skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: use ads or charge customers
I'm looking into writing an iPhone app that will require the use of a backend server. In order to self-fund the server(s), I need to get some form of revenue stream from the app. But I'm not sure if I should put ads on it, or charge a nominal fee.

If I put ads on the app, obviously this is a continuous revenue stream, but I'm worried about the user experience. If I charge a nominal fee (0.99 most likely) then I get a one-time bump, but then have to keep paying for the servers myself after that.

So I'm leaning towards putting ads on my app, but I'm not sure if it's a big deal having ads, or if the money would even be worth it? Any insights anyone could provide on this?
It depends very heavily on which RDBMS you use as to what ends up optimized. It's a relatively well trafficked subject, a simple google search turns up quite a few results, for example:

http://www.mysqldbahelp.com/2010/03/subselect-vs-join-perfor...

Disclaimer: I didn't validate his results ;)
It can lead to a similar result but is not the same. git commit --amend adds all staged changes to the last commit. fixup is a rebase of multiple commits into a single one, with the fixup preset.
I chalk this up to everyone who called out major technology companies for indirectly supporting SOPA through their membership in the BSA. Cheers!

It's finally starting to feel like the people who actually get what the internet is and how it works are being heard. It's about time.
Don't quote the variables, use placeholders. It's much simpler, and it's safer.

$dbh->do( 'INSERT INTO movie_collection VALUES ( ?, ?, ... )', undef, @{ $data->{movie} }{@fields} );
"...how do you explain the fact that people flock to the stores to buy Apple products at full price when Wal-Mart, Best-Buy, and Target carry most of them, often discounted in various ways, and Amazon carries them all — and doesn't charge sales tax!"

I don't mean to take anything away from Ron Johnson (how could I, who am I?), but I'd like to take a crack at answering this rhetorical question.

Apple's retail presence is unique for many reasons, but a big part of its uniqueness stems from the fact that they are the only computer retailer that has their own stores. The key point there is that you're going to buy a computer at a store owned and operated by the company that made the computer. That is entirely unique in the world of computing, and I'd speculate that there is a significant incentive present here.

When you buy something from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, etc, you're dealing with a retailer whose primary interest is in keeping he customer just happy enough to come back and shop with them again. If they can find a way to pawn the customer off on the vendor, they will. It's in their interest to do so.

Every customer knows this game: You bring a product back to a retailer. The retailer tells you that you must talk to the manufacturer. You call the manufacturer, and they explain that the retailer should just accept the item as a return and give you another one... or some similar explanation.

The point is that the customer ends up bearing the burden of managing this process. What a pain in the ass! I bought this thing and I just want it to work. I want to talk to someone familiar with the product. I want to talk to someone who actually cares about my feelings about the product.

The astute reader will note that each of the typical gripes above are solved by the Apple store formula because the employees are beholden to Apple, who is also the product manufacturer. They are the final stop on the responsibility train. No one else to talk to. Retail panacea!

Consumers know this. I know more than one person who are long time Apple fans, and they'll all tell you the same thing: buy from the Apple store directly instead of a reseller because they'll take better care of you.
That may be true of words like "deposit", but I can't even come up with a dirty use for "k mart".

There are also a fair number of misspellings (which might make sense to catch intentional avoidance), but the weird part is the correct spelling is quite often missing - for example, several variations of masturbate, but not the actual word itself.
Yes, but I think dev/stage/prod isn't going away anytime soon because you usually have dependencies to other parts of the system (for instance test and staging database, various subsystems, etc).
HP: $2.1 billion to wind down WebOS
Testing Integers
Very good point. I was thinking in terms of hours and did not make the connection to dollars. Thanks for the reply.
Great way to remove those unwanted stock apps
Quad-core Exynos 4412 could power Samsung Galaxy S III
Personally, I would rather be stalked by a search engine than by a social network that has seen my photos and knows who my friends are.

However, with the arrival of G+, this issue has become far more serious...
I've been avoiding recruiters due to past bad experiences. Do you mind the strangers of the internet asking for your recommendations?

I doubt I am the only one who is curious if you don't mind some unsolicited emails.
Celebrating the birthplace of the Internet in pictures
No. So many people have signed so many petitions, and the people who organize the petition drivers are often tricky, so the average person isn't quite sure what they signed up for. And many people sign petitions because their friends (or a hot girl outside the grocery store, or..) asked them to.

I would only worry if I planned to run for public office, and didn't plan to stand by my current beliefs.

Organizing an effort like this, yes. But mostly because it shows that you are an activist and can make things happen when you don't like the status quo. And I think the benefits of developing that reputation outweigh the drawbacks.
I thought I was alone in that preference! A designer was watching me read through an article and he was like ".... why are you clicking everywhere?"
It helps me keep track of my place, and I'm ready to control-copy even faster.
Atracciones Tur�sticas en South Beach
The smallpox vaccine that eliminated the disease certainly had lesser know and effective predecessor as early as 1770:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpox
The business model you're describing is YCombinator's business model: Invest in ten or twenty experimental businesses at a time, to hedge against each individual business's probability of failure.

