skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I glanced around and didn't see it, even though I loaded the wiki's MainPage. Nonetheless, I don't really have much motivation to download a PDF in the first place, but having done so, I don't have enough motivation to try to read this 58-page white paper just to find out the basics of how this works. They need to write an executive summary and a basic overview of its mechanisms, totaling <= 5 pages tops. It's totally unrealistic to expect people to 1) find your obscure links, 2) download a PDF or other external resource to learn anything about your product, and 3) sit down and read a 58-page white paper as an introduction. If someone is really interested in technical details because they're considering development on the project, or something like that, then this is reasonable, but not for people that you expect to be users.
I think the more interesting question is which companies make the most money per product.

Apple has 30ish products.

Google is hard to count, because they have a lot of "stuff", but it all could be said to support AdWords. I think that is too lenient of an interpretation. It seems more like AdWords is the Google currency inside of their product ecosystem.

Red Bull as four (according to another post).

Others, especially outside of tech?
I'm saying don't have your phone or other device be your only repository of important data when you cross a border. I'm not even talking about privacy, just access to your own data.
Chinawood - The World's Biggest Outdoor Film Studio
At it's peak... over 700 I think. ppc/lead gen/affiliates mostly.
There are cloud storage providers doing this. See for instance the tarsnap.com solution. Data is stored but with a key in your end. In other words, it is cloud storage done right.
I don't agree that he should give the app for free. I'd like to pay to support his efforts but 5 bucks is simply too much for this app.
The whitepaper is an interesting read. The "large data throughput" bullet-point is justified by the claim that no intermediary forwarding node has any idea whether it's talking to another intermediary node or the one of the actual endpoints. So once you have a buzzing network of anonymized nodes with large volumes of anonymous traffic, you can open up a direct connection to your buddy and transfer at high speed. Later, you can claim with "reasonable doubt" that you couldn't have possibly known whether or not they were a forwarding node or an endpoint in that conversation. (You can also claim that you didn't know whether or not YOU were a forwarding node!) This seems reasonable to me so long as you're transferring at a rate comparable to the average throughput, though I'm not sure how you could determine that.

Well, I'm not really familiar with this sort of distributed scheme, so that might be old hat, insanely insecure, or what have you.
bloody hell, Zed beat me to the punchline in the first words of the announcement.

Well done all around.
Codemod (tool to assist with large-scale refactoring)
Kind of a wild guess, but I could see linkedin having a big growth path in rapidly-growing countries that are adding millions and millions of people to the professional class. (China, India, Brazil)
The problem is that Stallman shoehorned that political philosophy into the free software movement as the only legitimate means of providing software to users. We can discuss the socioeconomic ramifications and the idealized world all we want, but the fact is that if you want computer users to be able to access and modify the source of the programs they use, you have to accommodate people who are out to make a profit at least until some external forces create an economic condition where its feasible to not want any profit.

I have non-mainstream economic and political views too that involve the principles you're talking about, but is Free Software a movement about software or reshaping politics? It's nice to conflate the two and spread philosophy through the GPL to the extent that you can, but it's also nice to know what you're computer is doing and to be free to change it. One goal at a time.
Hacker News is not an advertisement platform. Please stop posting the same thing over and over.

If nobody comments on them, perhaps you need to take part in the community for a while to see what is and is not acceptable here. You're account is only 17 hours old, you have posted no comments and already you have submitted the same site four times.
From the page [emphasis mine]

> Why does news:yc cost $4.99? Isn't that too much for something already available online? Yes, it probably is. This is my first app in the App Store. I've never done this kind of pricing before, and I probably got it wrong. However, I do want to make sure anyone who wants to use news:yc can: feel free to build it from source or pirate it if you don't want to pay.

Love this. I really wish this candor was the rule, not the exception. I'm buying the app right away.
Having chewed coca leaves quite a bit travelling through Bolivia and Peru I can say the effects are generally quite mild. Done correctly with a small rock of compressed ash (usually from banana peels) your mouth and throat will numb and you will have a slight "buzz". It helps with altitude sickness a bit, but nowhere near as helpful as plenty of rest, water, and time.
I disagree. I have personally known physically disabled individuals who are excellent programmers yet are physically incapable of playing musical instruments.
I use every mathematics and physics course I took until part way into my undergraduate studies on a daily basis.

