skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We suspected it was a bad deal, but tried it anyway as an experiment. Our blog post wanted to point that out, but more so we took issue with the fact that most people think Amazon pays 20% of the asking price even when an app is given away. Their agreement with devs says as much. No one seems to know that to be featured you have to agree to 0%. Again we agreed, but the secrecy is where our beef lies, we wanted to make that public.
These secret back-door deals that were so secret that they were written in bold in the email

Secret to the masses, not the parties involved. Yeah, its bold, but its bold in an email between two parties where they agree upon terms contrary to the public terms.
How do you know that about Alexander? Googling finds me no source.
It does seem problematic that to consumers it seems as though the dev gets a cut.
It seems likely that someone involved with the contest is trying to use it for free advertising. Look at the "About" page on that flash app, the person apparently lives in Waterloo, and his email has "uwaterloo" in it.
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Matz is short for Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby.
Neither of these are good reasons to label a company a "startup." Arguably, Salesforce.com is 'still looking for a business model' despite being public, as are any number of other companies. And every tech company likes to think they have a culture of 'moving fast, raising capital and innovating.'

Wikipedia provides a reasonable starting place: "A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets."
Digital Interruptions
Shameless self promotion of image resizer code...
http://www.nkdv.co/code/do/resize

php resize crop and cache source.
At first, people wanted to get away from Java with their FactoryFactoryFactoryCreationFactories. So they went to rails where everything was simpler.

Back then, every controller method had a URL.

This was fine, but had some corner cases where it wasn't. So they moved to explicit urls.

Everything was fine, but controllers got bloated. So stuff was moved into models and controllers became restful.

Now there's too much stuff in the models and we are back where we started and write blog posts about this cool new invention: The Factory.

I'm not saying this is bad. I'm not saying the people were wrong at any stage in this development. I'm just saying that as projects grow and people work to prevent old cold-smells from reappearing, to learn from earlier mistakes they slowly move to where they left off.

Until the abstractions get too complicated, the perceived bloat gets too bad. Then we'll see a new frameowrk and/or language grow, going through the same iterations.

Just wait.

I'm not complaining. I'm not flaming, I'm just thinking loudly.
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I think they're valid in calling the deal "secret," as the app-buying public at large has no idea these deals are taking place. The developer knows they're getting nothing, but everyone downloading the free app is harboring illusions that they're supporting the developer.
I'm a City College Student. I've taken 2 courses with Prof. McCracken and spoken with him privately on several occasions as well. He was an amazing man. A truly kind heart who knew how to bring out the best in people. Teaching was something he was very passionate about, he was still teaching courses last spring, well past the point of retirement. Dan McCracken knew how to make a difference to people and that was his real gift.

He could instruct in technical subjects, but he was already over that point of his life when I got to meet him. He had written his books, done his service with the ACM, made his contributions to the profession. What he devoted himself to later in life was cultivating people. He knew exactly how to nudge a student in the right direction to make them press onward. It worked for me. I don't think I would have made it through my freshman year without his encouragement.

I'll miss him. He was a wonderful person, a great teacher, and a warm presence. We should all be so lucky to as to know someone like him.
I'm not sure why some people react in that way when they are unfollowed. But why were they being followed in the first place? I know some companies like to follow every single person they can with the expectation they get followed back and then boost their subscriber numbers, and I think it's a silly game to play.
To be honest, this is true of every product that Amazon sells.
The Economic Reality of Mobile Device Security
I've been doing a binge of Kindle buying recently, and I have noticed that a lot of the more expensive books have a price that is set by the publisher.

Now, in the Amazon AppStore, perhaps the larger publishers will eventually be able to set a minimum price. The prices are already so low but better than zero.

I love Amazon's FAAD, and I feel safe downloading any app from Amazon while the Google market is more strip mall than indoor mall. The new Market app is a major improvement though but I am anxious to download let alone buy anything with less than 250k downloads.
New Android Trojan Has the Ability to Record Phone Conversations
He's not saying the 0% price was a secret from his company, he's saying it was a secret to the general public.

I pay pretty close attention, and I thought the free apps of the day were paid at the 20% rate that Amazon warns they may pay you if they unilaterally discount your app.
Here's my PS1:

# -----------------------------------------------------------------
# BASH PROMPT
# -----------------------------------------------------------------

parse_git_branch() {
git_branch=`git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/\1/'`
if [ $git_branch ]; then
echo "•$git_branch"
fi
}

# sexy prompt
export PS1='[\[\033[0;35m\]\h\[\033[0;36m\] \w\[\033[00m\]\[\033[33m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\03 3[00m\]]\$ '

And here's what it looks like:

http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2011-08-02_at_8.47.1...
Sure, I guess that would be nice. But I'm confused.

