skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is wrong with my Launch Page?
Hi everyone. I'm working on a project and have created a launch page with the hope of compiling a list of early adopters. As with many other websites that have launch pages, the hope is that these early users would provide valuable feedback and would allow me to iterate and (hopefully) achieve market/fit.

The problem is that my launch page isn't getting a substantial number of sign-ups. At a quick glance, this could be for one of three reasons.

1: I'm attracting the wrong type of users (through advertising). In other words, not early adopters;
2: My launch page needs improvement, or;
3: My idea just sucks, and it's validation that I should not pursue this idea.

I truly believe I need more tests to validate that the idea is not worth pursuing (It's only been a few days). Therefore, I'm looking for advice on the other two bullets. In other words,

1) Any advice to get potential early adopters to the website? I've tried Google Adwords and StumbleUpon ads (note with StumbleUpon I did the auto-targeting).
2) Any advice on the launch page itself (It's at http://www.lloquy.com/).

Thanks in advance.
"Most Android devices are locked down so that users cannot install apps outside the Android Market (aka "sideloading")."

This is new to me. Got any proof?

As far as I know in the US it's just AT&T.
In this case, he is simply (I realise that this isn't actually simple) shipping out PCBs in antistatic bags to hackers, so he should be in a good position. I imagine that scales fairly well. Apparently the documentation is already done too.

If you are sensible choosing who you go to, there are many shops in china who can pretty much do the whole job for you.

There are even a couple of startups who act as intermediaries between manufacturers and hackers who have produced boards like this that they want to sell in small to medium runs, but I can't seem to remember their names.
Group text apps take center stage at SXSW
> C++ is just not a very good language. C is a fine language.

This is the attitude that I really, truly do not get.

If I want a linked list or any other common data structure in C++, I include the appropriate STL header and declare an object with the template syntax. It's two easy lines of code. If I want a data structure in C, I have to write it myself. From scratch. Every time.

C++ is a powerful high-level language. C is a low-level language where everything is explicit; I know this is "elegant" to many programmers, but really, I'm just trying to get things done, and C++ has served me far better in that practical role than C ever could.

I don't love C++; it has tons of flaws (many of which disappear if you use shared_ptr for everything). But I loathe the tedium of working in C.
I've been working my way through Yet Another Haskell Tutorial: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/docs/daume02yaht.pdf
Excellent good post, something a little different.
No Australian cities? Boo ;)
I remember this coming up at reddit a few months ago[1]. At the time I downloaded and read the paper on the design[2]. It all made sense to me because my own thinking had been heading in the same direction.

OKWS is less a web server than it is an architecture of servers. It's the difference between sendmail and qmail/postfix.

It has nice security and performance properties because each service is run as a separate user, with a separate process. Logging is handled by an independent daemon. Request demultiplexing is handled by a simple daemon that binds to port 80. Actual HTTP parsing is handled by a shared library that services link to.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/exkk3/ok_webser...
[2] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf
Some advice is given in the "read more" link: http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/contents.html
This would have been an excellent idea (along with blogging at my own site, rather than a subdomain of Wordpress (!)) back in 2006, but I didn't do it in 2006 because I had no clue that I would ever been anything even approaching as modestly successful as I am today. Doing it today doesn't make a whole lot of sense because my business is bigger than BCC and the prospects for best growth in the next couple of years are decidedly not dominating the elementary education bingo card market.
> Is there a book that relates to Haskell as TAoCP does to machine code, SICP to Scheme, K&R to C, and the dragon book to Lex and Yacc?

My vote would be for Richard Bird and Phil Wadler's Intro to functional programming using Haskell.
Try to encourage people to feel like it's not "slacking" if they take some time out to get some exercise. It really does wonders for productivity...
A startup is a unique endeavor where failure is generally viewed as a positive experience.

Getting fired from a job hardly looks good on a resume, but having a failed startup under your belt is almost seen as a badge of honor.
> You just called a group of people haters because they didn't support your ideals.