I think this highlights an issue I have with the meme that with a major in math, you can do anything. What you can do with a math degree still depends on what you learn aside from pure math (essentially domain knowledge), be it in elective coursework or on your own. "You can be a physicist"? Yes, I could if I'd studied physics more. I would strongly advise other math majors to take a minor or a second major (my other major was CS, where the math background definitely helps, and it would be nice to have even more).
I wonder what Bob Harper has to say about it: http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/some-advice-...
curious, how many downloads have you got so far?
I know, but I don't seem to have the same physical reaction to it
Cheers. A tweetie-esque HN app is a great idea. I'll gladly put down $5 to help keep a promising high-schooler motivated and building cool stuff. Shame on you guys for trying to pressure him to change his price.
And I like you're approach of "well it's $5 in the app store but here's the source if you want to build it, fork it, and/or install it yourself for free." Jason Fried would be proud of your pricing (ha!).
Keep building. Good luck.
#downloaded
Better yet, get rid of general purpose computing for civilians altogether. That's one reason I support Android; if most people end up on locked down platforms like iOS or WP7, it becomes much easier to pass and enforce draconian laws. Remember the CBDTPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_...)? It would actually be feasible if everyone were using iPads.
As someone who has spent a lot of time on laptops the past years, I consider getting a desktop because of the ergonomic qualities. I find it delightful whenever I get to type on a full-sized desktop keyboard these days. I might even try one of the ergonomic keyboards.
Introducing the GroupMe Client Library at TC Disrupt
I'm pretty sure anyone with a BS in math can get a decent programming and/or finance job.
jplayer.org is your friend :)
That's a great find. The first quote I feel directly related to the Software Dev explosion since it is so hard to find a good programmer. I feel the reason is deeply rooted in sucky education, and a lack of mentors.
Were this in any other context - an inane weekend project, or faux start-up that is just a website - as we've seen a billion times before, people would spout the same mantras about charging from the start, hustling, going for it, and what not.

I don't know if people are making a fuzz because it's about Hacker News, or if they just don't believe the mantra they keep repeating, when they finally have put their money where their mouth is.

Charging for this app means the developer's time is valuable; releasing it for free would suggest that s/he does it to get a job. It also means that traction will let the developer improve the app over time to the benefit of people who subscribe to the idea.

I am perfectly open to a discussing on pricing it 2.99 instead of 4.99, but I can't be bothered by the outcries to make it free.

EDIT: I just saw that the developer even released the source code on GitHub. That's about as good as it can get.
A Guide to Normal Cholesterol Levels | NORMAL CHOLESTEROL LEVELS
Unclear. MIT's introductory CS course used to be taught in Scheme, which in many ways was a grand leveler because people who knew how to program imperative languages had to un-learn many things first. It was still considered quite a hard class.

In the new world order, we have 6.00, which is a "learn how to program" class which is not required for computer science majors (and which many non-6 majors take), and 6.01/6.02, which is the introductory sequence that everyone is required to take. The programming segments of these classes are still relatively trivial for someone with a reasonable amount of programming experience. (But I’ll also note the cover a very broad range of topics, and you’re bound to not know some of the other topics, e.g. EE)
Very true although I think in spirit with the general tune around HN it might make sense to say "Yes but pay $4.99 if you want me to sustain development" which I think is reasonable (and something I need to do more of).
The value is in an interface for HN that actually makes
sense for an iPhone:

The UI is making me think about making my own. Comments threads are not convenient to read.
In particular, I believe that expecting a student to learn to program well enough to study Computer Science in a single 15-week course is almost as absurd as expecting a student with no instrumental musical experience to be ready to join the university orchestra after 15 weeks.

I was a TA for CS 101 and 102 for a couple of years. I think I taught almost no one to program. The result (in terms of actual programming) would've been the same, had I just given everyone software and books and said, "have at it!"

As it was, I was just putting people through the motions of being in a college course.
I would like to see not just an easy way to select an SSD but also RAID configurations for high IOPs and to automatically get a ballpark price for an entire storage subsystem.
There is a huge gap between high school and college curriculum for many subjects. There is a huge gap between colleges and their curriculum, too.

There are no standards in education with regard to curriculum.
Obviously not. Someone at the investment bank pulled a price out of their ass, which was what the shares were initially quoted at. They subsequently rose a great deal on the actual market.

I'm not a market "fundamentalist", but they're an awfully good way of pricing things in many circumstances compared to the central planning approach of having several experts decided on a price.

I'm no economist, but I'm sure a clever one could find a good way to auction off IPO shares to get the best deal possible for the company.
I think the grandparent was referring to the theory that bankers may intentionally underprice the issue so that they could extract some of the benefit from the underpricing.

So for example, in the case of LinkedIn, the theory is that the bankers knew that the shares could go for 100% higher price than the IPO price and sold those shares to their buddies at a much lower price with the understanding that their buddies would pay them back a percentage of the money they make flipping the shares by doing various other business with the banks.

Of course none of this is proven, but it is a theory many serious people have.
Regardless of how they're scaring them off, they're hurting themselves quite directly far more than the diffuse effect on the applicant pool.

