skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How should I sell my software?
I've been running a side-business selling end-user software for the last five years. Sales are a bit too variable to rely on as a full-time job, but it certainly pays some of my bills. Unfortunately, it feels like the company I use to process sales is stuck in the dark ages.

Firstly, I feel like they are ripping me off with high commission rates (6.9% + $1). My conversion rate has dropped through the floor over the last few months and customers have emailed me saying that the billing pages won't load, etc. The last straw was a missing wire transfer of my payments from the service. I have no problem paying someone a cut of my sales to deal with this, but they need to make it worth it for me by making sure that I never lose customers because the cart fails.

FWIW, the big players are out for me I think. I'm scared to do things over PayPal - I couldn't afford to deal with the time and hassle of a frozen account. Google Checkout won't let me sell from my country.

Any suggestions for places to move my business? There are a number of new payment startups that have appeared and I feel like there must be a better way to sell this software.

[apologies for the throwaway -- it's my side business]
I'm surprised that he doesn't start trying to capture the Android market.
Their goal is to protect Windows from the competition. Providing proprietary hooks that cannot be easily duplicated elsewhere is their most likely strategy.
SearchYC is back online
I miss the "small town mentality in a big city" aspect of NYC too, though there are some gems in SF if you are lucky enough to find them. I hit a quiet, local, wifi-enabled cafe almost every day and the owners know my name & order preferences now. I don't pay on credit, but I've seen them do that with other regulars.

They're not open 24/7 though. I miss being able to grab a pizza at 3am in NYC.
Rihanna | Man Down Video HD
Speaking from Australia, I'll assume that at least iinet will have it on their cap-less servers to download. For example most major Steam games are and don't count against the cap.
I'm guessing the music industry is looking at it the other way round.

Right now, the music industry doesn't see a cent from all the kids downloading 1000s of songs to their computer. With iCloud, they have a good chance of getting $30 a year (minus Apple's cut) from many of those same kids, who will still think they are ripping off The Man.
The best, easiest way to install the Instapaper bookmarklet was always to do it through the desktop browser and then rely on MobileMe to sync that to your iPad and iPhone. The problem was that not every iOS user was willing to throw down $99 a year for things like over-the-air bookmark synchronization.

Now that that syncing is going to be free and available to every user of iOS 5, the Instapaper bookmarklet installation process just got simpler, not harder.
Also:

Antler Notes vs. Stickies (System 7.5):

http://jens.mooseyard.com/1997/04/they-made-me-an-offer-i-co...
How true is loud music actually? Was it taking the beating of Starbucks to the next level, or they really want you to get out of their property asap?
I don't even have an iDevice, but I'm still a fan of Instapaper: about 50% of my Kindle usage is reading Instapapered versions of tech blog posts on the train.

In theory it automatically sends the articles every morning, although I've found that the automatic sending is a bit flaky. I would (as a matter of public record [1]) happily pay for the service if that feature were more reliable.

[1] http://twitter.com/#!/samstokes/status/77852689605726208
Ask HN : What do you think about my idea?
i am preparing to launch a website about for criticism in technology such as people can submit article to criticise x company for y issue .. they domain name will be www.techcriticism.com .. give me your opinion about my idea ?
What would really make this is split-screening instead of mirroring, with the device pushing one image to the tv while keeping another on the handheld. Then the iPhone/Pad could show a controller interface (like the lower screen on the DS) while the game proper was playing on the tv screen.
I'm not sure how that would work, for the hash to be the same you would need the original song right? If they use sha1 or something like that how are you going to go from hash to song?
So should Marco have tried to patent the Instapaper concept?
Yes, but Apple still nearly died before they got their act together. That kind of turnarounds are rare
This is kind of inevitable in any evolving platform . The best we can hope is open standards, that's why my bet is on web apps and better mobile browsers
Thank Zend Framework for that.
I'm sure it will be extended to countries other than Canada soon ;p In a way I'm proud that we get excluded from all these kind of things. Shows our current laws are hated by the MPAA/RIAA people.
Some of the most memorable business advice I've gotten is from a restaurant owner.

He told me stories about how he's had to declare bankruptcy twice (he's not proud of it and tried to avoid it, but ultimately had little choice); how he's had partners who nearly ruined the business; how he's had to deal with changes in accounting practices; how he's had to deal with "local issues" (such as police officers, nearby merchants, etc); how he's had to manage relatively uneducated employees to build them into an efficient team, etc.
I used to think that but Spree Commerce is pretty nice. And Rails, too.
Everything you need to know about this years WWDC [Summary]
Apple announced today at Moscone Center its next version of iOS, Mac OS X and its new iteration of cloud service called iCloud. And while Apple had already announced to what we will be hearing about at this years WWDC, we still did not know the exact features they would be disclosing.

