skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimers:

1. All these data points are for the US APP STORE. When you see big numbers from taptaptap, etc, they are referring to worldwide numbers, which do not really help with rankings since rankings are different in each market. That said, USA is by far the biggest market, so most developers brag about US Store rankings.

2. Rankings vary quite a bit depending on the season. For example, Christmas day sales are generally 3x normal, and it stays at about 1.5-2x for a few weeks afterwards. When new devices hit the market, there is also a surge in sales.

Data points from my own apps:

Overall:

#66 Top Paid Overall iPhone = ~ 1200 sales/day

#60 Top Grossing Overall iPhone: ~$2500/day

Sports Top Paid iPhone(Varies a TON depending on what sports season it is):

#25 = ~ 50 sales/day

#10 = ~ 100 sales / day

#5 = ~ 250 sales / day

#2 = ~ 500 sales / day

Sports Top Paid iPad:

#5 = ~ 150 sales / day

Data points from other developers apps who have shared their data with me:

#7 Overall Paid iPhone = ~ 16,000 sales / day

#10 Overall Paid iPhone = ~ 7,000 sales / day

#1 Overall Free iPad = ~ 40,000 downloads / day

#15 Overall Paid iPad = ~ 1,000 sales / day
There seem to be a fair number of programmers who are BOTH college/uni-educated AND learnt it all on their own. What I mean is one of their previous employers/clients (perhaps their first) have them on file as having some CS/SE credential, while others (including their current one) have them listed as self-educated. Perhaps they told one employer their major was computing, but their current client thinks their major was business.

One way to recognize these frauds is whether they list their credentials online. They may write online that you don't need qualifications to be a good programmer, which is true, but they won't actually say they don't have any credentials because that's not what they've told their previous employers and they don't want to be exposed.

When there's 2 people giving presentations, one lists their PhD from a certain university and the other only lists some IT groups they run, I know which one I'll pay more attention to.
Pa Wine Stores Highly Rated Wine
City Wine Cellars offer highly rated wine which includes all famous brands, provides wine shipping services to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and New York & to all other famous cities of USA.
Check out this nascent effort: http://unhosted.org/
Upvoted it for (1) a great pre-sell pitch (2) established communication channel with its target customer (3) open up opportunities for future engagement.

Excellent!
AMD Announces Radeon HD 6790
"... 'm running a new startup where I'm building augmented reality displays ..."

Are they as good as or approach EyeTap (Steve Mann)? ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeTap
What about pumping up the prices somewhat (so you have room to give discounts), listing a base price, and then saying something about calling to outline a specific situation and seeing which discounts apply? Add in a few testimonials about people being glad they called, etc.

That way you give people a ballpark price (while they're doing preliminary research), give people a real motivation to call, and still give yourself wriggle room.

I like companies who list pricing and generally avoid enquiring otherwise, probably because of two reasons; [1] embarrassed if it's going to be way over my budget, [2] may just be doing early research and don't want a sales guy following me up every week afterwards.

If that is true for others also, you could easily add wording/checkbox to opt-out of follow-ups or outline that people just running early budgets are welcome to call too.
Creepy iPhone bug: front facing camera takes pictures by itself.
This doesn't answer your question but I thought I would weight in regarding your opposition to buying the Macbook Air. I bought a 13" Air when the latest revision came out and it's by far the best laptop I've ever used. Even though I use OSX on it most of the time, because it suits my work, the form factor is what sold me on the device. I wouldn't hesitate to buy one to run Linux or even Windows full time on it. My only concern would be the trackpad behavior, but the machine is so good I'd write my own driver for Linux if I had to.

Apple does a fantastic job of putting hardware of moderate specs in a better package than others. The device just feels better in your hands. It's almost intangible but no matter what OS you're using its a joy to use. Perhaps you don't feel the same way, but I think its worth keeping an open mind, especially if money is not an object.

This post probably comes off as yet another fan boy, but I hope it doesn't. A few years ago I wouldn't even consider Apple, but I finally had enough of the cheap plastic crap that vendors insist on shoving down our throats.
Brawny cores still beat wimpy cores, most of the time [PDF]
waterhouse, thank you very much for taking the time to explain. This is exactly what I was looking for: a detailed explanation that offers a fresh perspective from my current one and explores various scenarios. Thank you.
This also has the flavor of Warren Buffet's investing in 'boring businesses'. I think it is better to make something low-profile with higher likelihood of success. Bingo card creator is a good example. It takes out a lot of variables such as luck, connections, and timing.

There are plenty of places that you can choose your competition wisely. I would rather compete against a ma-and-pa than a fleet of the brightest engineers battling for space in the new fad market.

