skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Apptergy for businesses to understand the mobile app stores better
Big brands and businesses are not fully utilizing the potential of the mobile app stores...

I am a student at Singapore and as part of my final project have a proposed Start Up plan implementation of a web app that will:

1. Analyze a brands performance in the app stores in terms of downloads, features, ratings and other parameters.

2. Benchmark mobile app performance of companies against their competitors in terms of downloads, ratings, features, time of usage etc in their specific sector and geography. Then also give them an industry standard benchmarking score.

3. Suggest new features for their apps based on a human generated recommendation engine for new features that could be included in their application by analyzing products/features in other industries and competitors.

Lets say a Bank wants to find out how their mobile app is doing against other banks or any of their competitor. They can use our web app and compare their app versus others in terms of downloads, users, ratings, features etc. We are targeting this such that they can continually monitor their mobile app. Also the human powered feature will suggest features they could incorporate in their own app.

Do you think this is a good start up idea?
Who do you think will be the potential customers ?

I have the launch website at http://apptegy.com/
The 448.2M number also assumes that there is no overlap between the 152 average guests at each wedding. Does the average guest only attend one wedding per year? I don't think the number itself is a big deal but it's sloppy enough to stand out to me right away.
How To Create A Business, Product or Arts Page On Google+
#1 you rock for Redis. hail/praise/kudos (seriously!)

#2 I and a lot of other programmers tend to think of a string (for me, going back decades) as "a byte sequence which just happens to represent text, in some encoding". It's not merely a byte array. A byte array could be say an encoded image (PNG, GIF, etc.) or some other serialized object. That said, this distinction/confusion in terminology is not important. It pales in comparison to how awesome Redis is. :)
"I ruled out Java because it seems like every computer science major already knows it, making it more competitive."

Incorrect. There are more Java and .Net positions out there, and people hire for experience, so as soon as you have any measurable experience, you have a good chance of finding a job. Java usually pays more than PhP/Ruby/Python, and so does .Net. CS majors have an edge for a short amount of time over the long haul of a developer's career. Not having a CS/MS CS/PhD CS can get in the way of getting some jobs, but apply to them anyway. Experience usually counts more than education, except for places like Google that have insane interviews.

If you want job security and to be able to work anywhere, go Java and/or .Net. As part of Java and learning the JVM, you have a good base for JRuby, Android (like a specialized Java subset), Groovy/Grails (Java-based), Scala (runs on JVM), and Clojure (runs of JVM).
Sure, you can "improve compression" -- just compare yourself to an awful encoder! This is the strategy used by thousands of marketing whitepapers.

But x264 isn't an awful one; it's the best, by a factor of ~30% over the nearest competition according to the most recent independent comparison (http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2011/). Every company loves to claim that their "custom magic algorithms" are amazing and magic, but when push comes to shove, nothing compares to what free software can put out, and this shows no signs of changing, at least before the release of HEVC.

If you have a "magic algorithm" that does better than the current state of the art, send it in to be benchmarked! I mean, if you can do better than the encoder used by Google, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, and thousands of other companies around the world, surely you'll be able to get some customers if you publicize this super-amazing-magic algorithm, right?

Or maybe, like the thousands of other companies claiming the same, your "magic algorithm" is bullshit -- or a good idea, just already implemented in dozens of other encoders out there too, and you're demonstrating its efficacy by comparing it to a junk heap like Quicktime.
guess I was wrong... the carlhuda beast is already grazing other pastures
The first I heard of a service like this was
letters.com back in 1994. My friend started it.
He ended up selling the domain for 5 figures
and went on to do the webcounter at digits.com.
YumOrder Lets Individuals and Businesses Easily Maintain Online Brands
Presenting _is_ choosing to change one's vocabulary and speech habits, in order to bond with the audience. It's a matter of how good one is that determines whether a "fuck" is a fuck-up or a fuck-yes.

[eww, that parallelism felt forced, but I can't resist.]
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I love hacker news for discussions about business and about learning about how the smartest programmers in the world think about programming.

When articles that deal with the world outside of startup finance appear on Hacker News, the articles and comments usually have so little knowledge behind them they are practically unreadable.

It would be nice if this community could keep the articles they post based on VC funding, angel funding, debt funding for start ups, option pools, etc.

The comments here are more representative of political ideals and not based on facts.

(Also, I understand that is not entirely true as some comments are actually quit interesting, but I have to wade through so much garbage to find them that it isn't worth it.)
this quote backs up your assertion quite well: "The idea of FOAF was that everyone would create little XML snippets that represented their interests."
I just had a LOST flashback.
They use 30% rice in the Czech Republic?

