skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the only reason people are setting the 0.99 price is App Store promotion but you decide to use a different method of promotion, then you can set a higher price.
I used yapps2 for the DSL parts of GameClay. It's probably not the best Python parser generator out there, but it was installable via apt, simple to use, and familiar to people who have used Antlr. Had a simple DSL written in 2 days.

Also, if it's just a quick-n-dirty hack, don't underestimate the power of regexp/split() parsing. Yeah, everyone says you shouldn't do it, and you probably shouldn't if you're planning on maintaining things for a while, but you can get going really fast without learning any additional tools. And for maybe 80-90% of the things you'd use a DSL for, it's perfectly adequate.
Ideally, companies wishing to sell their wares will compete like this.

Is it ideal for products to be ranked on number of units sold and nothing else? Says who?
Unless someone is going to buy them for a few hundred million dollars they're completely screwed as far as I can tell.

Digg is a business that could have been run really frugally and sold for $50-$100 million. It's not a business that should have been blown up to 80 employees and hundreds of servers.

I agree Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson messed things up, but how is new leadership going to undo the spending of so many millions of their investor's dollars?
Because the cost of entry is so low, we should expect a revolving door of app developers heading to the gold rush. For every one that gives up, another will take his place.
I agree with you in principle but I disagree in reality. Due to the influx of equal parts quality and junk, a lot of consumers have experienced buyers remorse on the AppStore. Particularly in the first few months... remember the flack the AppStore was receiving for the junk?

That said, there's a significant barrier that even a premium 'niche' app must now overcome aside from generating awareness. Couple this with the app likely having very few reviews, not in the Top 50, etc.. then a buyer will become very cautious. (Myself included). In addition, user review system is broken (1-way channel), significantly less than 20% of customers will leave feedback, and upon uninstalling the app rating defaults to 1-star.

I've been struggling with trying to figure out how to best overcome this as a marketer. It's difficult, costly, frustrating, and the .99 trend certainly doesn't help things when 12,000 apps are battling for 50 slots on a poorly weighted popularity curve.
I don't understand why most people here are siding with Twitter. Their TOS clearly say that they don't tolerate impersonation, but running a fan account (or even simply holding a Twitter name and not using it) doesn't amount to impersonation. Why should any company automatically be granted the right to their username on any service? Of course Twitter reserves the right to do whatever is best for their business, but stop glorifying Twitter for doing the right thing, they have just as much of an interest in profit as this guy does.

Also, I find it very odd that a community of people who seem to mostly fall on the libertarian/free market side economically have a big problem with domain squatters, or people on Twitter attempting to take advantage of an imperfect market. While I certainly did not like domain squatters when we were searching for company names, I understand why they exist. The market for domain names is not efficient because it values all names at the same price (lsdjhaofiwjleijwa.com costs the same per year to register as google.com) of course this is wrong. Where there is an imperfect market there is usually money to be made, with domains you have domain squatters. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that domains don't tend to lose value so the cost of holding them is very minimal. Its a market, someone is going to make money off of demand. To suppose that domains didn't have monetary value and then they suddenly did when a squatter bought the domain is absurd. They always had value, everyone was just paying below market rate before.

Don't like market pricing? Go back in time to Communist Russia.
> Other people might.

Other people do. Maybe it's not the proper terminology, but it's too common to ignore it.
People have been sharing files by swapping external hard drives for a long time, definitely nothing new there, but I doubt it will be the new big thing. One of the things private trackers like waffles.fm, what.cd, and OiNK cater to is people that want obscure things and these can't be had by calling up your friends for a hard drive party. There is obviously way more variety on the internet than what your friends might have.

So, you are correct that there will be counter strategies implemented by the P2P community. This is the way it has always been. ISPs like Comcast started throttling torrents, so torrent clients started encrypting their transfers. Early on, when Napster was sued, new P2P programs emerged that lacked a centralized server, so you could never just shut down the community.

I don't know if they will be able to encrypt and mimic http or mail protocols though, the volume and behavior of traffic just wouldn't match up. I'm not as sure about this so I might be wrong though, but wouldn't it be easier to mimic voip or some other streaming protocol?
Wide brush generalization supported by an anecdote and a
hypothetical situation... pass.
Also: I recall reading another book where the author wrote that he offered to work for free, and was turned down. And it was a huge blow to his ego.

