skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HOW TO: Test Your Internet Connection Speed
There are different internet plans provided by different ISPs. The plans differ according to the monthly charges and the speed of internet you get. If you want the internet connection just for chatting and a little of browsing with your cell phone, you can get the smallest available plans but if you want to use internet at the most, broadband plan is the best for you.
With no story...
Luckily they got mostly positive reviews, however most apps have their reviews and comments trashed. I've seen great, 5-star apps go down to 2-stars because of people who downloaded it because it was free, didn't know what it did, then didn't like it and give it a 1-star. Others give 1-star because amazon screwed up and charged them, others give 1-star because it doesn't work on their device (even the description will say it isn't going to work). These things wouldn't happen with when people find the app and choose to purchase it.

The complaint seems to be that Amazon is talking out of both sides of their mouth. Telling the public that developers are getting 20% (thus making people feel good about installing the free app) then asking developers to agree to a rule change and accept nothing instead.
Early Stage Investing in New York Got Supercharged Mid-2009
shifty,

Admittedly, my response was focused more on the other beef than that single point. Given how much other information was in the post, I didn't think the 20% == 0% was the central argument; my apologies for missing that.

My core belief that in the long(er) term that the give away likely would have helped the movement and sales of your app still stands though. I think you leaving it in the store for an extra month is valuable data point, but not quite enough for me to categorically agree with "Yep, totally experiment failure, f Amazon!"

Did any reviews come in from any of those massive downloads? How were the reviews? What was the average score?

I would give up the argument completely at 6 months after a few more update releases if there were 0 reviews and 0 sales, otherwise I stand by my original statement that this was a GOOD thing for you and your company.

It is my feeling that you are focusing too much on this bait and switch. Fine, it happened... but you also have your app on 101k more devices than you did the month before so do something with that, flip your perspective a bit and take advantage of it.

You cannot convince me that having your app on 101k more devices in 1 day is a bad thing (except maybe the server costs). It may be scary/odd/unexpected, but you guys are smart, you will figure out some good way to grow from this.
The k is a useful visual hint, even when not necessary.
An Android emulator can only mean Android running on top of an ARM emulator How so? Android supports both x86 and ARM. I would have thought x86 on x86 would be the way to go since it has been done before with good performance. Heck they wouldn't even have to write anything just ship a customized virtual box or QEmu.
Getting Back to Zero
Sounds like a perfect fit, I think Turntable and Fred Wilson are both on the same key about ways in which people share music.
Agreed. That surprised me initially, but then I thought about it a little more. I think the issue is that with a "Free App" promotion, you get great exposure, but only to people who are going to buy your app for free.

- People who do see your free app buy it (if interested) and net you $0. They won't wait to buy tomorrow because why not buy it for free?

- People who don't see your free app won't buy later because they weren't exposed to you. Very few people will have "heard" of your app without having had the chance to buy it.
They haven't so far. Even some of them are designed that way.
I've been considering this approach for some of my Django projects. Right now I have an unpleasant hybrid of fat model methods and view functions that do a bit too much - having an intermediate class somewhere would clean things up a lot. My current app does a lot of denormalisation to Redis and Solr for performance reasons, which is mostly handled in the model classes - but having a bunch of non-SQL related stuff in ORM classes makes me a bit uncomfortable.
Yes, it was mostly that I would be more interested in watching a YC version than a techstars version. I think a single movie length documentary would be preferable to a series though that's more taste than anything else.

I also found this offputting::

What’s more, it should also be interesting to watch as Bloomberg TV’s board of judges, along with Cohen and Tisch, and many of the TechStars mentors dissect business models and offer startups and their founders pointed criticism and advice as they move through the program, reality-show style.

..especially the reference to the Bloomberg board of judges. I suppose I should give them the benefit of the doubt as they don't elaborate on what this board of judges will consist of.
The bit depicted in the last scene is the end of Season 1 of the series, as well as the very end to the first book. Minus some creative liberties, Book 1 of the series maps to Season 1 of the show in lock step.

Am I missing something? How are you a couple books in and that was a spoiler?
Lets say you are right, the dev is saying "omg look at teh numberz i lost 100 thousandz salez"

Note: Sales did not pick up after the free app sale. Therefore that free app sale was actually a waste of time. Furthermore their app requires a server to run, since its not a subscription-based app the server is 100% on their backs. They now support 100,000 unpaid customers with a server, and ALL those customers are going to cost them in the long run.

Amazon further moved by reducing the price of the app for 3 days without consent and modified description of the app.