I know Alton Brown thinks Bud is excellent with sushi
the #1 rule of Windows development/hosting is to NOT do Windows development/hosting. Bias to Linux, Mac or another Unix-like instead. Life will be so much better in so many ways.
Correction: as JoeAltmaier pointed out, I should have written something along the lines of "failure rate" or "hazard rate". Clearly a "survival rate" like that would make no sense.
Not only would I drop the F-bomb in the presence of the new boss, I dropped it at my interview. And I got the fucking job.
Awesome. Looking forward to seeing more of you guys in the future!
As one of the ML alums on HN, happy to share a few pointers.

The lab is a total of about 250 grad students and faculty, including MS and PhD. I imagine about 60% of grad students are MS. Even if you have an MS before, you'll have to start with the Media Lab MS degree.

You really apply to a specific adviser, so its important to know your research area, and define your past work in that context.
This is one of those issues in which I clearly see generational differences. I am pushing 40, and my opinions are at odds with most of the commenters.

In your personal language, your choice to curse or not is none of my business. But in the business world, it is unprofessional.

I won't think you are a bad person for cursing. But it will lose my respect. I will most likely stop taking you seriously. And the likelihood of my choosing to do business with you in the future is minimal.
You can do that with HTML5 (I suspect it's coming soon)
This is very interesting, and relevant since I just found out the air traffic control display at the local airport in my hometown has been replaced with, to quote one guy, "a big ipad"

They're up in the air about it because now, instead of knobs and switches, informed by paper maps and pencils, they've got this fancy, 'high-tech' touch screen display - 3x5 feet of shiny glass.

There was a minor storm in a teacup about it, because it leads to a much greater potential for accidents, bad landings and congestion (it's a very busy airport)- but because it cost millions, nobody can go back to good ol' pencil, paper and brain.
Now that a reference my dad would love :) Not sure if the regular HN folks would know of Bourbaki though
I don't understand. If a coffee shop has the same 100 customers every day for a year, is that fewer customers than an airport coffee shop that gets 100 different customers every day? Where was it written that customers are counted once per year? It seems obvious that they mean 448M wedding attendances per year.
For me, voice control became refined and mainstream when I told my android phone "Navigate to <friend's name>" and it automatically pulled up Google Maps and started turn-by-turn navigation. (Over a year ago.)

But I don't really think voice control is going to be very useful except in situations where hands are too busy doing something else.
>> There is no way to avoid the day of reckoning.

That would be true if it weren't for the fact that a good bit of our economy relies on confidence and trust. Confidence that there isn't a huge recession or depression in the near future, and trust that others will remain in business if you deposit/lend them money/invest.

So in a very real sense, a panic, even if it isn't based on anything fundamental, can set you back very significantly.
> Take the most popular person in high school and get him to design social software. It would suck. Bad.

Let's assume they had the technical skills to do it, why do you think it would suck?
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Yep, sure, lots of people will remember Zach and talk about him. It's too bad that they won't remember what he was talking about. When the presentation drowns out the content - assuming there was any content to begin with - that's a problem.
Great response. I agree with most of your points. I'm considering removing the "Discuss this deal" box all together since it's never used. I think a comments box under the deal would be better.
Astonish Poland&#8217;s Parliamentarian Had Transsexsual Surgery in Thailand.
Nice. :) This made me register an account here at HN so that i can post comment. Thanks for the heads up!
I'm reminded of Dick Proenneke http://bit.ly/s2VFdu.

Here's a start to "Alone In the Wilderness": http://bit.ly/uAcBsD , documenting his work and time spent building a life in Alaska, very much "handmade".
What's the Best Way to Meet Your Co-workers? Break Their App of Course
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Awesome, this service is needed. I had the job of finding/implementing an outside-accessible group chat service for a startup. I wanted Campfire, but one of the founders didn't like newfangled web chat and required it be traditional IRC.

Setting up open source IRC servers is a pain. They are almost completely void of documentation. And as the article points out, IRC doesn't usually have the traditional username/passwords or access controls you really need for business group chat.

I realize this is an MVP. Here are somethings I think should be included:

* Groups. It makes it way easier to manage access controls.

* A way to invite outsiders. The specific use case is inviting customers to join a chat, without the customer taking up a user/license seat.

* You've probably done these but I can't tell from the website; persistent chat rooms and varying admin privileges (ops in some rooms, not others, ability to create rooms, etc.).

EDIT: Why was my comment down voted?
That sounds like a lame excuse. Maybe he was just unaware that he was swearing so much. I think it’s generally easier to swear in a second language: There are no parents around to tell you not to use certain words. I certainly don’t feel the same when swearing in English and German.

I almost never swear in German – written or spoken – because it feels wrong to me†. I have less problems swearing in English. This goes so far that I tend to say “fuck” to myself when something goes wrong and not the German equivalent (or if I do use a German word it’s the tame „verdammt“ – “damn”).