The story was mostly about how new software--like Ogg--inadvertently infringes on overly broad patents even if was developed in isolation. In what way does promoting Ogg solve that?
Martha Nussbaum discusses capabilities approach.
Okay, fair enough.

But I do think it is exaggerating to say that "everyone downloading the free app is harboring illusions that they're supporting the developer."

I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of downloaders get no further than "ooh! free stuff!" click
I don't use perlbrew. Haven't tried it, since installing your own Perl by-hand is easy enough.
I'd be interested in this as well. Also, it would be nice to know how this stacks up against Hype (http://tumultco.com/hype/).
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But it's not true of any other app store with which Amazon competes. Whether or not it's true of Walmart isn't really relevant.
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No it's not. Amazon does a lot of selling for third parties who set their own prices.
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

In Submissions
...
If the original title includes the name of the site,
please take it out, because the site name will be
displayed after the link anyway.

And I'm reminded of this Hacker koan which you can find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan --

Uncarved Block

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came
to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

--
Oh, I'm on Windows, which already has that merging in FF5.
Uh... the President took questions on twitter like two weeks ago.

If that's not mainstream, I have no clue what is.
FWIW, the same question has been asked on SO, and despite lots of answers there, no one seems to have data. <http://superuser.com/questions/128323/why-does-microsoft-win...;
Agreed. Using Facebook, Twitter or any service that can disseminate information quickly for the purpose of spreading knowledge is always a good thing. If done wisely or at least with enough propaganda it may even inspire others to act. However, that knowledge and/or inspiration should not be confused with the act that needs to follow that knowledge in order to effect a change.
Multilingual Google Voice Search
Canalys: Apple's iOS now world's 2nd largest smartphone platform
I agree strongly that Amazon needs to make this clearer in their emails an admin pages (listing earnings that don't exist is terrible) but as far as their agreement goes, I think you are mistaken.

Section 2.a. of the Amazon Appstore agreement, emphasis mine:

"a. Royalty. For each sale of an App, we will pay you a royalty (“Royalty”) equal to the greater of (i) 70% of the purchase price or (ii) 20% of the List Price (defined in and subject to section 5i) as of the purchase date. No Royalty is payable for Apps with a List Price of $0.00. Such purchase price excludes taxes and any separately stated fees or charges. A Royalty is due only for sales for which we have received final payment from or on behalf of an end user. If an App is purchased using a credit card or bank account deduction mechanism, final payment will be deemed to have occurred when the applicable credit card company or bank has fully settled the payment for the applicable purchase."
For me the most important part of the story is this:

Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards? That’s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day.
Health and fitness habits can help people keep their youthful good looks
OS X: Dowload "iTunes festival"-streams using your terminal
Do watch out that your handwritten notes can be used as evidence if known about. A co-worker saying you had notes and you not being able to produce them might get a little sticky depending on the industry.
As far as I can recall, MP3 has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-90s, so any patents for which MP3 itself is not prior art should have four more years at most.
interesting list, if somewhat racist. i'm sure someone could compile a similar failure list for basically any particular nationality or ethnic group. better question would be "do businesses that utilize Indian services or Personnel have a hire failure rate then otherwise?" the implication of the list is yes. i'm doubtful its true though.

i will say this though: you get what you pay for. failures related to underpaid, hasty development in code sweatshops (indian or otherwise) is obviously going to be low quality.
A cut of what?
I see no reason to think that's not the case. This was a mutual agreement outside of the general terms. That's hardly unusual.
"2. Building on Someone Else’s Platform is Risky"

This is a common mistake. You should only do this if your product/idea is short-term. I would never build a long-term business on Twitter or Facebook, but I see so many people attempting to do this.

If they make a change where you have to pay 10X for access, limit your bandwidth, or even come out with something that directly competes with our product, you are done.
Facial recognition software could reveal your social security number
klass is used in meta programming as a way to control scope.
The good, the bad, and the ugly: large scale JavaScript apps
SOINN：Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network
Can someone better informed explain this Google-Oracale Java tiff to me. If Google is using Java, and they have gobs of money in the bank, why not just license it and be done with it? Don't they have more important patent fights to worry about? (I'm thinking about Apple). I just don't understand how all of this works I guess.

They have very competent corporate attorneys, so I assume they are making the right decisions. But I mean really, if there are emails like this laying around, just pay the fee and make this whole thing go away. What's the hold up?
They’re all doing it wrong: tablet ads
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Nursing assignments are conducted by professional nurses who have a high school diploma and have passed through medical school.
Are we talking about work or home computers?