TL;DR = sales on amazon are for profits of amazon only, get their numbers up but provide no real value for clients. They developer makes more money selling 10 apps a week than having the promotion which permanently harmed their revenue.
LulzSec gets Google+ boot, but returns
Nice report with numbers for my provider matching what I've seen. However, there is no mention of bandwidth caps, internet downtime, or availability of competing services. These three factors should be reported on as well.
This is a horrible strategy.

Full-tilting might be brave, but better players are always willing to fold.
>> And in some cases, they are using the Internet to disorganize the organizers.

Yes. That's what they did in Tunisia and it worked out well. People are not well educated and they can be easily mislead. They unleashed thousands of Internet Militia that started working on Facebook, groups, pages, forums, blogs... spreading a plethora of wrong information.
The DB write spikes are very likely to be EBS glitches, we've seen them do that frequently.

The crazy CPU issue might be related to the EC2 bugs in the Lucid Lynx kernel...Maverick is also problematic but Natty Narwhal has fixes for many of the weird Ubuntu-on-EC2 issues
Just as much as the proverbial yelling `Fire!' in a crowded theater is not exercise of free speech, perhaps fueling moral panic shouldn't be? </random musing>
>>I just have a hard time with the idea that doing harmful things is long-term beneficial.

I come from a protestant culture; we have problems believing that fun things can be beneficial. :-)

Krugman argued -- many of those things aren't harmful, given the situation the local people are in.

Instead of complaining about something that will be fixed automatically given good governance, work for good governance... Another of my standard links:

http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/01/why-poor-countries-are...

(Me? I am doing good by educating activists about the real problems. :-) )
This actually represents an extremely common misconception about MVC that's common among Rails developers as well as most of the other web frameworks that have chosen some form of the ActiveRecord pattern for their ORM. Model != Persistence layer.

A Model, in the classic MVC, is a model of your problem domain with classes that represent entities and services and whatever it takes to represent your business logic in code, not just a bunch entities that get saved and retrieved from the database. Your persistence layer generally lives below the model and knows how to persist your model's entities however you so choose. The ActiveRecord pattern really muddles this distinction by putting all of your persistence code right in with your business logic. It's a great pattern when you're building something simple with minimal actual business logic, but quickly becomes unwieldily when you get into more complex situations.
I've notified those in charge of the site. Thanks for pointing that out!
Flurry: Mobile Dating Apps Capture More Flirting Time Than Online Sites
London may soon have a free public WiFi network
Who owns the infrastucture will always have the ultimate control.

No matter how revolutionary your communication service is the guys with the cables can shut you off in a snap if needed. The Egyptian case is emblematic.

When a country is in chaos and internet and everything are still online it means that the government have control on much more than the infrastucture. And that is far more scaring than a shut down.
Calling from Gmail now in 38 languages
I don't feel this bill could even serve the purpose it was originally designed for. I would imagine that the perverts who haven't been caught yet, probably employ a decent amount of security in terms of encryption and proxies.

Oh, USA... what are you doing?
The end of Big Oil?
I can't remember the last time I did a formal analysis, but I naturally think about this stuff whenever I work with sets/lists, loops, recursion, string manipulations, or non-trivial standard library implementations....which is basically whenever I sit at a keyboard.
Google are using Java (a derivative of the Apache Harmony implementation of Java) but compiling it to a different bytecode that runs on the Dalvik virtual machine.

Dalvik is very different from the JVM in a variety of fundamental ways. The Wikipedia article has plenty of info on this.

Oracle's patents are on many of the inner workings of the JVM. Java itself (the language) does not have many unique aspects which were patentable because Java is largely derivative from languages that came before it.

So basically (as I understand it), Android uses Java in a very superficial way, and the patent issues at hand are whether Dalvik infringes on Oracle patents on VM techniques.
campnic,

I appreciate the response. I'll try and address each thing you mentioned.

--------------------

but let me tell you what i see. 'Amazon is building their market on the backs of apps by giving them away for free.'

--------------------

This company's app uses a simple software model. You pay $1.99 and you get their app. Your comment decries the entire Amazon model as benefiting them and not the developer.

I don't agree with this and here is why... let's say this company had a subscription-based app or some in-app-payment-enabled app. Suddenly it is on 101k new devices and let's say that 5k of them (5%) buy some simple subscription or even less, some 1-time-in-app-micro-resource inside the app for $.99.

Now suddenly this blog post has a very positive tone to it and the developers are praising Amazon for such a progressive app sales model and we are all here nodding our heads about how awesome it is and you and I are high-fiving each other over Skype Video because we are so excited.

The Amazon model isn't broken and it's not building a market on the backs of its developers. It can be an aggressive, mutually-beneficial relationship if both parties are prepared to take advantage of what Amazon has to offer. These guys weren't ready for that yet, but I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that come this time next year they will have a new app back in Amazon App Store, ready to do the 1-day-free-giveaway AGAIN, but this time they are going to be prepared to take advantage of all the traffic.