There is this comedy routine from 1998 by a German comedian about exactly this topic, by the way. I found it on YouTube, even with subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxNLENPsbq4 (I’m not in any way claiming that it’s any good, it just fits so well.)

—

† I don’t have a problem with others swearing. I’m not offended by it.
Anything would work for the vast majority of the world as long as it was stable. That shouldn't stop us from not artificially making it worse.
Great article!

I'm not too worried because I think voice manipulation (Siri, others) is as natural as hand manipulation and one at which digital devices will become more adept in the coming years.

Voice control and speaking interfaces, backed up by visual ones would completely overcome the concerns raised here.
Comcast went with IPv6. But it doesn't seem all that surprising that Rogers just annexed 7/8. ;-)
Nice; that's the same sort of math we're doing.

Note that the BackBlaze machines are optimized for very cold data since they only need to support backup and restore. We also do custom hardware at SpiderOak, but we support web/mobile access, real time sync, etc. That makes our hardware slightly more expensive because of the generally warmer data. So you're off by a few pennies, but certainly in the right zone.

For Amazon, I suspect their internal S3 cost is actually quite a bit higher than either BackBlaze or SpiderOak since their data is warmer.
You underestimate the power of BS. I worked for a company that raised capital hand over fist and sucked in companies like nobody's business. We could have been doing nothing or been awesome as hell, but it didn't matter- it was all about the slick CEO selling his wares. And in the end, the company still exists even after seemingly burning up in a significant blaze of glory. Money is more important than technology. Unfortunately, many here don't realize that yet.
Another similarity will be the lack of online banking. Many credit unions and small banks lack the scale to support that...

See also: ATM access.
Are you sure it wasn't a... flash forward?
AOL used TeleMail/SprintMail for this around 1992; Sprint provided an X.400 gateway to both fax and US postal mail, but IIRC the postal mail gateway cost something like $1/page and so nobody ever used it:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Qa6bcZ0HuVUC&lpg=PA7...
Hey this is really cool man! Great work. I love it.
"When those far removed from the creation of wealth-- undergraduates, reporters, politicians-- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice!"

Your comments preceding and following this sentence suggest that injustice doesn't enter into the equation.

But on the contrary, anyone who's paid attention the past 30 years is well aware that inequality has increased greatly, and that the main reasons are various forms of carefully calculated injustice, such as:

1. Regressive tax policies shifting the tax burden from the wealthy and the corporations to the middle class.

2. Mass wealth transfer scams such as the housing bubble and the S&L scams of the 1980s.

3. Massive spending on foreign wars which benefits a very narrow slice of weapons companies and related businesses - that money could have gone to build up the wealth of the nation, in the form of infrastructure, education, etc.

4. Massive deregulation of the financial industry, which allowed many Wall St. scams to proceed without hindrance.

The glib thinking exemplified by the quoted sentence is typical of "libertarian" ideology that doesn't expend much energy on thinking about the problems cited above.
Let's assume they had the technical skills to do it

So basically a nerd with social skills?
I'm PUMP
Actually, we tried this in the depression of 1920-21. We recovered so quickly that the depression is hardly notable enough to make it into a history class.
$19/month cell carrier Republic Wireless overwhelmed on release day
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If you don't pay bonuses, do you give a managing director at a bank a 1 million dollar salary independent of performance? How is that a good thing? And if you tried to pay her very little, the bank would just turn itself into a shadow bank and proceed as before. Remember, GM was not a bank, at least nominally, and it was bailed out
Habits – The Engine that Drives the Success Train
I like it! Clean interface and quick search. The top articles feature is handy. Maybe make the search options more customizable though? Being able to tweak the parameters of the search would be awesome
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Thanks for the feedback! As time goes on its article database will grow and it'll be more useful
> See, the thing about this comic is using profanity as a way to demonstrate non-conformance.

FYI, It's this type of trite language that sets off my pretentious cunt alarm. I stopped reading after this sentence.
The point is, the GPS transponder lowers the bar for supporting surveillance to the level that widespread abuse is possible.

This is particularly true of smaller police or quasi-police organizations whose professional standards aren't quite up to snuff. For example, the NYS Department of Labor placed a GPS tracking unit on the personal vehicle of an employee suspected of misconduct. They are now facing a big lawsuit.

In the good old days, the police could tail a suspect 24x7, but they would need the clearance to commit staff and overtime to the effort. If a detective goes to his Captain looking to follow around some random kid for weeks, he needs justification.

Today, you need to buy a cheap device and spend a few minutes planting and retrieving it. That minimal expense allows you to track a subject with complete impunity for weeks.

