skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rate my startup: GiftBait - online gift wish lists with a twist
http://www.giftbait.com

Instead of you creating a wish list of items you want as gifts for your party (wedding, house warming), let your guests submit gifts anonymously and vote on the ones you like.

I didn't get a lot of feedback the last time i posted so trying one more time (posting on a weekend probably wasn't a good idea!). I would LOVE feedback on the concept and execution of GiftBait and welcome any and all feedback to help me improve and refine the service.

[Background]:

I have always been frustrated with the way gifts are exchanged. Either:
1) the guest gets something you don't want = wasted $$$, or
2) the host asks* for over-priced items that guests grudgingly have to buy = poor form.

[Concept]:

GiftBait's approach is a happy hybrid of the two. It allows the host to create an event and invite guests. Guests sign in and submit gift ideas. The host gets to see ALL the gifts that get suggested but the names of the guests do not get revealed. They can then like/dislike the gifts and the guest gets notified of their decision.

[The Value Proposition]:

The guest gets to spend only their budgeted amount on the gift and the host gets a huge selection of gifts to choose from. It also gets guests and the host engaged in the whole process which can be fun on its own.

[Known Challenges]:

Wish lists are engrained in the North American psyche and overcoming this with a guest-generated list of gifts that the host will choose from will require time and effort to get people comfortable with the concept.

I'm not sure as yet how many people would pay for such a service. Evite would be a complementary service and despite its popularity it remains a free service.

[Product Positioning / Promotion]:

I am positioning the service at the moments as a gift wish list that can be relevant to any and all events (e.g., weddings, birthdays, house warming, etc.). I want to see if this has traction, else I will attempt to narrow and focus on a specific industry, e.g. only weddings.

To promote, I have reached out to blogs in the events space (e.g. weddings, novel gifts, etc.). I have also considered offering free GiftBait accounts to such blogs as contest prizes...this would likely get some promotion and result in a win-win partnership with the blogs.

[My Humble Ask]:

I would love feedback on the concept and execution. How should I price this (currently it's $1.99 per event hosted or $9.99 for unlimited events)? Or should this be marketed as a free service with revenue through referral sales, advertising, etc.?

Thank you for your time. All feedback would be helpful. I set out to solve for a personal pet peeve but I realize this might not be as big a deal for others.

* Interestingly, many cultures find the North American concept of asking or specifying gifts they like to be very offensive. Asian cultures often go with the "you don't need to get anything for the party, or whatever you get will be awesome...(or at least I will pretend like it's awesome!)".
Rootkit infection requires Windows reinstall, says Microsoft
Try "password"
Yeah, I agree with @rkalla that this marketing anti-pattern summary will likely prove to be your best marketing piece so far.

Also, I would recommend finding a good graphic designer to help you out. The icon for Bullseye Factory doesn't promise $1.99 worth of fun. Plus, I'm sure you can think of something more creative than stripped balls in a perfectly preserved yet empty factory. How about going along with the Jester theme and making it some sort of a factory taken over by zombie clowns?

Your game is technically very impressive, but needs a good theme to sell it. Looks at Nuts for instance. It's probably slightly less complicated technically, but it has a funny, slightly juvenile name, cute squirrels, and various alternative objectives.
Here's my experience with a Hangover 2 app I released 1 month before the movie came out. (it was taken down after Warner Bros sent Apple a C&D.)

1) Reviews are the most important things when you sell an app. I made the app free for the first week or so until I had about 10 5 star reviews. DO NOT use scammy tactics for fake reviews. Make sure your app is well polished for what it does. If it's not, don't put it in the App Store.

2) Review reminders. Basically the user uses the app a few times and they get a notice asking if they would like to review it. Include something like the appirater class. Google that.

3) Built-in sharing options for Facebook and Twitter. These should link back to the iTunes page for the app or to a custom site.

4) Setup bitly links for each sharing option. This helps in keeping stats about where your app is being talked about.