----------------------

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.

---------------------

I agree that my comment came off way too demeaning and I didn't mean it that way. I was getting carried away with making my point that from a sheer-number-of-device-installation perspective, they went from a trickle of water to a firehose in one day and that isn't a bad thing.
The best thing I ever did for my prompt was switch to zsh and start using oh-my-zsh[1]. Zsh itself has a handful of interesting features, but oh-my-zsh's built-in prompt theme support means I can cycle through prompts (most of which also include git or rvm info) with impunity.

[1]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
Semi-related: the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimperator
Seems appropriate here to bring back Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece from October 2010, "Small Change: why the revolution will not be tweeted":

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_...
The decision not to license Java was made before Android became crazy profitable, so maybe Google viewed it as expensive at that time. Of course, any license fee would have conflicted with Google's desire to make Android free. Even worse, all licensed JVMs must be compatible with either the Java SE or Java ME standards, both of which have major technical problems on smartphones. It's likely that an officially licensed flavor of Android would have been both more expensive and uncompetitive with iOS.
I built a recommendation engine: http://github.com/causes/suggestomatic

Because of the scale of data I'm using, I'm acutely aware of big-O. I guess what's most interesting is that gcc is able to take some of those "slow" operations and make them super fast (if it can fit them in a register) and other times I get the full O(n) effect. Valgrind has been a very useful tool, and can empirically show you where your program is going to blow up (if you doubt your big-O analysis).
Can anyone compare this to the other existing wysiwyg editors? The only thing I could identify as being unique is the floating toolbar.
It is amazon's standard policy. Many developers have commented on it.
... to a non-German?
Would be interested in that. Can you post back here if you do stick them somewhere.
For Chrome users there is Vimium: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhh...
I actually learned about Big O from a friend with a computer science background (I don't have one) when I was working on some jQuery show/hide code a few years ago. The idea was: you have a bunch of products on a page, and as you check and uncheck features you want, only the products matching your criteria are shown.

Originally, my logic was something like "for each checkbox that's checked or unchecked.... for each product that may or may not have that feature..." The nested for loop was fine with a small number of checkboxes and products, but as I got more products and more checkboxes, it began to slow down. My friend pointed out that it was Big O of N squared and explained what that meant. It was eye-opening.

I rewrote it to first compile a list of checked features (one pass through the checkboxes) and then show/hide the products (one pass through the products), which scales linearly.

I can't say that I think about Big O every time I write an algorithm, but I do have a sense that nested loops are dangerous.
I think maybe some of you are trying to make the analogy fit exactly and missing the general point...

There is a lesson in this especially for startups. I took "burning your boat" as a way to take that first leap and not look back. Someone else mentioned quitting your job. It's purposely creating circumstances that force you to look ahead and prepare for the future.
Facebook has taken in over $2 billion in VC funding but has a valuation approaching $100 billion. Twitter has taken in $1.16 billion for an $8 billion valuation.

Be careful equating a implied valuation based on a late stage private financing to actual valuation. It works when when companies are worth $1 million and there are one or two classes of stock. Not so much in these cases. The public markets will have the final say, and that could be a very, very different story for both Twitter and Facebook.
> They're converting polygons into voxels

Are you sure about that? He mentions atoms, but then the video also mentions that they're using procedurally generated graphics, which is something entirely different. Also, voxels would not work on the scale they are demonstrating, you'd need way too much memory.
INFO: Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Linked to Browser Usage
I really enjoyed that series and thought it was very well done. I hope it's even better on Bloomberg.
The problem is that those with no taste can't tell they have no taste. It's a wicked problem. Everytime someone mentions that Eclipse sucks, an Eclipse users asks "Why" because they truly don't grok it at a deep level. I see the same thing with Opera users. But, for sake of argument, let's boil down exactly why I hate Eclipse:

- The text editor is slow. There's no reason the damn text editor should be slow.

- Too many options, many of which are such extreme edge cases they're better off being hidden in a config file.

- Eclipse wants to manage too much of your project for you. It tends to package up and write files in it's own way, which is incredibly dense and very much the "Eclipse way" of doing things.

- Workspaces? I don't care where you have my "Workspace", I'll tell you where I want to save my projects though. On a project by project basis.

- Which version of Eclipse should I download? There's like 9,001 versions.

- Eclipse runs incredibly slow on modern machines. I have 4GB of memory and a multicore processor, Xcode FLIES in comparison.

- Why is everything a plugin? EVERYTHING. Oh, you wanted to install support for <insert language here>, well there's two or four projects that do that, you have to search for them in this really crappy search screen to install their packages. Or you can download them and install them manually, you do have a PhD right?