The inevitable result of all of this is going to be widespread abuse. A free society cannot remain so if citizens cannot conduct their affairs without looking over their shoulder (or under their car) at every moment. We need judicial oversight to answer the age-old question: "Who watches the watchmen?"
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XMPP MUC also has the problem that the largest XMPP client, Google Talk in Gmail, afaik does not support it. It handles multi-user chats via some proprietary method that only works for Gtalk clients.
If anyone is interested:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/
You're totally right. I posted this before I went and found out that this guy's knives are in a different realm than what I've ever used. Looks like they run in the region of $300-500, not $50-80 which is what I was referring to. There's a few posts elsewhere in this thread that point to other mass produced but quality knives. The nice knife I like and use every day is definitely mass produced. I learned about knives today!

That being said, I still think patio11's characterization is a bit unfair, and I stand by what I was saying about coffee.
I haven't had any issues with the speed recently. Maybe that's because I'm in an area with pretty good Sprint service. There were significant network issues back when they first introduced the Optimius V, but those seem pretty well fixed by now.
>If there's no money to be made in producing content, then nobody will produce content

Sigh, how often have I heard this by now? It's a lie, and you know it. The only thing that will stop existing are the big content industries.

>There needs to be some way to monetize the labor and time that goes into the production of art and entertainment.

And where did I exclude that? I merely said that paid distribution of content is no longer a viable business model. Gatekeepers are no longer needed in a modern information society. Besides, I don't care about the copyright industry's profits and it enrages me that you think I should[1].

>IMO, anyone who claims that paid distribution needs to go away also bears the burden of proposing an alternative that makes rational business sense.

Why should I need to propose an alternative? I'm stating a factual truth: the business model is obsolete, and trying to preserve it by force ultimately hurts everyone's rights and liberties. If the alternative is no alternative, then so be it.

An analogy: If somebody would invent teleportation, it would not be his or her job to come up with new business models for the industries that produce or provide other means of transportation. And no, this is not an utopian scenario. It has happened hundreds, if not thousand times in the past. A new technology came along, making an older one obsolete, and possibly putting entire industries out of business[2]. Nobody complained. Until now - when the content industry is the first that thinks it's entitled to laws and regulation to safe their business model from rightly going the way of the dinosaur.

[1] Shamelessly ripped off from http://torrentfreak.com/i-dont-care-about-your-profits-and-i...

[2] Another very nice essay by Rick Falkvinge, also on TF: http://torrentfreak.com/nobody-asked-for-a-refrigerator-fee-...
As a former banker with 18 years experience, this article is 100% on the ball. Having worked as a senior executive during the times of Global Crossing and Enron I saw how the system was gamed!.

Working at this large institution I saw how the bonus system, made the supposedly senior bankers act like a group of Mary Kay cosmetic sales girls, seeing how they could optimize their bonuses by playing the game, and how they got the lower levels of the pyramid to play along because of the partial subjectivity and discretionary aspect of the bonus system. Because of this discretionary aspect, lower levels of the pyramid, we're unlikely to question the creation of complex and funky new products specifically designed to overcome impediments to maximize that short term bonus.

When this giant "ponzi" scheme began to collapse, I saw how those same greedy senior executives proceeded to panic and destroy significant strategic parts of the business solely to stop the leakage of their bonus pool and try and cosmetically dress up the banks short term results to justify and maintain those 6-8 figure bonuses they had thought they were going to receive.

Many of these executives later "resigned" or were "retired" by their boards who should have been accountable for the damage reaped by these masters of gaming. Most of them(I think all of them!) retained huge bonuses all at the expense of the shareholders and employees. Writing off 100's of millions of $ of shareholder and depositor value. With middle class retail shareholders, depositors, and employees paying the price of this borderline criminal behavior.

Most galling to me is that one of these executive used some of his "hard owned bonus" to have a faculty/ building at my alma mater named after him. I believe this was probably more driven by ego than guilt!

Nassim is 100% on the ball. Nothing has really changed and history repeats itself, and unless government starts to listen then I fear the outcome will either be financial collapse or revolution (#occupywallstreet?).
If the entire premise of Google+ is that it's supposed to be Facebook from the GooglePlex, yes, it's a failure.

However, the strategic intent of G+ may simply be to put pressure on Facebook and act as a fire-break to prevent Facebook from moving into Google's really profitable area, search advertisement (Facebook does well at display ads right now, but it's a smaller market than search).

By putting G+ out there, Google is basically saying to Facebook, "Go ahead, do your social search (and ads), we'll copy it immediately because now Google already have a social network in place".
Technically Freenode doesn't allow the creation of random channels for any purpose; they are required to be for some open project or open source software. (I say this as a member of quite a number of random channels on Freenode; but they could technically crack down at any time, and I would not recommend this approach for corporate use.)
Hewlett-Packard: A Once Formidable Company