No they are haters because they are spreading FUD about Ext.js with no true or substantial points to support their claims.

> What does commercial-grade mean to you? How many users does that mean? How many tested platforms?

ONE of our apps has > 300k users. No major bugs or usability issues on production. And is tested on every browser with over 5% usage share (too many to list, the info is on the net anyway) on all the major platforms (Win, Lin, OSX).

> Microsoft and Google uses jQuery and not ExtJS

This is laughable. Microsoft and Google use jQuery for web pages. Not applications. Looks at Gmail and find jQuery there ???

> - other people may actually be good at writing their own stuff

If they want to waste their time and be overtaken by the competition who are making better use of resources they are entitled to make that poor judgement.

> - ExtJS may not save you from writing custom stuff, because you may need stuff that aren't included

It takes less resources to extend Ext.js that is does to replicate it.

> Can you support these claims or you just wrote them down to justify your ideals?

Having worked on RIA for over 6 years and having had Ext.js apps in production since Ext.js 2 my experience is that both Ext.js and illuminations work well. I'm not going to write a review and give you cypto certificates to login to apps that are not public. Its an observation from experience.

> You are obviously someone engaged in a trollish behavior for some reason.

Spreading FUD about a framework that is completely false is trollish behavior. I did not do that.
It's fairly CPU intensive. Like many classification-based techniques, much of the computation is in constructing the features. For our case, this means we had to implement most of CSS to get the visual features of every element on the page.
Google Latitude check ins unlock reward offers (in Austin)
Good going Dale, you must be pleased to get it out...
Why I do like Skype - I was able to video call with completely un-technical family on Christmas day with barely any freezing by sending them a webcam and having them dl and install Skype. It really blew me away, first video call on a general computer and I was expecting it to be a lot less slick and straightforward, especially on Christmas day.

Why I don't like it - Linux client is 3 whole versions behind the MS Windows one and it shows.

I don't have gmail. Looked on the jabber site but didn't see anything about video [conference-]calls.

Obviously I'd rather use an open platform and open protocol but it has to be [very nearly] as simple to set up as Skype and as stable in this particular case.
Not talking about making it difficult to process credit cards, but rather standardizing it as much as possible. I will again use the ATM as an example. If all ATMs looked exactly the same anybody should be able to detect fake ATMs and ATMs sabbotaged with external skimming equipment.

Security wise an inexpensive portable standardised terminal would make much more sense. In the end it would cost a bit more, but this would not necessarilly translate to increased cost for the POS. Less skimming equals less cost to the service providers _and_ the POS.
I imagine one big downside of this custom stack is that they will have a hell of a time doing any sort of integration with Match.com.

Hiring and training is also probably more difficult, though that has got be a huge boon to OKCupid engineers since Match cannot afford to lose them.
Sorry, that was an oversight. Won't happen again.
I'm not single, my girlfriend just dresses me.
Yeah, this would be nice, but it is also totally understandable that it is not allowed. "Just" adding reliable sync to native iOS apps and single-package CouchApps is cool enough :)
For $10,000 a day you could save 100 lives a day via optimal philanthropy. At a certain amount of money, you might have a moral responsibility to not do exactly what you want to do. http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villager...
A decade of freedom: Free Software Foundation Europe turns 10
Thanks for the feedback. We'll find a solution. :)
Heck, since Chrome has to put itself into the users AppData folder in order to do silent updates, is there anything preventing malware from just screwing with the Chrome libraries themselves?
tl;dr: I'm vested. Peace, bitches!
OS X Isn't for Developers
No you just sell your iPad1 on eBay like everyone else. You'll get a decent fraction of your purchase price back.
"Fake it 'till you make it" has so fundamentally changed how I function.
Skip the article and go straight to the numbers: http://www.kyleconroy.com/apple-stock.php
Empirically it almost definitely helps your chances
Thanks for this article. I thought that Square only supported the iPhone, not Android; is this a new development?

