skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is the Mac app store really so small that 15 sales per day gets you into the top 200 overall rankings?

Yeah, the volume is not that huge in the MAS. I just didn't know how bad the music category was.

I assumed the other categories wouldn't be much better - but as the OP writes in his post they were able to sell 900 copies/day. So I guess Mac users are just unmusical ;)

Btw. fun fact: I outgrossed Apple's Garage Band in India and China ... made me $3.50 and $7 ;)
Regarding the API, Netflix announced several months ago that the API was going stop supporting DVD options all together: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/06/upcoming-changes-to-open.... This makes me wonder how long they knew that this split was coming, or if it is just a coincidence.
The Trouble With Facebook's $12 Billion, 180,000-Jobs-Creating Economic Boost
I think you may be surprised. Microsoft has done this before; they see something which is apparently working for a competitor, and run with what they think is a logical extension, without necessarily thinking it through that well. Windows Vista's very, very animated but ultimately not useful Expose-like thing (Flip3D) springs to mind.
This rather sounds like "how to survive in a large dystopian corporation". Some are good tricks but some don't apply everywhere
Brilliant. Very true. Thanks for framing it like this.
Linux will only help as long as there is hardware open enough that you can install it. With tablets and smartphones and their closed drivers this will be a disappearing opportunity in the Post-PC world.
Looks good, but WePay lacks a number of features found in PayPal, such as recurring payments (aka subscriptions).
short version: 40% smart phones run Android, 28% run iOS, implies that you've got nearly twice the available market with Android as you do with iOS, doesn't mention fragmentation in the Android market at all so loses out on the objectivity measure.

When I first heard Andy Rubin talk about Android he said in that talk that his #1 goal was to disrupt the phone business. I think that goal has been achieved. I wish I were eloquent enough to explain the difference between Android and iOS to developers in a paper, I'd called "The Nordstrom's and the Flea Market" :-)
Oh, so the patents to search and crowd-review would be public. So crawl the search database and have those new results for review.

Looks like another group is doing this in conjunction with the USPTO http://peertopatent.org/. I guess you'd have to have some way of bringing the concerns to the USPTO for review, a relationship with them.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to keep the patent review comments around, that way if someone found themselves in a lawsuit they would have a starting point for defense.
Achieving software perfection through tough love
E-commerce development
Montreal website design, e-commerce development, CMS, internet marketing, SEO, logo & print media design. Pearl White Media is a full service web &amp; print design company in Montreal, Canada.
keep in mind that through the acquisition, nathanmarz got something out of it as well :)
Hi Nathan! this is awesome. I'm really excited to dive deeper.

some questions:

- I'm trying to understand the relationship between ZeroMQ and Kestrel in your architecture. is ZeroMQ used for message passing? and Kestrel used as a stream source/sink - aka a sprout? in other words, my assumptions are: zookeeper helps manage node discovery and coordination while message passing between nimble managed bolt processes' are through zeromq. kestrel queues are used for external integration (data stream sources). Is this correct or am I missing something?

- do you have any tutorials on using cascalog with Storm? are they compatible or have you developed a different clojure programming model/DSL for working with Storm?

thanks and again - nice work!
It is less "computation" and more "pattern matching/processing", something computers are really bad at, but people are relatively good at.
> Actually there is no good reason Microsoft didn't write an X86 virtual machine so that their tablets could run the old programs.

There is. You'd be looking at something very much like Apple Rosetta. Now, the first Intel Macs were substantially faster than the PPC Macs that most people had at the time, but even then Rosetta felt painful. All current and near-future ARM chips will be slower than most current Intel chips; you'd expect it to be even more painful. Worse, for lightweight apps it would involve far more CPU usage, which would hurt battery life. People wouldn't _care_ that their Windows 8 tablet was getting two hours battery life while their friend's iPad was getting 10 because they were running a legacy app which was hogging the processor doing instruction translation; they'd just blame Microsoft.

The case of Java is a little different; both Dalvik and JVM are designed to be JIT compiled relatively efficiently to multiple common architectures. Architectures like x86 and PPC are generally _not_, and things like Rosetta suffer as a result.
Maybe I'm working with bigger databases than I used to, but lately cache reheating has become a bigger issue, particularly with mongo.