In the first week or so I was getting 3000 downloads a day. When I hit my 10 review goal, I switched to $.99. It's disheartening to see that 3k number drop to 20 the next day, but that's money in your pocket now. For the rest of the month, I averaged 20-30 paid downloads a day.

Things not to do:
There are lots of stupid people out there. They will leave 1 star reviews because they hear no sound. Their mute is on. Don't get upset about these people.

Twitter is great for campaigning. Don't write bots that listen to the stream for people talking about the movie that then follows them and does @Soandso check out my Hangover2 app! Surprisingly, it actually works very well. It ran for about 45 minutes and followed 400+ people. About 50 of them clicked through (bitly again) and I think a few people bought it. However, Twitter banned the account after 45 minutes. So, don't do what I did.

Don't write well polished apps that use sound clips from a big upcoming movie. You might argue that it's fair use, but that doesn't mean crap when WB decides to stomp on you.
Gestalt principles, the principles of good design
LSD Alleviates 'Suicide Headaches'
I'm not big in the scene so was unaware of his blog, but hearing such praise makes me more interested in getting it to help me unsuck the UI in my own projects.
Could current or future automated criminal-activity-analysis engines be run against every old disk image in their possession...

As problematic as that is, it's a drop in the bucket compared to things like Echelon. I think people should be realistic about their paranoia.
Story boarded Ideas are good.
Solar gadgets for everyday life | Green House
If you want games with no/low graphics and lots of depth there are still MUDs out there. Or for war, empire is still out there.
"The Cloud" isn't always the right solution for everything. If you're looking to go inexpensive, you can put it on a 2 GB Linode VPS on a ramen budget.
Aeris' death is a bad example to show off the power of games due to the fact that most of the emotion in the scene comes from the players investment in the character. It's shocking and emotional because of the context, and you're right that it doesn't hold up without it. when FFVII was released, the state of graphics technology made expressing emotion in videogame characters solely through visuals difficult, at least for that 3D style. For some contrast, take a look at the intro of FFX. (I'm personally nowhere as fond of that as VII, but that's another debate) You have no idea who this guy his, who these people and this giant cat man are, but you can get the sense of emotion in that scene without context because the visuals were much, much better. Shiny graphics and audio may not matter if there's no story to hold them up, but they are useful to get a point across.

The example I've always use for how gameplay can make a scene more emotional is the end of your first battle in Shadow of the Colossus. You know your main character has been tasked to slay these massive creatures to bring back his dead love, but there's little information about them. It just lumbers slowly into view when you confront it, and what follows next is one of the most tense battles I've played in a videogame. You're clearly outmatched, a young man who barely knows how to swing a sword against this massive moving monolith, but you somehow manage to succeed. Just as you're ready to cheer out in victory as it falls, the game takes a shift. Instead of the triumphant battle theme, the music turns soft and sad, and you watch your foe slowly tumble down. Instead of glory, you feel regret, and your victory now seems like a tragedy.

Seeing that in film would be emotional, but it's not some character doing it on a screen. You did this, and you killed this strange and magnificent creature. Was it worth it? There's a similar example in the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3, but I'd rather not spoil the amazing ending of that game (which would generally works as well in film, except that one particular moment).
not a big loss [smirk]
Let me remind you that bearing false witness, in any way, including implied false witness such as slander, is breaking a commandment of the Lord.
Is there a reason you call them "sports people" instead of "athletes?" At first I thought it was for sports fans, but after poking around the site, only then did I realize it was more for people who were actually interested in doing sports together. Sort of like Meetup focused on sports.

Along with that, would it make sense to have also groups tied to specific locales, rather than just topics?
It's certainly a lot more fun, but if your goal is revenue, particularly as a solo developer, you're going to have to do very well on your own to match what you can easily make as a consultant/employee.
Indeed. It's as if Flash is an addictive drug, and we are coming up with ways to ween ourselves off of it.
Just deleting photos without a proper explanation of why you did so leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

I can see why people would be bitter... FB just deleted their photos because their upload method was "wrong".