My brother and I are looking to sell some physical products (spice mixes / dry rubs) at farmer's markets. We were going to do Cash Only, but I just ordered my Square to handle the CC processing at the markets!
I loved the interview. It's amazing that one of the biggest Android-Market hits started with a mach-screen shot of wingless birds. Testimony to the ability of a great idea to make millions happier. Thanks for posting!
I have a theory about this. I think hackers come largely from the autistic spectrum part of the population. We are less fascinated with other people and more willing to be alone, or perhaps with a completely logical slave machine for company.

The desire to fit in and conform does not develop in the normal way, because we're not aware until later than neurotypical people of what other people are thinking and we never care about it quite so much. Normal children are obsessed with finding peer approval and young hackers stare in amazement.

I failed to grasp the basic mechanics of marketing until a kind MBA recommended "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoff Moore, after I had told him I didn't really see the use of sales and marketing. One of the ideas in the book is the need for marketers to convince different market segments that this product is suitable for them. A huge part of that is convincing them that they are not alone, that the product has already sold to a lot of other people and that they are not going to be doing something risky and independent by buying it.

This herd mentality, which dominates mass market sales, had not really figured in my earlier understanding because I am not in that same category. I'm in Moore's "innovators" category. It doesn't matter a bit to me whether anyone I know of has chosen some product or idea.

So I think many hackers have a poor grasp of marketing because it doesn't really work on them and they don't know how unusual that is.
Based on this table, it looks like if you buy the equivalent amount of stock every time you buy a new Apple production, you'll get a free upgrade within 2-3 years?

My current machine is:

Apple MacBook Pro "Core 2 Duo" 2.8 15" (SD)	2009-06-08	$2299	$4,328

and it's about time to upgrade.

And I could really use an iPhone 4 upgrade from my 3GS:

Apple iPhone 3GS 16, 32 GB	2009-06-08	$199	$375

The Mac Mini sitting under my TV could more than replace my whole entertainment center:

Apple Mac mini G4/1.42	2005-01-11	$599	$5,026
> I fail to see any connection between the JavaScript library you use and web pages or web apps.

The use case of a page vs an application should have a huge impact on the library i.e. architecture you select. If it doesn't and you say for example use jQuery for a RIA your on the road to a big ball of mud.

> Does it support progressive enhancement? Is it accessible?

Progressive enhancement is a concept best applied to web pages not applications.

Ext.js 4 has full ARIA & 508a support. Your example of YUI does not.

> http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Name one feature YUI has that Ext.js does not ?

YUI does not have any decent RIA architecture support, for example MVC.

YUI like jQuery is good for pages, not complex applications.
Tablets: The argument for productivity
Trakt - Last.fm for Movies and TV
When I download a compiler and the core libraries for a language, I don't want to have to download an IDE with it—Haskell Platform downloads are generally slow enough already, without adding something that really shouldn't be considered part of the core functionality of a language.
Just my 2 cents,

Your join button is pretty muted- it's gray, it's small, it's in the corner and it's surrounded by the same blue color that sits in the background. Try A/B testing by moving the join button to the center of your top banner, making it big and green.

:)
Amazon terminates all Illinois affiliate program members due to new law
I don't think this scales to any large fraction of the content that is being created right now, though. It does work for some, but I doubt this will become the way things are done on a large scale.
Instapaper 3.0 is here
Good luck on the new venture!
From the Oxford American Dictionary included in OS X:

raison d'état
noun ( pl. raisons d'état
a purely political reason for action on the part of a ruler or government, esp. where a departure from openness, justice, or honesty is involved.
Instapaper just became a social network
The few of points I've made about this are:

1. The Xcode 4 download compared to Xcode 3 is basically just a different IDE. The gcc version is, for all intents and purposes, identical. There's nothing stopping anybody from just installing that if all they need is the toolchain.

2. The other big 2 OS's (Windows and Ubuntu) don't have any build tools installed by default either. Granted they are just an apt-get away on Ubuntu, but it's still something you have to explicitly install.