Overwhelming user pressure is slowly bringing Macs into the workplace, but they're only feasible because something like Citrix XenApp (aka Presentation Manager aka Metaframe) servers allow access to decades of in-house Windows applications.
Ask HN: Advice for a new tech lead?
Luckily, in a more bumbling than romantic way, I just landed a gig as lead developer for an internet television company, and though I'm very excited, I'm also aware I've got a lot to learn.

I wanted to know if you guys could lend me any advice? I've got my own ideas about how to run an IT department, but I've essentially got carte blanche, so staring at the blank page is a bit scary, and I'd like to avoid any landmines. What would you do if you were in my place?

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration HN!
This was indeed a quick hack. Because the who-is-hiring thread is focused, I expected a small false positive error rate. Let me know what additional cities or abbreviations you'd like to see (or fork me on github).
Certainly they do, since linkless submissions are penalised in the rankings. But I don't really care, and I can't be bothered writing a blog post about it. I submitted it becuase I thought it was interesting, and other HNers might have something to say.

There's some anti-irony in having a submission about something as ephemeral as twitter being equally impermanent. Making it a blog post would spoil that. And my blog isn't about this sort of stuff anyway.
My major step forward in bash prompt setup earlier this year was realising it didn't have to be a single line.

I have one info line which tells me path, user, host, git branch etc. And then the prompt sits nicely on the line below and is always at the same alignment.

http://i.imgur.com/0F6qt.png
Your entire response is conjecture.

He readily admits he bought into the 20%, got and clarified the 0% offer, debated and went for it. He shows the 54k number as a way of reinforcing the bait-and-switch they are using to lure people into the market, not as a way to say 'i should have been paid $x'.

You say 'Amazon gave that company an incredibly aggressive marketing campaign for 1 day' but let me tell you what i see. 'Amazon is building their market on the backs of apps by giving them away for free.' I write Android apps for a living and I appreciated the cautionary tale. The rest of the comment you left is basically unsupportable. We have no data to say what % of people that get the app for free leave a review (and, consequently, whether or not that review is good or bad). I'm guessing we also have very little insight into how the numbers of installs affect the search rankings.

You are (probably) right, there are a bunch of people that grab just the free apps, but I don't see that as a good thing and I'm not sure how it plays into your argument. Its also not clear that the 'freemium' option was offered to the developer as an alternative of putting up their full app up for free. If it was, I would have expected PopCap to do so with Plants v. Zombies.

Its also unnecessarily diminutive to say '... I have to point out that the sales BEFORE the free-app-of-the-day listing[1] were not impressive...". The fact of the matter is they made infinitely more money before the deal of the day then we can say they did AS A DIRECT RESULT of the deal of the day listing.
Personally, I'd prefer a Preferences GUI, rather than JSON files. If you're going to release on a platform, follow that platform's conventions.

I suspect laziness on the part of the developer in regards to a Preferences GUI, rather than any attempt at a new paradigm.
"At one point, Biden, who had been fingering a rosary, turned to Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman. “We should all go to Mass tonight,” he said."

Not to ask forgiveness for breaking a commandement, I would wager.
Private/Generic || Transparent/Personalized
American Mom Bloggers Connecting with Africans
Bono, U2’s frontman in collaboration with ONE brought 10 American mom bloggers to Africa to connect with Kenyan mothers from July 23 to 30. The mom bloggers’ met female farmers
Go into detail about the last time you've found it necessary to analyze a particular algorithm for either speed or memory using the typical tools taught by CS programs in your web application.

I agree with the folks who mentioned doing a sort of naive, intuitive "big O" analysis as you work, as opposed to a formal analysis. I was recently working on some social graph stuff, and I started down the path of doing an "all pairs shortest paths" determination with Floyd-Warshall (which is O(|V|^3) complexity).. needless to say, it only took a few minutes to realize that this won't work for any real world size datasets and would require a different approach. If nothing else, you quickly find that the naive approach doesn't work for any meaningful amount of data, as just building an adjacency matrix for a few hundred entries, if the datatype is an int (which is what I was using at the time) will blow past the heap size limit on a 32bit JVM.

I'm actually still researching and considering exactly what I'm going to do. I don't necessarily need every shortest path in the system, so the first cut at optimizing this will probably be to cook up something that only calculates a portion of the paths. Another approach might be to look into a parallelized algorithm that can do this on a cluster. Beyond that, I've been poking around trying to see if there's a way to apply a sort of incremental evaluation approach to the problem, where I build the initial matrix of path distances, and then incrementally recompute just the part I care about, when something changes.