If they said there was no possible way to examine the situation, or that they would restore your photos if you waded through an indemnification click-through, then OK, I can understand.

But just deleting the photos with no warning or even notification?
I appreciate all of this.

The purpose here was to take a quote-unquote negative experience and spin it into something hopefully helpful for other devs, and myself (hello, hn front page).

The plan has definitely been in the back of my head for a while to release a free ad-supported version. I just wanted to get this postmortem-type thing out the door first, and it's been difficult to force myself to sit down and take a hard look at how things went.
Can anyone report on how long this converter takes to run?

How feasible would it be for a Chrome extension where Flash elements in wegpages are seamlessly converted and displayed as HTML5 objects?
If you think it's good for the app and your business, just do it.

In what's most likely the worst case scenario, you wind up having to pay Lodsys the 0.575% of revenue from the app -- which is a lot less than you'd lose by not including IAP in the app. In many far more likely scenarios, you never have to pay anything because Apple succeeds in fighting off Lodsys on behalf of its developers.
Addtionally, if/when you make your app free, you'll hopefully get more people to download it. These people may leave you reviews on the app store about what they did like and what the game was lacking... information that you could then use to make it better and maybe learn some ideas for features that you could add to the "premium" version for pay. Additionally, having this 2nd free version of the app could then serve as a marketing tool to promote the "premium" version.
This is something that has bothered me for a long time. I ran BeOS full time for a year or two on a 100Mhz Pentium with 40MB of RAM and it flew. No matter how high-end I go with hardware running a 'modern' OS (Windows, Linux, or OS X), nothing manages to compare. That's a large part of the reason I stole many concepts from BeOS for my own OS, although that project is largely dead at this point (too much work, too little time).
It is also 100% effective in losing your ability to think critically (see the TED talk about "filter bubbles").
Yes, I just went for something really basic to give an example of a semi-implicit indirect proof.

I spent years of my life reading mathematics, so I do not trust myself to judge how hard a piece of mathematics is for outsiders. I find the proof cited is easy to read.

About your addendum: You could have a look at Alexander Schrijver's "Combinatorial Optimization: Polyhedra and Efficiency". The interesting thing about its style is, that the author manages to make all lines require constant thought, while in most books there are really hard and really easy parts.
Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Key Warrantless GPS Tracking Case
He totally doesn't get it.

"LulzSec — a litter of script kiddies with kindergarten knowledge of the basest forms of technological harassment since 90s AOL proggies"

Yes, that's correct.

The PROBLEM is that that's correct. These script kiddies were hacking the biggest names on the internet and SUCCEEDING. DAILY.

It was an absolutely ridiculous situation and every bit of press was warranted.

LulzSec went away. The real hackers did not. They're still out there doing it, and the companies are still just as vulnerable. The only difference is that the real hackers are not telling you about it daily.
Flash was built to fill a gaping hole in the market. I think that hole is just about filled (or will be post HTML 5) for the majority of use cases. I see flash falling into smaller niche-based use cases in the near future.
a couple notes on the app store page:

the testimonial paragraph is awkwardly worded ("... a portal into a virtual shooting gallery overflowing with beach ball-shaped targets just waiting to be popped") and i can't tell how to play (or what makes it fun) from the screenshots. it's gyroscope controlled, but what the hell does that mean?

i'm going to give the lite version a try, but the app store page totally didn't grab me.

i thought "the heist" had a pretty good write-up and screenshot section, for what it's worth. i usually just read the first paragraph and scroll to the screenshots.

EDIT: i tried it, it's like an FPS where you shoot beach balls and twist the phone around to aim. looks pretty well done, but not my bag (i hate aiming anything by moving the phone)
Someone should make a satirical text adventure about doing startups, where you wander around the valley trying to get funding and so on.