I'll build a big db and then run ad hoc queries interactively and be like... this is pretty cool. Then I'll reboot, start the query, go get coffee come back and see that it's still running.
I appreciate the sentiment but next time just hit the downvote button.
Angry Birds game opens as a new attraction in Chinese theme park
"Uploaded the web app on a shared hosting account free of cost (courtesy: my friend). "

mmmmkay
Trademarks have no application outside of trade. If they're not selling batman.js or seeking to confuse buyers of Batman merchandise, there is no trademark violation. Especially considering this is a web development framework, which isn't even remotely related to Batman media.
The top button out of the three (⟲) in the column is it.
Why Have People Stopped Posting on Google+?
What It Means To Be Married To A Web Geek
Or, in fact, Microsoft will go one step (and not necessarily a logical step) further. There doesn't seem to be any question of a situation where, say, UIKit replaces AppKit as the modern way to write MacOS applications, and UIKit applications must be distributed through the app store. Microsoft, however, is pushing Metro as the new big thing for desktop apps, not just tablet apps, and Metro apps will be app store only.
* Ruby Show
* JavaScript Show
* Ruby Rogues
* Software Engineering Radio
* The Changelog

As you can see, I like podcasts; but all of them are fascinating and fun! :-D
If you can. Honestly I meant something along the lines of "Even that would be OK if you knew about the limitation and the script flagged indirect jumps as errors too."
I would say you're probably right about work experience being much more relevant. However, if you went to a very prestigious school, you might want to put it at the beginning for two reasons.

First, the education section takes up relatively little space, and a good school will quickly get the reader's interest.

Secondly, by the end of your work experience section, the reader has probably formed an opinion of you, and a good school won't do much to recover from a mediocre list of jobs.

Of course, none of this actually affects your qualifications for the job. However, HR people usually see things a bit differently than an engineer would...
TechCrunch Review: Google Wallet
Be careful specializing on technologies; that's a hamster wheel of a career. Better to specialize in application domains. Lord knows where ObjC will be 10 years from now, but search engine discoverability is probably going to be important for a long time.
Google Wallet Goes Live
I'm still getting used to the three fingers stuff. I feel like I'm learning to type all over again, start with one finger, then two...
That's good to know! I'm moving to Sweden soon :)
>Hosting does not count: It's a physical asset.

If, instead of 'subscription business' you mean "businesses that rent access to software without much by way of per-user physical infrastructure" then yeah, I think some people would agree with you. I would. businesses think that because they have a low marginal cost per user, they think they can rest on those high margins. This might be what you are talking about, and if so, I agree. I mean, if you have a business with margins that are very high, investors notice, and they start trying to horn in on your market; either investors are willing to throw gobs of cash at re-writing all your software then saturating the market with marketing, or maybe someone open-sources something that can do a lot of what you can do, and suddenly you have a bunch of small competitors using the open-source software willing to compete with you at a more reasonable margin.

I was thrown off by your use of apple's hardware business as an example; I mean, selling intellectual property divorced from infrastructure is a hard problem, really, it's a different problem from the subscription vs. one time payment business models.
Ya, the two finger is a change in OSX Lion. In Snow Leopard it was three fingers and opposite (swipe left to go back, right to go forward).

I'm still getting used to the change to two fingers and going right to go back..
skip ahead to minute 5 when the presentation starts. I posted this because recently there was a discussion about cancer on HN in which it seemed people were unaware of the evidence (discussed until minute 20) that cancer is a "disease of civilization".
Yeah but the relevance drops precipitously as soon as you talk about only restarting the DB server. Planned downtime is less of a problem than unplanned downtime.

For example, at Google my caching strategies could be exported in production with only a few minor changes to the code. If we experienced data center downtime I could actually offload a hot cache to the other backing stores in round-robin configuration. The problem isn't when one database server gets taken down, it's when all the servers in the datacenter get taken down at once without any warning.
I meant `sensible' purely in the technical sense. Postscript is superior to pdf. pdf is basically a stripped down postscript in binary format as a premature size optimization. ps.gz is usually smaller than the equivalent pdf.

I wouldn't send out postscript files to people I don't know, since you can't assume that people are able to read them.

I assume your comment was purely about the social point of view? Or are there technical reasons for foregoing postscript documents you may want to print? (Especially reasons that didn't exist 30 years ago.) Thanks!
تعارف بلاك بيري
"A shortcut should appear to be an application to the operating system (Spotlight, Finder, etc.)"

In the not too far future that would mean signing it. Shipping the private key with the app is out, so the signing would have to happen on Google's servers.

"A shortcut must have a customizable name and icon […] the name must be displayed in the menu bar."

I think the name that shows leftmost in the menubar is part of the signed binary (otherwise, one could build an app that perfectly impersonates another one). So, changing the name in the Finder should trigger a resigning of the app (on Google's servers, per the above). I doubt that is possible, as it would require some low-level hacking. (counterexamples I can think of are Interface Builder and AppleScript's saved as application. I think both are special-cased.
So you're saying it needs a half-man-half-bat logo to make sure it can evoke more than one image? :-P
>Similarly, we're moving away from a time of microserfs to hackers and coders who are free.