3. If I wasn't a dev, I'd be pissed to find some compiler toolchain IDE gongshow eating up 5-15GB of my disk space, so not having it by default is probably a good thing. Most people aren't devs.

I paid the $5, but I'd still like to see just the toolchain available as a free download, though I still don't think it would be a good thing to have it installed by default.
UberGenius: Uber Is Taking Control of SXSW Pedicabs
It absolutely makes sense for a lot of business relationships to be based on "You remove as many sources of risk as possible and in return I commit to use my skills on your behalf." The name for that business relationship is "employment."
Losing users will also cost them money in advertising dollars.
I have a few quick thoughts about why you're not getting many sign-ups.

The copy on the landing page makes sense, but it's still confusing in a way. Maybe if you had a small diagram or brief description on how this is done, people might be more interested.

But, if I was interested I would be weary of oauthing on twitter because I'm still not sure what or how you do what you claim to.

The video should probably be less than 60 seconds and should answer what the service does, how, why, for who in the first 20 seconds.

Stumbleupon traffic doesn't work well. People are simply browsing from one site to the next looking for articles or funny cats and your bounce rate using SU is probably 100%.

Google ads might work but you might be better off getting on http://betali.st and http://startupli.st to get those early adopters.

Best of luck!
New XML Standard for Super-Fast, Lightweight Applications Announced by W3C
Argument kinda falls flat. For starters, Xcode 3 is still free, at least for now. No need for Xcode 4.

Also, I'm certain that someone will package gcc for mac sooner or later now that there's an incentive to do so. There has not been much incentive to do so before now since it was included with Xcode.
It's not about the protocol construction really. SIP is ok and should deal with most NAT problems with ICE support.

Simply because the SIP protocol looks simple and is easy to inspect... a lot of hardware/software will get it wrong. And I mean wrong like not implementing some feature on the phone thus bringing the common supported feature list down, implementing ICE in a wrong way then dropping the product support, breaking basic SIP transactions in a way that the phone doesn't even work without a NAT, etc.

Then router producers come in saying - we're doing home routers - let's help and solve it by doing SIP-ALG and active rewriting on our side. And they get it wrong again. And then they don't think of implementing a way to disable the SIP-ALG (looking at you speedtouch).

All the protocols are there. As long as you stick to one single manufacturer, it's ok. As long as you don't need custom features, it's ok. It's when you want to be good to everyone and support everything - then SIP networks fail because you simply cannot support everything at the same time.

Noone tries to analyse Skype and they control all the clients and servers. Whatever problems they create - they can solve. That's why they do better in many cases. Because you can't even "try" to fix their traffic.
gcc version is the same as Xcode 3. Xcode 3 is free at developer.apple.com
Show HN: Tweetmix me generates random and funny tweets based on any user TL
It's simple. You give us a twitter username and we will mix the updates in that timeline to make it look funny, ridiculous or even smart.
From W3C:

"Efficient XML Interchange, or EXI, is described as a very compact representation of information in XML (extensible markup language). EXI is so efficient that the W3C says it has been found to improve up to 100-fold the performance, network efficiency and power consumption of applications that use XML, including but not limited to consumer mobile apps. It is particularly useful on devices with low memory or low bandwidth."

Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/REC-exi-20110310/
Behold the Anonymous/HBGary saga e-book: Unmasked
Rate my Startup - Organise Twitter with tags
That has been my experience too. Sometimes the chase is better than the catch..
I would have made $200. I'll stick with the iPod.
R.E. eggbrain's inital question
"I don't have any real good idea what you are doing right now -- Twitter is already partially organized by Hashtags, what more does your website do? Is it looking for bigrams and trigrams to determine tags? If so 140 characters might not yield you much useful data. If not, could you explain it a little more?"

Great question! Twitter's hashtags, as far as I can, see are a great idea but in most part under or misused.