Definitely true.

Are we looking for competitive, dominant nurses and compassionate, caring enterprise sales staff?

The range of problems you can solve increases exponentially with the different types of people you have on the team. The types you mention would be a good addition to a team with complementary attributes.
I've seen absolutely disastrous code from people with advanced math degrees. There were major maintenance problems. (A huge OO subsystem, with no instance methods at all!)
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And to follow up, really nice work. My favorite HN reader so far.
Comments:
- Would be nice to skip through the comments and go straight to the article
- $4.99 is the right price. I spent $2.99 on the "offline HN reader" and another one and this makes me regret ever buying those others.

Again to the price-haters: $5 a pop to help keep a hs kid from flipping burgers or mowing lawns this summer and keep him doing something that matters (and something he's shown to be pretty kickass at so early in his life)? Worth it.
I'll ask the question that nobody else is crass enough to: Assuming I order and pay, what are the chances that I get a pill delivered to me that gives me an erection?
I don't mind people not wanting to spend $5 on something if they don't [for whatever reason] feel it's worth it... but I sure don't care to see them whine about it, either.
> Does anyone have any reason to think it's bigger than that?

The revenue per paying customer is high, but their conversion rate is low. When the economy picks up again and companies start hiring I can see both of these numbers improving

They currently only capture about 2-3% of the US job search market

They are not yet a mature company, they are still pouring all revenue into sales and marketing, R&D and dev - I think they will only be more mature and start showing the expected 35-40% net in 3-4 years time

They are still only 60% USA and 40% international - a lot of overseas growth to work out

$400M this year, I can see them eventually start leveling out at ~$4-5B a year in revenue where they will have to start coming up with new streams - which is certainly possible.

They could completely wipe out Monster and the others if the next few years work out well

They have a very good brand and large social network and have only really focused on monetizing the job search portion of it to date - there are many other apps that they can layer onto their platform (and they should open up that platform to others who want to build out ontop - I am surprised they haven't)

I think the risk of them not growing into the current price are pretty low. They can show 3 years now of double-or-more revenue growth and exceeding targets.

I can't see any of their competitors grabbing the market that they currently have and the market they are moving into. The LinkedIn brand is strong and if you talk to people the experience of recruiting through it is apparently brilliant. The only problem may be Xing and others in Europe

This IPO is a huge marketing event that will see a one-off big spike in numbers again. Everybody is talking about LinkedIn at the moment - I dug up my old account which I hadn't logged into for 3 years. I must assume that many others are doing the same. They have never had this much press and the marketing value of the IPO must be in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions

I wouldn't short them - no way. I wouldn't buy at this point either - but I can see them becoming a ~$15B company on $500M net and $1.5B revenue company in ~3 years. Their growth and multiples will start tailing back at that point
then buy another kindle.
I used this when it was in beta, and it's really really nice. I can't wait for iPad support!
Reserve your place at the MathsJam
Tons of political problems have been solved in the past†. If politics were incapable of solving problems society wouldn’t exist.

It’s just that you can’t go about solving political problems like you would go about solving engineering problems. That’s all.

†A few examples of relatively targeted efforts to achieve set political goals:

- Women’s suffrage in the UK and other countries

- Abolishment of the death penalty in France and other countries

- The civil rights movement in the US

Those are all high-profile examples but solving problems in a way that doesn’t cause chaos or disasters is one of the core tasks of any political system.
No kidding, most people use actual phone books or their mobile phone equivalent.

The key difference between phone numbers and URLs is that everyone recognises that phone numbers exist, or at least know they're meaningful.
Yeah, we own em all. I've thought about the auction route but I'm exclusively a frontend kind of guy and nobody else is very technical, so I'm not sure how I'd be able to implement it. We just ended up going with Shopify since we thought it offered the easiest plug and play solution for us. Plus we're entered in their massive build a business contest. I definitely agree that some of the names could fetch a higher value if they were auction based, but honestly we're just happy to help other entrepreneurs by offering an alternative to CellPhones4U.ly type domains.
I hope that using CLI will actually give better results (on top of being easier to test!) as this allows for testing just PHP - ignoring the whole stack.
To mitigate testing using just "wall clock", I repeat tests hundreds of times and then drop 50% slowest results. At the end I calculate the average and standard deviation. I review standard deviation values to spot any weird results.
I also try to make sure that the machines that are running the tests are as good as they can: they don't run any GUI, all services including cron are disabled, I run the same test at different hours, etc.
Thanks for making the source code available (https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/)!
Points are currently prioritized over replies, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that points are private and you're not displaying the contents of a threaded comment in the root article display page. Seems like those two things (points and replies) should be switched, and more attention should be paid to letting the user know a comment has replies.