I guess it depends somewhat on if you are looking for f-you type money or something else. If I were to compete in a hard market, I would definitely go with the let the market move to me approach.
Mozilla shames developers with list of slow performing Firefox add-ons
Getting this master degree from the Open University would require you to fly to europe/uk to sit your exams. They let you study online but you must take the exams at one of their regional centers. They don't have one of those outside of europe
They do make 100k a year but typically after moving abroad. In my anecdotal experience, 90% of the "great" Nepali sw engineers emigrate. I do think you will see some move back and take high-paying contract work w/ them to Nepal. However, this depends on whether Nepal's political/economic climate stabilizes. By all accounts, the current situation is a mess and worsening.
NSArray/NSMutableArray are class clusters - meaning that upon allocation/initialization they choose between many classes (and it might swizzle the class pointer to be of type NSArray/NSMutableArray, I can't remember).

What's interesting to me is that this uses the standard Objective-C [[class alloc] init] mechanism, which is more intuitive than using a nonstandard class method (because in most other languages new will only allocate one class). When you look at Apple's (NeXTStep's) APIs, there's a lot of evidence of thought in the design process there.
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The different viruses are program viruses, adware, spyware, trojan horses, and many more. Each virus is different and varies with the target places and the damage.
This is great, thank you!

Took me a while to figure out how to get signed in with instapaper... Turns out it's in the Settings app. I wish Apple provided an API to link from an app to its settings page, and back to the app from the settings.
I know of affiliate links but there may be others, as well.
That is amazing data-- thanks. Are those at the .99 cent price point? Or higher?

(grats on the success, by the way)
Would someone who quit school at 16 with A-grade experience catch your eye more than a postgraduate with C-grade experience?
Emotiv EPOC EEG Headset Hacked: An Interview with Cody Brocious
the homeless?
If you were to make an HN/Reddit/etc clone (for a niche)... 
... what would you use? What language/framework, what database, what hosting (dedicated servers, cloud?), etc?

Reason I ask: I'm "just another" web guy, dabbled in a bit of everything, but never really became an expert in any single technology or language. I'm the webmaster for a large corporation, managing their enterprise CMS, in-house graphic design, landing pages, email campaigns, content writing, etc. Eg, "a little bit of everything".

I want to get a bit more into the development/site-building side of things, maybe build my own little startup. I've got a niche that could definitely do with a dedicated HN/Reddit style link-sharing/commenting site, and lots of other ideas but since this is more about the learning than the actual end product, i'm interested in what HN thinks is the "best" solution for these types of sites, so I can start from scratch and learn it all properly (i'm willing to do courses etc, I just need a direction).

I've been stuck in this "Where do I start, what should I learn, what should I use?" rut for 6 months now.
There are much more effective ways of educating the world without charging thousands of dollars and handing out degrees (e.g. MIT's OCW program).
"The fundamental problem is scarcity"

Is it? I think distribution is more the issue. We shouldn't underestimate the paralyzing impact pervasive bureaucracy and corruption can have on an economy.
interesting as I didn't know who http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daeken is & relates to this thread ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2410776#score_2410776
A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway.

Well you get older and fear change a bit more, and you tend to say "no" to more things, but that's not really a management skill.
Piet Program Gallery
iTunes RSS feed + data interpolation between individual categories.
Then, Amazon actually started doing business inside of these states in the form of affiliate programs and warehouses. It is on these two points that the fight is being contested

When I was involved with on-line retail, the existence of a warehouse in a state constituted having a presence in the state. We had a warehouse in NJ that we shipped from, and that was the only state we had to collect sales tax for. We delayed opening another warehouse because of the sales tax implications, but finally opened up up in NV in order to reduce shipping time and cost to the west coast. We only had to collect sales tax for those two states (I know because I wrote the code for it).

Now, from what I understand, Amazon tries to get around even that by having their warehouses owned/run by a subsidiary or other entity that is not strictly Amazon but ships Amazon's items to other states (not to the state itself, otherwise this sub-company would have to collect and pay sales tax). Strictly speaking, Amazon still doesn't have a presence in the state in terms of warehouses, so until the state laws are changed to recognize these shipping/warehousing-only companies as one and the same as Amazon, there's still no sales tax to collect on a pure existence-of-business-entity in the state in the form of a warehouse. Amazon effectively outsources their warehousing and shipping to other companies -- this is actually pretty common (along with drop-shipping) in the mailorder business because running a warehouse is an expensive, capital intensive operation.

Affiliate programs are outsourced services also, outsourced marketing (lead generation). Really, this comes down to an attempt to tax outsourced operations. Maybe a better way for the states to fight it is to change the zoning and the tax laws so that warehouses are taxed more aggressively (especially if they ship things out of state -- warehouses that ship intrastate would have to collect sales tax, warehouses that ship interstate would pay higher business or property taxes).