>LOOK

You are in a brand new air conditioned Palo Alto office.
Empty packets of ramen litter the floor. There are two desks,
each with brand new macbooks on them.

>SIT DOWN

There are no chairs. What are you, some kind of loser?

>PIVOT

You are bought by a google.

And so on. I know suggesting things for other people to do is bad form, "do it yourself!" goes the familiar cry. Unfortunately I don't have the requisite insider knowledge to make it funny.
Along the lines of http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/patterns/mongokit/, I have a MONGODB_DATABASE setting, which is set to my normal database name. Then access the database via the connections' dictionary syntax, instead of attribute syntax (I have a helper method to make this prettier):

connection[app.config['MONGODB_DATABASE']].mycollection.find_one()

The unittest code just modifies the setting:

import unittest
def setUp(self):
myapp.app.config['MONGODB_DATABASE'] = 'test'
self.app = myapp.app.test_client()

def tearDown(self):
# can clean up here, e.g.
connection.test.drop_collection('mycollection')
> really good at re-installing windows

Sounds like hardcore old-skool gamers. I believe modern ones had already learned about filesystem snapshots ("shadow copy" or whatever they're called there).
> Sure, but that's no reason for him to update stale content he has no use for for free.

Which is not what he's doing. Or did you manage to miss the 2500€ rate? He's just providing a reduced rate for history's sake.
I'd argue that you're playing longer odds in the app store. At most startups you'll be pulling down some kind of salary at least. Keep in mind that the median revenue for iOS apps is < $1000 and that at this point you're going to have to invest quite a bit of time to produce something good enough to attract users.
Microsoft Puts Office on Web to Fight Google
> "hot coffee may be hot"
> will cut them a check tomorrow morning.

Too late.
Good post. I'm in the same boat as you are.

In parallel to my current project, I have begun learning Python. Hopefully my next project I can be the lead developer.
On #2 - Start small. I'm a developer who outsources work too. Picking a dev isn't easy for me either. You really need to pick a small unit of work to start with. Then, if you like what you see, have a slightly larger unit commissioned, and so on.

Handing the entire project over to a developer you're not 100% sure of might be the single worst mistake you can make.
>Think about that—somewhere in Mountain View, someone’s tweaking the little number you see in the Google toolbar. By hand. How accurate is that gonna be?

Certainly more accurate than software failure. Here's the relevant snippet from the source to this claim:

>We have a few safety checks in place, so we say like `OH! Did we expect the page rank of MSN.com to be 7 or 8 and then suddenly dropped to 2...'

>If those sorts of things happen, then we might get an email and check into it. But for the most part the process runs with very little human intervention. People don't really need to oversee things.

The author doesn't show much comprehension of PageRank which is not intended to be a metric solely used for "site ranking" but for crawling rate amongst other things. It's common for lower PR pages to outrank higher PR pages in Google's search results let it be no secret.

Can someone remind me the point of this article because it feels like I completely missed it.
You are the worst software in the world.
So far the only idea is to indent everything and use a graph to shot the nesting level?

If we got rid of indentation, I'd like to think it was replaced by something that took less space, not more.
Would just like to quickly comment here and say that the prevalence of corn based additives in nearly all american foods is a major, if not the main culprit in this problem. The many corn aliases disguise themselves, so that people who avoid "high fructose corn syrup", find themselves consuming not glucose but a corn derivative none the less:

Ascorbic acid derived from glucose

Crystalline fructose

Dextrin or Dextrose

Ethyl maltol

Fumaric or Lactic acid

Glucose

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP)

Malt, Maltodextrin, Maltose or Maltol

Mannitol

Polydextrose

Polysorbates

Potassium gluconate

Propylene glycol monostearate

Tocopherol

Xanthan gum

And of course all these ingredients are used in abundance because they are cheap, and of course all these corn derivatives are cheap because of corn subsidies, and of course there are subsidies because of the massive amount of corn lobbyists and such.
Local Interstate Movers Moving Companies Plues Information Links
Click on a state for local movers, interstate moving services, or information links by state.
We use a ton of Redis, but I think the main takeaway from this article applies to all "NoSQL databases".