A complete rundown of all announcements made at this years WWDC keynote (June 6) is as follows:
Three digits: http://i.imgur.com/kQSGr.png

And two: http://i.imgur.com/OaynE.png
Is iMessage missing something?
There's been quite a hubbub over iMessage basically competing against all the other group messaging apps that have come out recently but I can't help but completely miss the point of it (and other) apps. Am I missing the point that it does not do SMS? Or does it and they don't say that?

Seems to me that the perfect messaging app would be one that does all that the group ones do but also do it via SMS texting. Not everyone has an iPhone/Android/Smart/Feature phone. I believe the SMS market (no stats to prove this) is MUCH bigger and fail to see why no app also does SMS as well. Wait... one does. But it's on Windows Phone Mango. And they also have speak to text.
Palin's almost-unintelligible statement may allow some flexibility in interpretation, but only under the most generous parsing is she even close to being correct. Here's the quote as it appeared in the first place that google gave me:

>>>
"He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be taking away our arms by ringing those bells, and um, making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed,"
<<<

Her statement tells us almost nothing. She might as well have strung some random words together monty-python style, and we'd have been educated to nearly the same degree. What little is discernible, is simply wrong:

* He didn't ever warn the British that they couldn't disarm us. All accounts of his interrogation have him trying to bluff them away from the town by scaring them with the spectre of a mustered militia.

* He certainly didn't warn the British by "ringing those bells". Perhaps Palin thinks that he continued to ring bells while being interrogated.

* I don't recall any accounts of his ride that have him firing a musket into the air. Correct me if I'm wrong.

So far this is all rather superficial quibbling. But if we're to gloss over the petty revisionism and surmise a greater theme or point, Palin is still wrong. It's pretty clear that Palin wanted to somehow milk the Revere thing for a shoutout to the 2nd amendment. She wants the purpose of Revere's ride to be to tell the Brits that they can't get our guns. Perhaps she wants to believe that Paul Revere set out on his ride intending to be captured.

Personally, I don't pretend to be greatly offended by Palin's grammar and grasp of historical minutiae. What does offend me is the way she and her supporters talk in the aftermath. As though you think that petty, condescending weaselling with semantics can be taken as a serious defense by anybody who isn't already in the choir.
They already have it if you signed up for genius or whatever it's called.
> Apple's market cap is currently something like half-again as much as IBM's.

That's been true in recent years. But who would have thought it remotely possible before The Return of Steve in mid-1997? Before then (and for some time afterwards), many people regarded Apple as a zombie company.
There are quite common things which are impossible or rather clumsy to do with folders, for example produce a view by specific composers then a view by performers. Can not be done with folders unless suffer large amount of duplicates.

If you listen to your music in a rigid way where folders works fine then obviously iTunes and other music management software are of no use to you. But you are not typical.
Yay!!!!!! Missed you guys too much!
In terms of satisfying the technical demands of the form, yes. But creating a work with evocative punch like this poem has is more akin to composing a symphony.
if a project goes beyond a certain size, somebody has to be in charge. you could build, say, the Dallas Cowboys stadium, without a project manager who heads a project management office.

if your project is small enough that "everybody is in charge" and you've got the consensus to work that way you're not talking agile, you're talking magic... and you're going to be 3-10x as productive as a conventional "team"
I did answer the question: "the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful." Just like most other jobs.
Thanks for the edit. Sometimes context makes all the difference in the world. I deleted my other post that focused on the size of Sun.
I'm surprised they don't do something nifty with the x.com domain. I had some ideas when I was still there. Housing developer content seems pretty lame.
"And they’ll quickly find Instapaper in the App Store."

Until Apple pulls the plug on Instapaper. Let's hope that never happens.
Mac OS X Lion Server $50, encourages hobbyists
While overall mashable is correct the details of the article is bit off. I don't think training is the right word for what is happening. Consumers are only just beginning to see streaming music as a product and it takes time as expected for them to evaluate weather or not it is a a good deal. The article seams to have the idea that if we can just train users to pay for music again then the music industry will be profitable once more.

What Apple is doing is providing a new business model for selling music, this has long been said to be what the recoding industry needs to do to survive. Really Apple isn't even selling music is it selling organized, easy to listen to music. The idea that this will "reset" the music industry is absurd if reset means go back to paying anything close to $20 per album, or having to repurchase you music every decade. The price people are willing to pay for music has been falling for years, this new service puts the price at < 1 cent per song per year. I don't see this trend reversing anytime soon.
I'd say that the representation of numbers is an important part of math.