No, we really aren't. Yes, it's easy to be independent if you have a marketable skillset, and it's a great time to launch a startup. That said, the vast majority of programmers are still employed by big organizations where these rules are very much in effect. They aren't directed at people who are working on their own; they're directed at the majority who are working in a corporate climate.
There's the Kindle store.

I think the main problem is getting ahold of the SDK.

I thought it was a variety of J2ME they used.
Launching Google Wallet on Sprint and working with Visa, AmEx and Discover
British Transport Police: Illegal Downloading Kills Babies
A visual hint at just how big Facebook's photo library is. [img]
Regarding sugar, I recently came across this video, which I also found very good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

About half way through he explains, it detail, exactly what happens to sugars in your liver and compares glucose, ethanol and fructose. I found it very interesting, at least.
I really do not like the italic text. Immediately thought of cheap newspaper classifieds. Maybe just not make that italic? It is already lighter than the main headlines so it might be different enough.

Monospace for "internet things" is geeky, looked weird.

Lose the "(primary)" at the cell number unless you add another number.

Bullet points maybe?

"company." as single word in a line is sub-optimal.

"development teams of 2-5." -> "development teams of 2-5 people."

"Email" -> "E-Mail", I am not sure about this.

You silly Amer. wi. al. your abbr. in addr. :)
True. Also consider most of the world of Nokia Series 40, which by far destroys any other mobile operating system:

"Analyst estimates place the total number of devices shipped with S40 close to 1.5 billion, as of the end of 2010" [1]

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Series_40
I haven't looked into other options that much, but I know they're switching to something called Canvas: http://www.instructure.com/
Conditionals on the edge
Thought this might be a good place to get some feedback on my own template: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13800588/Anonymous.August.2011.pdf

Will share the .tex if people want it.
You're a patent attorney? Cool.

I'm a former law student who never quite got around to finishing my last class, and has kept up somewhat so tries to answer questions here and on Reddit until actual attorneys jump in. Some of my answers have been voted way up, so there is some danger people might actually listen to them.

Great to see an actual patent attorney around so that if I get something wrong there's a chance it will get caught.
Big Data, Stupid Decisions
Candid Camera con Cheerleader | Video Divertente
Writing code to execute in orbit seems interesting. Do you have any further suggested reading?
Still doing some maintenance on webOS for now (firesale TouchPads have been a nice shot in the arm...plus the fact that Palm decided to give a bunch of promo codes away for one of my apps!) but I'm working on an Android app for now and probably Windows Phone after that.

If webOS hardware comes back, I'd love to develop more apps for webOS, though.
Netflix Rebirth
And what happens when Apple decides to (or is forced to) stop offering those shows for re-download? It's still a "licence" for you to be able to download them, not the same as physically owning a copy. (though slightly better, since you can just not delete the videos, and store them yourself)
Top Coolest Patents Held By Steve Jobs
That may be true, but it doesn't mean the government hasn't enabled you.

Most people fail to recognize that a big function of civilized society is to shift the power from the physically-strongest to economically- (or politically-) strongest. Enforcing property rights, keeping the horrible realities of war out of your life, building and maintaining the infrastructure that allows you mobility and access to goods and services, keeping the poor happy enough to avoid revolting against the (evolutionarily unnatural) rich, and maintaining a mostly fair capitalist market are major functions of government that the majority of us take for granted.

The rich benefit from these functions significantly more than the poor, so it makes a lot of sense for the rich to pay more taxes.
Expect This Year’s f8 To Be Huge
Well we both know it's a very large grey area. But while I agree that the combination of the words bat and man alone could in someway be construed as non associated with the comic star, using code examples like:

batWatch = Batman
currentCrimeReport: Batman
address: Batman
number: "123"
street: "Easy St"
city: "Gotham"

- and -

jokerSimulator.get("why so serious") #=> "WHY SO SERIOUS, HA HA HA!"

kind of destroys the ambiguity.

Don't get me wrong, I think the technology behind batman.js is interesting and useful. I just think it's rather unfortunate that they chose a name with such strong pre-conceptions and that is so childish.
This is nice. Nothing in it is really new though, flipping through it I kept thinking about what I was doing five years ago. On the other hand, past is prelude.
High margins and a mass market strategy tend to be antithetical though.

I think by Apple's standards, anything that doesn't surpass the competition is a crappy product; at the very least it's not a product worth making. Apple had digital cameras and laser printers; what they didn't have was a way to do either product better than everyone else. Focus is certainly part of it, but Apple is less focused now than they were in 1999. Admittedly, compared to any other company, Apple still has extraordinary focus.

It's more my point that it's easy to imagine a world where a minority of Apple fanboys have all the Macs and iPhones and iPads, while Windows and Android rule the mass market. It's execution, not strategy--operational, marketing, retailing, and engineering execution--that makes the difference.
One good reason to use Redis with snapshotting to disk instead of Memcached.