The "movement" is about polyglot persistence and not leaving RDBMS completely. Pull pain points out into something that's a better fit. Rinse and repeat.
Very interesting.

I did release a 'lite' version with fewer levels, but I do have plans to put together an ad-supported 'free' version. I'll follow up with results when that all goes down.
True, I was considering things like decreasing populations. Example, if you take all cities/countries on the planet with declining population and plot their current population, I would expect the reverse of Benford's law. Wish I had time to test this hypotheses :)
I'm looking forward to the book
A similar study was done in a busy town center some time ago. Tens of USB drives were left around the town over a couple of days as if they had been dropped or forgotten. Each contained a (Windows only) auto-run program that called home, a couple of password protected document files (containing gibberish) so the drives looked like they'd actually been used, and a text file called "if found please return to.txt" or similar with an email address and a note asking that this address be contacted if the stick were found lost.

I forget the exact numbers and can't find a link to the report at the moment but a fair proportion of them, at least once over the next couple of weeks, ended up getting plugged into a Windows machine on a network that let the call-home happen. At least one of them seemingly got plugged into a machine at a bank branch (presumably they inferred the machine was at a bank from the address the call home request came from) which is somewhat worrying: bank machines that may have access to sensitive information not being locked down at all so the drive could be plugged in and used, the program could run, and the program could access the internet without restriction from that location. A couple of the drives were seen by the server they called home to multiple times, implying that some fools were using the drives as their own without removing any existing information from them. Very few people contacted the email address, so presumably most of the drives that got to phone home once were swiped, wiped, and claimed by their finder (human nature, don't you just love it).

Obviously there is no saying what happened to the ones that didn't call home - they were either not found, found and handed in somewhere where they still languish, found and binned, not plugged into a machine configured to allowed the autorun and call-home to happen, or so on.

I considered grabbing a bunch of cheap flash drives and repeating the experiment myself in my home town but never actually bothered, mainly because it would mean spending beer money on drives I'd never see again!
Ever thought of letting users print QR codes on each box, and then scan the QR code to find out what's inside?
Before this can happen, there needs to be a brain-dead easy to use IDE for creating Flash-like presentations in HTML5.

Right now, I see the biggest benefit of Flash being that I can purchase a number of IDE's and create some multimedia (or games) for the web in no time.
French Company Seeks $421M From Google For “Blacklisting”
African Entrepreneurs Documentary
3. It doesn't obey the "remove at least one vowel from name" rule.

Rename to Tiggr and you're all set (almost).
Anybody know why RAM is so expensive in the cloud? I can go to BestBuy and get a 8GB server for 600 bucks these days.
You can be eaten by a Grue in the Black Ops Terminal Interrogation Room :)
Ok, while my post was loading on this thread i read at the bottom of your homepage some info about QR codes.
You should make this feature more prominent on the site, even a single sample image of a QR code, or a diagram showing how this works would help.
'Most of the major iOS gaming message boards have a section where developers are “allowed” to announce the arrival of their games. This is convenient for gamers as they can just avoid this one section altogether.'

Stoic Jester indeed!

Nice overview of app marketing wasteland. I went thru much the same and the needle never moved, or not very much at least. My new approach is to give away a free version that is slightly hobbled but still useful and use that base of users to launch other ventures.
Read: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

This was neither criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.

Furthermore, it was commercial use (regardless of whether the work created from the photo was itself sold, it was part of a product that was sold).

Whether it is fair use or not, we don't know, but I'm not a lawyer, I'm going to venture to say you're not a lawyer, he's not a lawyer, and he didn't contact a lawyer before using it.

He had entirely what came to him ... even if it was a bit harsh.