That said, I'd agree that decimal is not a particularly interesting part of math. For reals, continued fractions are probably the most interesting representation, and have nicer mathematical properties, at that.
It's not a nail int the coffin by any means but you would think it would make strategic sense for them to be making a concerted effort to get people using their service at a conference like WWDC ala Twitter/Foursquare... big missed opportunity to get influential people using their service.
Great, I read the same thing in Newsweek in that time frame.
Were you one of the first to become a millionaire by successfully applying the new model? The author matters just as much as the content.
"Capture a region of the screen
QuickTime Player lets you record part of the screen, such as a specific window. It’s perfect for creating a video tutorial of an application."

Don't think I've seen that mentioned elsewhere--relevant to the discussion on new OS features potentially replacing 3rd-party applications.

"OS X Lion includes a built-in restore partition, allowing you to repair or reinstall OS X without the need for discs."

Relevant to the install discussion.
if you can afford a mac, i guess you can afford saving 0.80 dollars a month for buying a $30 OS update every 2 years.
Boston University history professor Brendan McConville said, “Basically when Paul Revere was stopped by the British, he did say to them, ‘Look, there is a mobilization going on that you’ll be confronting,’ and the British are aware as they’re marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing — she was right about that — and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.”

Patrick Leehey of the Paul Revere House said Revere was probably bluffing his British captors, but reluctantly conceded that it could be construed as Revere warning the British.

http://bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1...

This is something of a reprise of the incident when Palin gave a Tea Party speech in front of a banner that read "1773". The Left jumped on it and said she was ignorant for not using a banner that said "1776", showing themselves ignorant of when the Boston Tea Party actually occurred.

All of this is perhaps besides the point though. I don't think Sarah Palin is qualified to be President and I hope she doesn't run. But Obama wasn't elected because he had anything decent qualifications. He's a Chicago political hack who stole Dem ballots from Hillary Clinton in Texas and who (literally) couldn't get a stop sign installed in Chicago. His "qualifications" are that he's black and many on the Left enjoyed the thought of themselves voting for a "person of color", never mind that his ancestors on both sides (especially his father's side) were slaveholders.
I know, and I think it's a funny one too....
I think marco is totally right that this can only help instapaper in the long run. Let me tell you a story from my own experience:

My partner and I created an iPad game for cats. We wanted to get some extra marketing boost so we contacted friskies (purina). In Nov (2010) I exchanged a few emails, and talked to them on the phone about our game. I sent them a video and they told us they loved the idea and they would get back to us. Then one day, silence. We didn't hear anything for months.

Then a couple weeks ago they released the Friskies "Games for Cats" which are suspiciously similar to our game. The blogosphere exploded. "Friskies releases creative iPad game for cats" "Friskies is oh so clever etc."

We were pissed. But sales improved. A lot.

I tried to track their rankings so I searched for them on the AppStore. Hmm, thats odd. I couldn't find them. It turns out /they didn't make native apps/ they were "simply" HTML5 pages on their website that you open in browser [1].

So what was/is happening is people see "Friskies iPad Game for Cats" they grab their iPad and search for "game for cats" on the AppStore and then they find our game and we profit.

Also, most people who have cats and iPads don't even think to look for a game for their cat. So by Friskies putting marketing into this they actually increase the size of the market (to be honest, I hope they run a TV commercial advertising their "ipad game for cats").

Moral #1 of the story is: BigCo might steal your idea, but they will likely mess it up and it can end up helping you.

Moral #2: high water raises all the boats

[1] I realized HTML5 is a "real" app, but most normals don't yet view it that way. They expect to find apps in an app store.

UPDATE: formatting
They've had prostores.com for quite some time and while it does have a good number of merchants using it, it's far from best-in-class. I would expect much of that to migrate over to Magento (and Magento Go) which is slightly better and more modern. But I don't think my expectations are that high.
Dropbox isn't unlimited either.
Agreed, but Apple had to do some insane revamp of their products before they could turn around. Although I'm not a student of business stories, I bet you a small caffeinated drink that those kinds of turnarounds are massively rare.
project management is about getting business results, not sticking to a certain process.

we can't wave a magic wand and get a project done with features, quality, and budget at a certain date that we choose. we can use project management to understand what we can do realistically.
Groupon is absolutely buying revenues. I read somewhere that $1.00 of revenue costs them $1.43. Given estimates as high as B$4 for 2011 revenues, if investors will value the company at B$15, it is clear that each dollar of revenue is worth $3.75 to investors.

Groupon's financing strategy exploits the difference between what an investor will pay for a dollar of revenue--$3.75--and what it costs to earn a dollar of revenue--$1.43.