IANAL and IANA-Tax-Collector.
This is an interesting comment because it may determine if DuckDuckGo (DDG) can remain true to its privacy goals given that the privacy feature was not part of its goal initially compared to say 'offering structured content'.
E.g., if privacy-conscious users started using DDG thus enabling DDG to reach critical mass attracting buyouts, huge advertising dollars for it's structured content, will DDG cave-in and ditch privacy?
> Remember, most of the time the LHC isn't actually colliding,

Huh? I'm pretty sure the LHC is designed to spend >50% of it's time colliding. Lately they've had to spend more downtime upgrading the machine because it's been finicky, but this if definitely hurting the project. The decisions about what risks to take and how much downtime to allow are hugely contested.

> The bottle-neck for LHC isn't how many collisions it can throw up...

The number of collisions is definitely a bottleneck. Yes, to some extent you can make up for a small data set by throwing more grad-students at the data to create a more clever analysis, but that really doesn't take you far. Searches for most major new physics scenarios have very well-defined minimum amounts of data. If the requisite amount of data isn'y taken in the LHC's 1-2 decade lifetime (because of delays/budget/whatever), and another accelerator isn't built, then we simply won't be able to evaluate that scenario.
so I went back to the default player for the lock screen integration

The default music player on my nexus one running 2.3.3 doesn't have lock screen integration, and as far as I remember from my G1, the default player never has (the app doesn't even have a preferences/options screen). A friend recommended doubleTwist to me, however, which does have a lock screen overlay for music control.
The problem with "when hungry, eat", is that hunger is not really a good indicator for sustenance needs for humans. Living in western countries, we are surrounded by easily obtainable and addictive foods and nutrients. If we let hunger control our eating, especially in this kind of environment, most people tend to over-eat. Combined with recent results that caloric restriction and potentially intermittent fasting may be very healthy choices, I think it might be likely that hunger is really a maladaptation in modern society.

I do fully agree with the part "When tired, sleep". Unfortunately it is very hard to apply if I also want to maintain a working home-life with a significant other that has a different sleep-pattern.
My lowest priced paid app is 2.99, but it doesn't affect the figures in any way. Overall paid counts individual sales only. Top grossing factors in the price.
Software firm wants naked web coders
"... So, what is identity? I think in its most basic form, your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others' access to that attention. ..."

Attention is a bit hard to quantify. A more concrete definition of identity is the combination of an email address & a nickname ~ http://seldomlogical.com/2009/08/20/digital-doppelgangers
> Is there a reason besides lack of funds for shutting this place down?

It's always a trade-off between money and physics results. The question is: is the cost of running the Tevatron worth the information it will give you about the few physics questions where it has an advantage over the LHC? Would that money be better spent on other experiments (e.g. direct dark matter detection)?
The tech in use is derived from Eyetap designs. I've been waiting for someone to bring the tech to market for a decade now and decided not to wait anymore.
Well, there's at least one thing that's missing from this degree program which is a core part of the Harvard traditional degree system -- strenuous admission requirements and filtering.
> because in most other languages new will only allocate one class

Now that's simply not true.

In C++-derived languages it will (and mandates that a new object be created to boot), and C++-derived languages are the most common for Enterprise Programming, but that's a far cry from "most other languages".
You could always use Arc :)

Code: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

Instructions: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/how-to-run-news
Maybe you would like to take a look at the source code of HN: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar
Hmm.. This is depressing. I am thinking of learning to program, just to make interesting(perhaps sell-able) iOS/Android applications.

Any good math books you can recommend, for people who are genuinely scared of complicated equations? And without losing my day job(graphics designer).
Gotcha-- I saw "1200 sales/day" and assumed it meant you sold 1200 units. Is that $1200?
> risk aversion

Yes. In the West, it's your ideas that fail; out in the East, it's you who fail.

One word answer; culture.
Why not link to the original article ( http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto040120111... ) instead of blogspamming???
As a current college student I can tell you that what you are saying is an exaggeration. A small subset of Linear Algebra is required for graphics . I took linear algebra in first year of college and forgot almost all of it by the time I took a second year graphics, needless to say I had no problem picking up the concepts in a weekend from scratch. The amount of LA required is a very very small subset compared to all the crap you do in a full blown LA course.

Most students in the CS program hate math and CS theory courses. Subjects like Algorithm Analysis, Discrete Math, Automata Theory which often get cited as examples of stuff that self-taught programmers might not know are boring and annoying. Almost every student in the department dreads these courses but has to hold his/her nose and take them to fulfill the degree requirement and most people promptly forget these courses after passing the exam unless they have real interest in the topic and are taking fourth year electives in the subject. To be honest I don't think the self-taught programmers are missing anything.

