but then again, that's unobfuscated and not optimized C++, not old-school "I know what I'm doing and I don't need the compiler second-guessing me" C.

Unfortunately there's still a lot decompilers can't do, mostly compiler tricks (e.g. storing a pointer to the middle of a structure instead of its beginning, and using negative offsets to access other struct members [3] - this is usually obvious when looking at it, but HexRays can't make sense of it so it falls back to raw pointer math).

[1] http://www.hex-rays.com/
[2] http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/1188/hexrayscpp.png
[3] https://github.com/Laurelai/decompile-dump/blob/master/outpu...
Galaxy S II Pictures, Features and announcement
And Gmail would have the same problem. But to date, I have never seen Gmail ask to refresh..
As opposed to the allowances it makes for men who want to pursue other interests? She was insecure, lazy, and unambitious. I think those were much larger factors than the mysterious lack of opportunities in science for women to do pursue things other than science.
That is, a Lisp program is represented as a list, a data structure that can itself be manipulated by a Lisp program. This means that a Lisp program can contain macros that can generate Lisp code at compile time (or even at runtime).

The latter (about Lisp macros) is actually orthogonal to it be homoiconic. What it does mean is that parsing, manipulating, and generating Lisp code is just like generating any other Lisp data structure. But there is nothing stopping non homoiconic languages from adding first-class macros (macros that are written in the language itself).
The cranky guide to trying R packages
You can push the app and generate buzz by giving away a replacement phone to the top scorer over some period. If its ad supported and grows large enough the money should cover the expense.

Something like:

"Want / Need a new phone see how far you can send yours flying for a shot at new hardware."
I'm sure Qt still have a place on the desktop as a multiplatform GUI toolkit, but it does seem like the end of the road for Qt's mobile stuff.

I think the best that could be hoped for it would be a role akin to MonoTouch, but I think the amount of work to get to that stage would be too great, especially considering Nokia would have no interest in it.
Isn't what the author describes almost exactly RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) aka postfix?
Also how it was done in the 50's by Americans. (Arthur Burks, Don Warren and Jesse Wright[1]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation
Similar: http://metamerist.blogspot.com/2007/02/alan-kay-oopsla-1997....
If by rewind you mean that you can choose an arbitrary executed statement and start to reevaluate the function from there - then it's there since VS 2005 at minimum.
Exactly. A OS with high usability which works. NOT a phone OS which has a frigging process explorer !!
just like this guy then... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FtWWTllCrg
I've seen HexRays do the same thing - most of the time you need to actually tell it that a variable is a pointer before it tries to do that.

Stating the function type explicitly also helps it display the right arguments given to it. This output could be significantly improved if the assembly version were available as well.
TIPS AND IDIOMS FOR DEVELOPING NETWORK BASED IOS APPLICATIONS
Posterous.

I used it a few days after it was launched public and thought it was just anther blogging platform. I hardly paid much attention. After an year or two the service started to gain traction when some famous bloggers moved to Posterous.

I still don't use it but it certainly has grown big.
Too bad. It would be wildly popular with astronauts... The screaming can be disabled, right?
This happened ~10 years ago when search-engine results were too messy for the throngs that were looking for the Dancing Baby, so the business world invented portals. Then portals became useless because their curatorial layers were not scalable, but by then search engines had made improvements and the pendulum swung the other way.

It's a natural see-saw between specialization and generalizations (there's probably a one-word term for this in evolutionary biology). We see the same in thin-client/thick-client talk in client-server/webapp contexts.