The problem with this model was described by the OP: It's hard to sell "Product/Market Fit in a Box" because so much of product/market fit is tied to specific products built by specific teams. YCombinator finds product/market fits, but they don't just sell the ideas: They sell the specific companies and products along with the ideas, because these things are not separable. Indeed, PG's explicit belief is that even a valuable idea like, say, Dropbox is less valuable than the specific team of people who built Dropbox.

Because the value is in the people and the brands and code they create – these things are your real product – your "labs business" will need a constant stream of fresh recruits to replace the veterans who graduate. You're basically running a school. (Incidentally, it's no coincidence that, even in actual laboratory science, so much funded research gets done at schools.) However, in case you haven't noticed, it's not that easy to find a constant stream of smart founders, each with the skills to find a product/market fit and grow it into a business.

And there's a big cash flow problem. Poor people do not get to be angel investors, no matter how good the angel-investing business model is. Perhaps funding ten startups at once is less risky than funding just one, but it also costs ten times as much up front, and it will take years to find out if you have a winner. Better have years worth of living expenses in the bank. Better have a lot of money you can afford to lose.
This is really an awesome presentation - lot's of great nuggets in here. Thanks for posting Ilya!
I personally find multiple monitors distracting if I don't need to follow lots of log output simultaneously. The 27" Dell U2711 [1] with 2560x1440 works perfectly for me, and is pretty much the only monitor with this resolution in an acceptable price range (~$800). On this screen there is enough space for Eclipse, two Android emulators, and part of a terminal showing the logs, for instance.

A 17" display with about 1920x1200 also just works for me. I find lower resolutions very hard to work with.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/2922
Small note: wrapping URLs in <> confuses the URL parser.
No, there is no need. But there is an opportunity for publicity for the cause.
Suggestion: Keep scoring duplicate submissions as +1 votes, but also add them to the user's publicly visible "submissions" list.

I'd love it if submitted links always appeared on the my "submission" list. Currently, they only appear if the link is a new submission, with submissions of existing links being treated as an upvote and added to "saved stories".

This is a reasonable default for the scoring purposes, but caught me today when I was looking back for a story I was sure I'd submitted some time ago. Because I went through the process of submitting it, I thought I would be able to find it by scanning my "submissions". No such luck.

In the absence of a personalized recommendation system, I also find it useful to look at what else my favorite posters have submitted. Since "saved stories" are not visible to others, whereas "submissions" are, this is lost information.
I was performing an assessment of a content filtering appliance once and we obtained the word list of terms that it filtered.

I'll never forget that one of them was "vertical bacon sandwich", which to this day I still think they made up (I've never heard it used in any context ever). We laughed about it for ages.
How about an even better solution using cloudfront?

Both cheaper and faster than s3 :)
Thanks! I was worried it was too dense, but I wanted to make sure to put in enough advanced content that everyone would get at least some value out of it.
Desi Boyz Gets a Certificate, The Dirty Picture Passed Without Cuts
Desi Boyz Gets a Certificate, The Dirty Picture Passed Without Cuts
A source said: Desi Boyz manufacturers were expecting a U / A certificate as it is a big budget film with Akshay and John in the cast, most were aimed at families and young too. Unfortunately for them,
Wow. Props to AMZN. How long have these files been available?

I prefer to use my own choice of parsing tools and database software and really appreciate provision of raw files like this.

But I'm not sure what the purpose of requiring attribution is if the data can only be used for personal use. Assuming we comply with the license and do not share the data, who else besides the user is going to see it?

If a user builds a better movie database with this data, he must not share it with the world or even his neighbor. Sorry, them's the rules.
I use blosxom for jamesshore.com. Although I like its simplicity, I wouldn't start with it now. I don't think it's being maintained. I've also had some performance problems.

Jekyll's "static pages" approach has a lot of appeal to me, so if I were starting over I'd give it a serious look.
Facebook Testing Messenger for Windows Ticker+Chat Desktop Client
The Facebook Phone: It's Finally Real and Its Name is Buffy
A Specific Kidney Disease Diet Will Reverse Kidney Disease
Try http://kasabi.com/dataset/linked-movie-database and http://kasabi.com/dataset/dbpedia
You can always ignore G+ and browse like you used to.