Even if ALL your cache servers go down, you'll at least have the reheat load distributed among a cluster of cache servers in a super-efficient direct memory dump rather than hitting your DB servers over the network.
And here you are, posting on the successor to a government funded project, developed by brilliant minds who were likely the recipients of scholarships or state funded educations.

Just because some of humanity are dicks, doesn't mean that you didn't benefit from the people who aren't dicks.

And i'll reiterate what was said above. Just because you're making bank doesn't mean you're making people's lives better. You can make money making the lives of others awesome. But making bank doesn't necessitate that you're making the lives of others better.

That's the same logic that was used to over-inflate the sub-prime mortgage bubble. If you want to make the lives of others better, make sure you're doing that, rather than walmarting your customers.
Agree completely. The only honest way to make a living in a capitalistic society is to provide a service or product that someone wants. You can only make money by providing something people find valuable.
I saw them on German TV, and OK, maybe also in Michael Moore's movie (not sure, I watched it recently but I am foggy about the details). For example there are pictures of the tent cities that emerge.

To be honest lots of stories from the USA sound disturbing, but then again I can not claim to know every corner of Germany. Perhaps there are lots of people living in squalor here, too.
Yeah, that's more of what I was looking for. I've got several thousand dollars, and am about to quit my current job to go full with my current project. I want to make sure I spend money where it needs to be spent.
I worked in Higher Ed for a while, and when I left I thought "oh it should be really easy to create a company that makes better software than much of the academic software out there, probably for way less money as well". But then it hit me. Almost everything, even pretty inexpensive stuff is purchased by large and mostly unqualified committees (with a requirement that at least one member be insane). The process is usually drawn out over many months, even years (not just for blackboard scale sized products). The result is that to survive the key is not a great product, but to have patience and lots of salespeople in suits to send to listen to these committees and make them feel like you care. (In my experience even if you know what product you want, you still have to go through the ritual, the fastest I ever saw software purchased was 4 months, and that still required bringing in sales people even when we knew what product we wanted)

A team of 1-3 smart developers could create a product that is significantly better than blackboard and orders of magnitude cheaper in less than a year. But the process of selling the product would take more energy and resources than they could commit. A team of smart developers would quickly realize there are much better ways to make money and sell software. I believe this is the core of why most academic software (institutional level) is terrible, the only companies that would put up with this are ones that are more interested exploitation than creating great software.
If you are currently living and creating wealth in Somalia, then I agree - society doesn't help you much and if you pay any taxes, you can stop.

If you live in a first world country, you should realize that the difference between your country and Somalia is a result of government work and is funded by taxes.

Secure borders, police guaranteeing your property rights, courts, lack of bribes and corruption (relatively!), good roads, good lines of communications, educated people to hire. They don't just show up randomly in places.
you say childish, I say fun. why so serious? ;)
Great read. As somebody else said: yay for hustle.

What I wonder is if these guys have a contingency plan for when this particular app fad dies out. With consumer-facing apps especially, this seems like a huge danger.
Windows is a high-margin product.
I would say my comment was purely about the "user-friendly" point of view, which overlaps technical and social. The right answer, speaking from a technical worldview, is always at least related to what is user-friendly. Technically superior is the same as technically worthless if nobody can use it.
I think for the majority of human beings, it is true. For people on this site, it may not be.

The point is really the following:
* Pick a long-term thing
* Finish it
* Do this a lot of times
* Get good at finishing

It's a really hard thing to learn post teenage years. I had the same problem but started fixing it in my mid-teens. I couldn't finish anything before then. But then I started a couple of music businesses which were very interesting to me and I learned to finish what I started.

Compared to my 10 year old daughter who can now zip through many long-term projects with appropriate levels of planning. At her age, I remember basically not finishing any school work. She started out the same but working on a lot of projects, she's learned to finish what she starts.

The natural state of a human being is to be stagnant. It's very few people who continuously try to improve themselves. Therefore, get the continuous improvement habit as early as possible.
Java (well, JVM) has method hotswapping. It's very useful for debugging and development. Because of static typing, you can't change classes to add new methods, but you can modify existing methods. (There is something called JRebel which does allow you to change classes but I find it a little hacky.)
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The one thing I miss after moving from PHP is xdebug :/

Profiling too?
He says no such thing. He says we live in an imperfect world where the government has a role to play in getting us out of this recession. As to your second point, that's based on your opinion of what constitutes making society better.
Developer Turned Patent Lawyer's Rundown of the New Patent Reform Law
Especially with search engines becoming better and better.
I appreciate what Google is doing, but it really makes my latent tinfoil hat itch. Google already knows more about my online habits than I do, I'm not sure I trust them enough to give them that much more data.

When you're not paying for a service, you are the merchandise and all that.
named after or name inspired by?