And congratulations for digging up a use case for Calculus in CS. I can site examples of CS fields where say Cognitive Psychology has huge influence. The fact still remains that it is completely irrelevant to most of CS unless you are interesting in that one obscure area (in which case more power to you).
This seems to require user to upload files to their server manually? Seems like it's more like an asset management/approval tool?
yes, so there'd be NSArray and NSImmutableArray
A Corporate Campus Made to Mirror Facebook
I used a mechanism that was outlined in the syllabus. My understanding is that the syllabus is a legally binding contract, so no.

I'm not going into any more detail than that. I'm sure you didn't mean any harm by it, but it creeps me out a little when internet strangers start asking for information about how I could hypothetically be sued. I'm not a lawyer, and I'd rather not be surprised to discover there was some wacky clause of a law I wasn't aware of.
Microscopic black holes have been theorized as power sources for starships. The Hawking radiation becomes more intense, the smaller the black hole is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship
The surprising thing about high-energy-frontier accelerators is that, for the most part, groups aren't competing for beam time like they are at many other types of particle physics experiments. Roughly, they just hit the "Go" button on the machine, and collect data continuously. This data is then distributed to thousands of grad students, who sift through it looking for a million possible signals.

There is a caveat that the LHC does some heavy-ion collisions (the ALICE experiment), which takes about a month away from normal proton-proton collisions, but this isn't a big deal. I'm not sure about the Tevatron, but I don't think they have any other experiments besides D0 and CDF which could justify the operating expense.
There's a lot that happens behind the scenes of a modern graphics API. For example, issuing a draw call may cause the driver to incur a flush of accumulated state changes, patch an existing shader, or even trigger a shader re-compile. Cutting down on what happens behind the scenes will allow developers to issue more draw calls within the same time and put more objects on the screen.

DirectX 9 had a similar problem of expensive draw calls but it was compounded by drivers living in kernel-space requiring an expensive context switch when draw calls were issued.
Can you do this from the US as a non-EU/UK citizen/resident? This is quite fascinating.
Check out Gridiron Flow - it has built-in version control as well as a bunch of other cool features for digital asset management for designers.

http://www.gridironsoftware.com/products

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/visual-versioning-how-a-demo...
OK, you have a point: the homeless do get some benefit from City services. Though even that system is broken. I pass by several homeless people lying in the doorways every day.
Viruses are really a matter of computer action given user intent—and therefore are able to be solved not just by detection of incongruous computer action, but also by detection of incongruous user intent.

For example, imagine that instead of WIMP, all interactions with a computer occurred through a hierarchical, task-based UI (similar to, e.g., emacs org-mode) where you had to specify a high-level goal you wanted to accomplish before you could set about running programs to do it. If the computer knows that what you want to get done doesn't involve deleting files, then any program you run that does delete files has either been executed in error, or is acting not according to the user's command.
Short answer: Use anything, it doesn't matter. All the major languages have good web frameworks these days.

Long answer: You will find comparisons between Rails, Django, ASP.NET MVC and a hundred other web frameworks all over the net. While some of the web frameworks are more elegant and mature compared to others, all of them are constantly evolving and growing. Your choice should depend on your core language skills. Which language are you comfortable in? Which language do you want to be coding in for a long time and possibly make a career in?

My suggestion would be to pick Python. There are plenty of hosting options for Python and Django. Have a look at http://code.google.com/appengine/
Based on my quick reading* of the mongoid_search code it looks like it is using a regex query against the keywords array which requires a full scan over the index. In fact the way it is being done is probably far less efficient than just doing a normal regex table scan without the keyword array. If you were to modify the search method to do a normal string query (maybe using $in for OR and $all for AND) you should get much better performance.

*Ruby isn't my native language so I may be missing something.
it was a joke :-(
If it turns out that one of the installed apps was taking pictures without the user's knowledge, then that's one reason to like the permissions that Android shows you for every app you install: No app can take a picture without requesting the proper camera permissions, and I'm not going to install a game or a music player that requests camera permissions (or anything else totally unnecessary). (For those who don't know, the list of permissions an app requests is presented to you before you install any app.)

iPhone/iPod/iPad users can correct me if I'm wrong and iOS pops up some kind of warning when an app turns on the camera -- I know it pops up a warning under some circumstances at least.
Like it or not, part of the value of a Harvard degree is the signaling effect it carries. The signaling effect is, in large part, due to the selectivity of the school and the coursework.

Put more directly... if the extension school has a 10x higher acceptance rate and has easier classes, then it is probably diluting the signaling effect a bit.
Mirah, an expressive JVM language
I never made any claims and didn't demand the attention of others, the onus isn't upon me to prove anything if I haven't claimed anything.

If you must know, I'm a software engineer at an early-stage startup in SF.
I'm beginning to feel like a broken record saying this, but it's possible to get a browser-recognised certificate for free, for example from http://www.startssl.com/ (yes, their web site design is straight out of 2001, but it works).
Too bad you require a relocation. I could so rock this, but I refuse to live in California anymore.