Anyway, at the moment, this is the largest extent to which I've actually had to spend some time thinking about the kind of stuff that I studied in some of my CS classes... I've actually got all my algorithms books of the shelf, and digging in, as I research this. :-)
The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake
Discussing rogue "undeletable" cookies seems a little silly when you consider you have to be logged in to the app. Of course they know who you are.
Personally, picturing the digits never did it for me. I think I work better when thinking about quantities and values: the infinite number of 9s means the value will continue increasing until it gets to 1. Or just understanding that 0.000...001, an "infinitesimal" quantity, is the same as 0. Something like that.
Ask HN: Attention Blackberry Devs
Hey guys.

I have access to a (completely legit) list of about 420K Blackberry users and the owners of this list wish to start using it to promote BB Apps (they are very good at the community building part, but zero knowledge when it comes to marketing, the value of the list, etc.)

If you develop BB Apps and wish to get your app in front of thousands of Latim American users, please contact me.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

EDIT: it should have been TELL HN... sorry about that.
It seems there's no real consensus either way, it's a personal choice. But I'd suggest you start with a free one anyways, because then you can get some content on there while you spruce it up. By the time it's pretty enough for you to pimp out you'll have some interesting posts in addition to just a pretty interface.
Agreed. I'm always surprised how many of us there are who enjoy good tea.
WoW is exactly what I do not want. Not jaw-dropping enough, and it has missions and characters - so, no, thank you :) I want a stunningly executed guided tour through someone else's imagination.
Re-writing descriptions is such a bizarre thing to do I don't know why Amazon would choose to do it. Clearly they are getting things wrong in the descriptions, which is misleading to customers, which must be illegal in some fashion.

Holding apps hostage -- not being able to choose unilaterally to remove them -- is beyond the pale.

Whose app is it anyway?

Does Amazon think they own these things the second they get uploaded?
Right, Myst. Totally slipped my mind. Myst 3D was a nice try on their part, but ultimately such a disappointment - too simple and stripped down.
@bambax – once you click submit on the form, you will always be able to return and edit your application. That message about only clicking once is there to avoid copies of the same entries. You are also welcome to submit more than one application, especially if you have different startups/business plans you’d like to enter. Please refer to our official contest rules for full details: http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge/rules/ and drop us a note if you have any questions: awsstartups AT amazon.com (Disclaimer – I work for AWS)
I had no idea 20% was expected to be paid to the dev and I've downloaded several from the Amazon App Store. It sounds like this dev made an uneducated choice to be featured even after knowing they would receive zero %.
not only is this a re-blog of an old story that adds no new information, but they got the basics of the story wrong.

shitty blogs can't even copy stories properly anymore.

the the original story and thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824318
Swede arrested for building nuclear reactor
[Hiring] Senior Developer in Cape Town
But if I say "omg, the person who stayed here last night has run off with my $30,000 necklace" then what evidence do I have to provide?

A police report, at the very least.
How to get started with Email Marketing
Shorts for summer 2011
Amazon's money.
Show HN: Alert Notes - natural language reminders app for iPhone
Our app just went live on the iOS App Store yesterday. No App Store reviews yet, so was wondering if I can get some feedback here. We've had previous feedback from beta testers and app review sites and it's been mostly positive so far. The app's website is http://alertnotesapp.com/
Not too dissimilar from the BBB, which is a total scam/protection racket... You have an "F" rating... now pay us $1000 to "rate" you again and review that rating. 3 days later Boom you have an A.

More: http://feefighters.com/blog/the-bbb-is-a-scam/
I read them as asking the show also be offered in another format, not exclusively.
If you've only read the first book (or only watched the show), I can sort of see how you'd make that statement, but in the lands outside of Westeros, there are dark-skinned people who are wise, spiritually enlightened, and better spoken than the bulk of the 'Northern European' folks presently on the show.

Further, it makes sense that a group of barbaric nomads who ride horseback on the plains would have darker pigment than those who spend their lives at court in a castle. That part isn't fantasy, it's evolution.
I see. It does seem that this guy is blatantly an idiot, which hopefully limits his influence... not that being so prevents one from being taken seriously in politics and other realms these days, I suppose. Bringing this extortionary behavior to public attention is exactly the way to go.
This article touches on a few areas in owners renting out their assets for profit. Not only could one be devastated by a ransacked home but also if a renter would trash a boat rented through a peer to peer site. My question is can vacation, and room sharing sites provide insurance to protect owners?
Clickable: http://alertnotesapp.com/