- Eclipse can't find your java runtime without you telling it exactly where it is. This is unacceptable in 2011.

Oh god, I could go on. But I think we all get the point.
Compared to GE, it seems to fit. It's all a matter of perspective.
For TN you could possibly do management consultant. These have been notoriously tricky and lots of horror stories. There isn't anything strictly marketing related.

H1B is possible. It's so far shaping up to be like last year where the cap isn't met until January next year. So plenty of time to score an H1B. 21600 out of 65000 have been approved as of 07/22/2011.

An excellent resource is http://www.canuckabroad.com take a look at the forums there.
200gbps firewall
If you solve problems that deal with a lot of data, or make a lot of calculations, you'll probably care about big O.

Last time I really had to consider big O in a web app was 2009. Of course, it had nothing to do with the fact that it was a web app and not desktop or otherwise. It had everything to do with the problem I was trying to solve.
Duncan Bannatyne drops £50k reward for 'breaking arms' of blackmailer
This scammer has a scary bplan. I mean what would you do if the scammer sets up a bunch of twitter accounts and posting negative reviews and then demands money?
>For an app selling 10-20 copies a day, how much would it have cost that company, paying a PR firm, to get it infront of 101k new users (forget about payment)... how many tweets would you have to get out or blog posts written to make 101k people aware of your app?

It's not just that, the app would've got in front of much more than 101K people for that many to download. Maybe a couple of million?

Looks like this strategy is:

1. Good for apps with ads or in-app purchaes.
2. Bad for apps that need server infrastructure on the backend.

Not all apps are like that. Since the app failed both the above categories, they shouldn't have agreed to the terms.

Other apps might be enjoying the attention happily and making money, I don't see anything 'rotten' about that.
The revolution has been tweeted, as shown in Egypt.

But that whole statement is wrong. It's not whether the revolution will be tweeted. It's will it be tweeted, facebooked, shown on YouTube, blogs, TV news, radio, newspapers, recorded for Wikipedia, etc.... Twitter is just one part of the new global information system.
A majority of web-apps are forms, data storage and display. I was more interested to see what sort of problems people do solve with Big-O considering it's not something that you typically have to use when working with a majority of web apps and simple push/pull sites.
Microsoft has a c++ SafeInt library that does this.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd570023.aspx
http://safeint.codeplex.com/
I've only started experiencing the crashiness after I upgraded to Lion. Before then, I was personally rock solid on Xcode 4.
I actually think the FSF completely misses the point here.

We shouldn't be using patent-free file formats, that have made compromises to be patent-free. We should be fighting to end patents (except for medicine). The best thing we can ask This American Life, or ProPublica, or Planet Money, or Marketplace to do, is to air more shows about the problems patents cause.

This type of act by the FSF is the type of thing that gets some guy at the office to say, "I told you. These people just want you to use Ogg on your Linux computer running on some patent unecumbered CPU (couldn't think of one). They're just not realistic."
A friend from HN (whom I'll leave anonymous, simply because I don't know if he wants his part in this to be known or not) was sharing information about what was going on in Libya with another friend, and mentioned that a virus was spreading through the opposition chat rooms. The virus made its way over to me for analysis, since its first stage was .NET (which I've got a good bit of experience dealing with). I broke the protections, wrote an antivirus, and within 48 hours or so, we had a detector/removal tool spreading throughout the opposition.

That is what spreading information is for. It's connecting the right people to the right problem.

Edit: I left out one key piece of information. The virus was explicitly written not to cause damage, or join a botnet, or anything of the sort; its sole purpose was to gather usernames, real names, and as much contact information as possible for the user hit with the virus. While we don't know who created this virus, it's entirely possible that it was created with the express purpose of identifying/locating certain members of the opposition.
This is the item from
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2836987
hitting the mainstream press.

I was unsure whether to submit this, as it doesn't really add anything new, but it is, as I say, in the mainstream press, and it does add the issue of threats being made openly on social media such as Twitter.
I totally disagree with the point about the nature of a free app getting a lift in reviews.

"How many reviews may be a half to a full star higher because the app was free and there isn't that feeling of being owed value by the reviewer because they got your app for free."

Breaking a rule, I cannot currently post direct references, I hope someone either corrects or bolsters this:

I have read at least one peer-reviewed study showing that people generally see a free service/item as having less value than one that costs some X $ amount. Perhaps that doesn't translate to how they feel about the quality of that service/item, but I think your assumption about the reviews being susceptible to an extra half point is not well founded.
Agreed, very narrow focus and although the results are positive, the publication does little to spur on development in this industry. American ISPs, we need to talk.
Blogged: A good reason why we are not in a technology bubble: Competition