Hell, create a whole new Google Account completely disconnected from your prior history and G+ connections on your main account. Thats what I did right as it came out.
One aspect of the experience in the Apple Store that Johnson doesn't mention is that all the gadgets there are powered up and you can play with them. I've never understood how cell phone stores and electronics retailers who almost invariably have dummy units out on display expect to sell anything to a casual buyer. This especially goes for Windows Phone 7; people who use it seem to love it, but it doesn't have much iPhone style mindshare so it seems like it NEEDS to be out there to fiddle with. But I've only seen dummy units in stores.
Sure. Where's the dbh coming from in this example though? And how do I get it out again nicely to print the SQL to the command line?
I would say it is because a) there is a lot of money to be made and b) Moore's law forces one to move fast to corner a market because one can almost guarantee that someone will disrupt it within a few years.

Early customers were knowledgeable about this. Because of that, they accepted (partial) failure of products in exchange for earlier delivery and/or lower prices. Those customers, in turn 'educated' the masses to accept crashing products.
What is your position on population control of humans?
There is some data available for personal, non-commercial use. http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?usedatasoftware

However, licensing the database is super expensive: "We offer licensing packages that start at US$15,000 per year." http://www.imdb.com/help/licensing/contact
Can unthinking contract fundamentalism please die out already?

Sorry, contracts that ignore Schelling points are invalid. Concretely, it's called a demarcation point and everything past it is none of your business.
Tips for Building an Online Business - from MME7
Fun? Curiosity?
HIV has been cured for Simian monkeys for quite a while because we could invasively experiment on them; so, the FDA stopping us from invasively experimenting (including involuntary innoculation of disease free subjects) on humans may have "statistically" cost more lives than it saved, but you'd have to be a Nazi to advocate it.
looks really cool and useful. One gripe: 3D pie charts are evil.

http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/12/02/how-succi...

Use bar charts instead, or if you're really stuck on the pie chart thing, don't make it 3D
Nice to see we have "juggalo" covered. Somewhere, Violent J is smiling.
Rodent Bait, Recent EPA Restrictions
Do we know how many days need to pass before it's possible to re-post exactly same URL? It seems to me that HN has a ton of undocumented features.
Pretty cool - I like it. Sort of like the Chef expert system written years ago by the Conceptual Dependency people except I bet you are matching recipe title names and recipes on the web to the text entered for "What is the dish?"

Because it is really important for my health to track my vitamin K intake, five years ago I built a recipe web site (cookingspace.com) that gives a breakdown of nutrients in recipes that I use. Simple to do, except figuring out the USDA nutrition database.
There are fallbacks in place for all the gradients. They look fine in IE7. The compressed size of the code is more relevant than uncompressed.
I have a problem with the way Facebook allows me to share links. Even by using your 'advanced' login security measures, I have been required to fill in CAPTCHAs hundreds of times for legitimate links. For instance, why is a link to an imgur JPEG file considered possible spam? Do you not whitelist domains? And isn't the repeated use of CAPTCHAs generally an abuse of the actual purpose of a CAPTCHA?

Additionally, Facebook has disallowed me from posting specific legitimate links. You've failed as a communication medium when you censor links. There was no indication that anything was wrong with these links that I shared with friends. There's no excuse for this practice.

Yet, at the same time, you allow seriously terrible practices on your own site, such as pages which require users to click on fake button images to do actions. It makes absolutely no sense how you are "policing" the integrity of your own site and the linking to other parts of the greater web.
Subway Commuting between 30 to 60 mins a Day Increases Productivity 44%
Lowering Your Auto Insurance Costs
That would be an example of an ex post facto law — punishing behavior that occurred before such behavior was made criminal — the creation of which is explicitly forbidden to the Congress in Article 1, Section 9 (and to the States in Section 10) of the US Constitution.

That's not to say your name wouldn't end up on a list of people who should be watched for further seditious behavior or something, but I'm pretty sure that kind of thing already happens, and has been for a very long time, anyway.
Hacking Chinese: a sino-centric language learning blog
Don't write to the same location. Everything needs to be a pointer, but updating pointers is an atomic operation. aka assume a is an integer.

a->(0x00010001)->5
a->(0x00030001)->6

You can keep reading 0x00010001 and getting 5 all day even as a is "actually' 6. This also works with strings or objects etc, the only downside is you tend to eat up a far amount of memory, and you need to avoid freeing 0x00010001 when something still thinks a's value is stored there.
I'm really happy to see more people moving into this space.

I've used a number of different systems (openCalais, AlchemyAPI, Zemanta...) in a variety of projects (Sentiment analysis, document classification...), and what I've found thus far is that while each system works extremely well within some restricted application classes, none come close to being general purpose APIs for the myriad applications developers try to throw at them.

A couple of pain points I've encountered are requiring a larger than expected corpus to generate meaningful data based on overly broad scope of the platform's analysis, or the lack of ability to apply negative signals from external sources. I find there tends to remain a large quantity of logic sitting rather redundantly on the application end to post-filter what's generated.