Good start though, I've been enjoying browsing HN on it since seeing the news go up.
The Great Switch by the Super Rich
NASA hires a story teller to tell their 50 year story.

His story about Armstrong's moon landing was compelling, but I connected more with the one about Casals and the young cellist. Casals asks the cellist to play this and that, the cellist is mortified at his mistakes, and mentions the evening to Casals years later.

Casals tells the now more experienced cellist that he wasn't noticing the mistakes, he was noticing the things he did right and the things he did remarkably. Only idiots point out nothing but mistakes, it's up to us to notice and celebrate the beauty.

This has been a lesson for me that I've been learning for years, slowly, that when I see a story or some other creation, appreciate it first for the intent and sincerity. If the context requires it, then certainly provide constructive criticism, but don't let the criticism hide the essence.
Wish there were an iPad version of this... Hacker News HD crashes a lot on mine, and I'd be willing to pay $4.99 for a nice interface with cacheing.
I'm using it right now and I like it a lot.

Instapaper integration is handy, but I'd like to be able to bookmark conversations, so I can go back and see new comments.
That doesn't quite work, because if you open direct links to that friend on a regular basis, someone's going to notice that it's not really random.
I hate to be that guy but:

"megaton |ˈmegəˌtən|

noun

a unit of explosive power chiefly used for nuclear weapons, equivalent to one million tons of TNT"
WeUseMath, so do I
Can some one explain how this protocol compensates for DNS level blocking ?
The Four Steps to the Epiphany is Now in French
Maybe, just maybe, they don't have an obligation to cater to your expectations of how they must describe their network. Maybe the people they're trying to reach are happy with a white paper. Maybe they're not great writers, designers or marketers and would rather spend their time working on their product.
The success of Red Bull defies logic in one important regard: It doesn't taste very good.

That's like saying beer, oysters, caviar, or Coca Cola don't taste very good - it's entirely subjective. I like the taste of Red Bull a great deal and I'm fussy.
The University of Minnesota's introductory computer science course for majors is still a Scheme course based on the SICP book.

http://www.cs.umn.edu/academics/undergraduate/class_desc/csc...
Ask HN: How many employees before you can call yourself CE0 & not sound foolish?
Surely 0 doesn't count.
Free Vs. Paid (Iphone)HN Access? I dont think its fair for people to Poo-Poo on outcries of making it free. To be fair, HN now is freely accessible, and a part of me cringes at the notion of charging folks for an "iphone-wrapper" (pardon the term) to free HN community content.

Though, it is commendable that great effort has been put forth by the developer/mastermind of the app -- and certainly that should also be rewarded. (cool points for putting it on GitHub)

Perhaps, something in between? Tip Jar; or KickStarter or Ads? I dont know. It would be interesting to see what kind of revenue and overall reception the app and developer gets! (would love to see a 'post-launch' write up)
Well, being that it only runs on a legacy OS...

Seriously, though, isn't 9 current and 10 expected soon?
Uninformed hn users decide, of course.
New Patent from Apple Introduces Platform Independent Word Processor
As important as this is, I know people whose lives are so consumed by their quest for immortality that they go without much of what makes life worth living.

This is a synopsis of a short story by Larry Niven.
Nice work - just installed it. I would sorta agree with everybody else and say lower the price - $1 or $2 is "dont even think about the price" range whereas atm seems most of the conversation is about the price being high

Edit: thanks for putting the code up. let us all know how this works out in terms of numbers etc. if you can
That S-expressions can/often contain code doesn't make them more complicated when used for data only. Anything can contain code.
Maybe, and that's fine. I'm just trying to help set expectations and comment generally on why this kind of thing is a bad idea if you want to attract users. Most people are not going to read 58 pages to learn about how this works; that should be obvious even to bad marketers. If they don't care and only want users that cared enough to read the white paper (or were careless enough to use the network with almost no technical detail), that's their prerogative and they're welcome to it. :)
Ask HN: Would/do you pay for an uptime service?
I'm working on an idea for an improved uptime system that only charges you when your site goes down. Is this something that you'd be interested in paying for? It would be tied to your paypal account and if your site went down and was validated to have gone down by 2 or more of our servers on different networks you would be charged a fairly small amount (say a $1).

Would you pay for this, if not, why?

Thanks in advance!
I've seen loads of two person companies with a CEO title. And even single person startups with 0 employees sometimes have a CEO. If I were you, I'd get less hung up on titles and just get to work :P
Good. IE9’s failings are annoying but not nearly as annoying as IE8's.
I have to say, that http://ihackernews.com/ is pretty snazy! I wonder why people dont just put a "home" icon button thing.