Let's say they have a dollar of revenue in hand. They can sell $3.75 of stock based on that dollar of revenue. At $1.43 per, they can buy $2.62 more revenue. Which they can use to raise $9.82 from investors. Which buys $6.87 in revenues. Which they can use to raise $25.76, and so on and so forth, until they exhaust the market's capacity for buying Groupon stock or everyone tries to cash out at once.

Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If a dollar of revenue is actually a dollar of recurring revenue, it could be worth much more than $3.75. It all depends... How much churn do they have? How much competition will they have? It costs $1.43 to get the first dollar of revenue. How much does it cost them to get a second dollar from an existing merchant?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. If it turns out that these revenue dollars are not recurring and the participants in the business know this but are disguising the situation from investors and misleading them into thinking that these dollars are just like regular business revenue dollars...

If that were the case, maybe one day people would be on HN claiming that such-and-such a company is a "Groupon Scheme." But if it turns out that they have been spending $1.43 to buy a growing revenue stream, investors might end up looking exceptionally smart.
I agree the default option should be "DO NOT TOUCH"

And about the single track folders, tick "part of a compilation" in info box will do the trick.

Keep listen to Pandora while it last.
The Need for Speed
I would argue that you had a source file that may have been of lower quality and AAPL is basically giving you high quality rips of all of your music (DRM free) and hosting it so that your other devices can access it as well at any time.
Which of these features will require the premium support?
Did you know that you can also add articles on iOS by copying the URL and opening the Instapaper app? I didn't realize that there was a way to add a bookmarklet to mobile Safari, and I discovered the clipboard method by accident. Not that I use it often, but when I do, it's good enough.
I would worry more about the spotlight this brings on the functionality itself. The mainstreaming of deferred reading without ads is likely to inspire some kind of backlash from the content creators.
Admittedly, I'm cheap. I prized my $400 Dell Vostro for years and reluctantly switched to a Mac because I was ultimately convinced it was a better machine for software development. I ended up buying a used MBPro for ~$800.
>How about the camera plus app that Apple took off the app store for making the volume button a camera button?

Not exactly. Camera+ was not approved for the app store because of the volume button as camera shutter feature, so they resubmitted but hid the feature from the reviewers by including it as an easter egg. It was removed for a while from the app store because of that intentional deception. They're lucky they were allowed to resubmit the app at all after that (and so are we all, it's a wonderful camera app).
Apple nearly died because during that period because they were an inflexible organization that reacted slowly to changing market conditions while operating under increasingly out-of-touch management.

Unless the argument here is that Marco is a dumb guy who for some reason isn't in a position to pivot quickly and react to change, I'm not seeing any parallel here with what happened to Apple in the early 90s.

Marco's still the market leader here. He has to fuck up before he's in the position of needing a turn-around. I'm not sure why you're taking it as fait accompli that he will be unable to react appropriately; he's a smart guy.
You make an important point. However I think there is value in thinking about the "right people" also in fixed organizations, especially larger ones.

If you have tens or hundreds of developers, you will have various kinds of tasks. Some people feel more committed to certain kinds of tasks, so matching these will certainly make your organization more efficient. Sadly, this fact is often overlooked by work-dispatcher who might be under the illusion that for developers it does not matter what they are working with or how long they are committed to a certain area.
I don't know if Boxcar is all that threatened. The notification wrangling it seemed to do seemed like an after-thought, so no doubt the new notifications will be better.

However, I use it and it has always seemed to me that its focus has been to create push notifications for services that otherwise wouldn't have them, such as email, twitter (before the official app added push), and others (they have an API).
The vast majority of the articles I add to Instapaper, I add from Firefox on my desktop at work. And virtually all the articles I read in Instapaper, I read when I'm off-network completely (I have an iPod touch). I don't think Marco has much to worry about yet.
But will people be unsatisfied with Reading List enough to bother looking for alternatives on the App Store?

Non-Apple platform sync seems to be the biggest missing feature, but what else is there that folks would pay for?
ExtJS's set of grid panels was just about the most impressive one I've seen thus far (tree grids, group grids, paging grids, features for filtering/searching, sorting, hide/show columns, binding to xml/json/direct, etc). Though it would probably huge overkill to tie yourself into the whole framework just for one widget.

Examples: http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/#sample-2
iTunes is amazing at creating smart playlists, but it can get a bit complicated.

iOS devices all have to ability to create playlist on the fly to.

But building playlist without proper ID3 info can get tedious real quick and endless playlist building is not a solution to the problem of quickly populating a queue on a whim.
Would it be filtered to only hack data submissions?
Demoted
The true story of audion:

http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/
The True Story of Audion
The Passage by Justin Cronin