I don't pretend to understand the level of complexity involved or what's being worked on currently (not an NLP guy), but I do think there's a huge space to create publicly available text mining which can more effectively be applied to narrow domains.
Thanks for this.

We are likely saying you have a BoA account because of an email which they sent you. Showing "how we know" is a good suggestion but would involve us storing some info from your email (which I imagine people who care about privacy are against)

no, it doesn't know if you have ghostery or adblock installed, just tells everyone to do this

multiple addresses: we thought we had this bug squashed, apparently not. Shouldn't be an issue in the future

Glad you find the suggestions useful. If there is pickup, we'll add more account types (currently we scan for about 250) and tutorials.
The truth about IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP
In the author's defense, the advice is from a talk by Rian van der Merwe: http://speakerdeck.com/u/rianvdm/p/an-introduction-to-user-e...
Notes on design of a Haskell API
Yep - wonder if sites would try it, however. The credibility stamps most sites display are verisign + some hacker safe stamp + TRUSTe (a privacy seal). Do you think owners would show a "easy and transparent privacy" stamp?
How not to do developer launch events and an alternative suggestion
The difference is that the connections on G+ hold much less meaning than the connections on Facebook. Facebook automatically populates specifically-named friend lists based on your network data and asks that you refine their lists to improve their data collection.

Essentially, users who choose not to provide Facebook with their close friends, family, university, and location will be scoped out and tagged by their own friends using these smart lists. It's a disturbing strategy for data collection.
Damn. No one cares enough to even downvote this. I sure feel retarded for asking now.
That's the straight reading. Enigma, the biography that brought Turing widespread attention, follows a gay narrative: "we make modernity," and "the Nazis change, but they don't go away."

And now, after we made this bit of the modern narrative, you lot are stealing it. Typical. :-p
Sexo Oral
> Americans all learned to drive stick. Impact on human population of the planet: none. Impact on the rapaciousness of future generations: questionable. Feedback loops (as opposed to straight-line cause and effect) closed or otherwise in evidence at all: zero.

Either less drivers on the road or more accidents ( i did drive stick back in the Russia and it is very different driving, esp. when all around you is also driving stick). It would also result in smaller cars with less powerful engines. It looks like a very powerful feedback loop for me.

>Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet

Huh? who was driving automatic transmission cars?

>One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is.

a very Grand Statement of Dilusion. We'll see how we escape global warming.
BTW: chrome 15/Windows-text zoom does not work in your blog. FF 8.0/IE 8.0 increase font size as expected
No Death, No Taxes
Review of the Canon sd780is Powershot Digital Camera
Historically, those industries required less talented people in order to stay in business. Somebody has to sell the product, answer the phones, sweep the floors, etc. If you created a company that could operate with out all of those less talented people, this would be a boon.

Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else.

As to your second point, I can't imagine that's what he's really thinking. The few talented people who create the twitters, iphones, etcs, are far outnumbered by the millions of less-talented people who actually use those products.
To undo fullscreen in Chrome:

* Command/Shift/F

or

* Command/, (going into Preferences disables it)
google doesn't seem to have a problem with accounts being compromised from visiting malicious sites. I do like the incentive razor you've applied, but i think there is a simpler explanation in this case.
It's not my thesis, I just found it on net and it seemed cool.

I wish you good luck in your endeavor! :)
Why are you giving props to Amazon?
The article was published at 1 pm CT. The stock was down over 7% around that time[1]. The article didn't cherry-pick the days lows since it was published at the days lows. Still, this is a great example of how intraday market commentary is often invalidated in a matter of minutes.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=lnkd
YUI Theater
And an important part of this is that they pay extra care to the anti-theft systems so that they don't get in the way and stop you from using the products normally.

Many times I've seen cell phones where the anti-theft system was so bulky that you couldn't open it or close it completely, or access the keypad easily.
The value of ignoring things: why I really, really hate dress-codes
Because I believe they acquired IMDb many years ago and would have the final say in how the data may be used.
Haha, I agree!
Maybe it was a test case that they used to spot check the filter.
Additive synthesis is tedious, having to specify every harmonic and its relative strength. No surprises when doing additive, just lots of work. (I'm assuming you mean adding stacks of sine waves, rather than layering different patches on the same note)
MLM Tip For Stopping Attrition
I know, but since I will be using either EMC2 on Linux or Grbl on an Arduino to run the G-code, I can live with CAM software that runs on Linux.
Chances are the options weren't restricted options that employes could exercise ahead of time and that there was a 4 year vesting cliff. Most people don't exercise options at vesting time so I'd bet that most of the options were taxed as short term capital gains (and that would mean that 25% is actually probably a bit low for most employees with where this would get them to).
Show HN: Arduino guitar foot pedal controls shipping at Thanks Machine
The 30 best business cards of 2011