For example, in the stream that I receive, just looking at the first 25 tweets there were a total of 2 hashtags, #email (which is useless) and #SXSW. I would have more luck searching for "#imjustsaying" than if I searched for something like "#programming #rrails". Plus the limit that 140 characters means in many cases there just isn't room for a descriptive set of hashtags, and do I really want to only be able to classify information based solely on the author's suggestion.

I totally agree that looking for bigrams and trigrams in such a limited set of data would not be very helpful.

So what I thought, and what is the idea behind tags4.me, is that having read the data and followed any linked information I am the best person to classify the information in a way that is meaningful to me.

For example the actual reason I created this is that a little while ago I remembered that I had seen a really good startup a month or so prior float past in my stream. I checked it out at the time and thought, "gee I must remember that and tell ___". Well of course a month pasted, I saw the person and couldn't for the life of me remember it, what the site did, and I couldn't find it after searching twitter. Hell I didn't even know what to search for.

Now if I had been able to classify that in a way that meant something to me, for example with the tags "Startup, Programming, Development, Analytics, Awesome". With my site it takes like 2 seconds and at anytime in the future I could enter any combination of those tags and see that tweet again.

I just thought that it might be a useful tool, and having followed HN and YC for a little while, thought I would love to get some feedback from the community.
Idea HN: Make transcripts of all videos in KhanAcademy and have them presented with blackboard images and all, nicely organized in a web page with links to original videos.
I wasn't arguing that Xcode is expensive. I'm arguing that the barriers to entry are pretty offensive if you need the capabilities of only gcc. An hour-long process involving credit cards isn't very nifty.
If I wasn't a dev, I'd be pissed to find out some compiler toolchain IDE gongshow eating up 5-15GB of my disk space

Yeah, but the essentials that most command line builds require wouldn't even take up 10% of that. Apple already wastes gigabytes on printer drivers and extra languages you don't need.
Noticias Hacker, like HN but in spanish
I don't understand? Can't you release the ruby gems or whatever it is as binaries? You only need to spend the $5 if you want to change something, right?
Who Cares If Your Business Isn’t Perfect?
The links and prices are correct. You'll have to match the specs on the sheet when configuring at Apple's store.

Note that the drive option (500GB vs 750GB) does not change the price -- you can have either for the same price. I chose the faster drive (7200 rpm) over the slower (5400 rpm) -- a 25% increase in drive speed makes a world of difference in performance.

I'm not sure what you did with the HP configuration -- starting with the base config ($999), adding the specs listed on the sheet (note: there is no base 6GB to downgrade to 4GB -- and Apple memory options are never* competitive compared to other options), the price remains as noted on the sheet. Perhaps try it again from the base config. So, the rest of the analysis is unfounded.
It doesn't involve credit cards as xcode 3 is still freely available. If Apple does not include the developer tools on the Lion DVD, and if they remove all free versions of xcode for download, then I don't doubt someone will package up the "build essentials" for OSX and make them available. To date there has been no reason to do this, but if there is a reason, there is nothing preventing it that I am aware of.

edit: though I agree a smaller "build essentials" tool chain would be nice, but that was the case before you had to pay for xcode and nobody has bothered to create one. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be possible, only that it's probably not worth the hassle of setting it up and maintaining it (though Apple doing it would be excellent).
I'm so down with an apt-get (or in this case, brew install) for build tools. That's really what I'm getting at. It'd be great if it were installed by default, but if it were just accessibile by any means it'd be a massive step up. Most people don't need all of Xcode.
Gems that use C extensions generally build them using native libraries.
Codec = coder/decoder = piece of software that does encoding/decoding. You can also call it an SDK if you please.

Format = specification e.g. h264, png, vp8.

Google released a new codec (or, pedantically, an improved version of the codec, but I don't want to get into philosophical debate whether Firefox 3 is "new" or "the same" wrt. Firefox 2).

Therefore "Google juices VP8 open source video codec" is perfectly accurate.