Not every company wants to deal with unpaid interns.
Every market has a tail that looks like that. The App store is not unique in having a long tail.
Domains and account names all have a market value, to suppose that the value should remain at $0 is to ignore the fact that certain names hold value. I'm not sure how anyone expected that these names would not get taken by people who saw the (pretty obvious) fact that these would become "monetarily valuable at a later date"

Hating domain squatters is the equivalent of disagreeing with free market principles in the domain economy. When things have uneven value and are sold for an even amount (free in the case of Twitter) its not surprising that a market develops to regulate this exchange.

In this example Twitter is the central regulator and can control things in a way that benefits them the most. However, if you think they are any more worthy or have less of a profit motive than this other guy you are simply fooling yourself.
That was exactly my point. If apps were sold the same way DVDs were, then placing in the App Store wouldn't matter as much. My feeling is it's actually possible to sell apps this way. For instance, the Ocarina app had so many people writing about it that I believe it would still have sold many copies at $5, especially if the people writing about it could easily toss in an affiliate link.

Perhaps the same would be true of AdSense sales.
Vim for the win!

I'm not a vim expert, I actually know the minimum you need to do work, and I've found it very good, but I hove almost no experience with other editors or IDEs. I do mostly python and I don't really need an IDE for that. Despite its learning curve, I've found vim to be really easy to use, once you get used to it, your muscle memory does all the work for you. Considering the time you work in an editor/IDE, i suggest just sticking to the one that makes your hands hurt the least.
If an app only has one user, it doesn't need to scale, it needs to perform. Scalability is all about users and only loosely related to performance. Datasets are irrelevant.
Madoff Skandal - Madoff Opfer - Madoff Betrug - Madoff Verluste
It's a huge mistake to buy into the argument that you need to sell at $0.99 to make any money. More than half of the top 100 paid apps on the store cost more than $0.99. Many of those cost >$5.
Because, unlike Julian Simon, some people know that the planet is made of matter, and they know about the Law of Matter/Energy Conservation, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and other physical properties of the Universe, any of which by itself would make it impossible for natural resources to be infinite.

Some people have also heard the story of Rapa Nui, whose inhabitants discovered that natural resources are NOT infinite, shortly before their deaths.
My mistake.
Its just that its a little frustrating to be waiting for a thougth-provoking comment and find that i was just downmodded.
Thanks for calling me on that.
Smule Shares Its  Audio Technology To Bring Cigarettes To Your iPhone
I've also been interested in DSLs and found some very cool code samples implementing an EDSL (embedded DSL) for describing shapes. I have looked at it countless of times for ideas when I'm writing my own. Although the code is in Haskell I think you can learn a thing or two from it.

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/afp/lectures.ht...
Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
This social factor includes murders and other petty crimes, as well as holocausts, wars, and things of that sort, all of which have a tendency to reduce lifespan, and none of which would stop just because we live 2500 years.
If youre going to discuss something it helps to have a common ground to begin with, as i dont pretend to know what consciousness is or if it even exists, i asked Tichy to tell me his definition so i can understand what hes denying.
Not to the point of defining all the words, just the basic concepts were trying to understand.
Play nice! It is the hard problem.
HuffPo has that safe harbor for "user content" as specified in their ToS. The most obvious thing is the comments on their articles. If I cut/paste a NYTimes article into a comment on their page, they can't be sued for it.

For content that an agent of their's posts, they enjoy no such safe harbor. EDIT: Back when the MPAA was looking for YouTube's records with IP Addresses, people speculated that they'd pour over them to see if Google employees were either uploading or viewing this content since if you have knowledge of infringing content, you are liable.

As for why they haven't been sued, I don't know.
That is one lousy article. It's too short, and doesn't come with enough provisos. I agree with the spirit of what he's saying, but for crying out loud, people are expensive to train, and lots of them turn out useless anyway. I'm sure there are many, many fields where Trojan work and a determination not to give up will get you very far if you get a little luck and grab it for all it's worth, but you have to be up to hammering your head at that wall until it breaks, and in some fields the wall ain't breaking (mostly due to licenture issues)

A friend took three years to get into video games programming after building a substantial portfolio, getting business experience and doing a Masters that's stupidly competitive to get into, after getting his CS/IT degree. If you're that bloody minded, sure you can make it, but don't put down the people who turn you down when you're an unknown quantity. Look at your situation with cold eyes, not fake optimism and opinions of your worth and capability.
"Undersea cable damage is hardly rare--indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems." -- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20152/?a=f

I see no reason why these cables would be any different, though as noted in the same article, the fact that there are far fewer means that each cut is more significant (and thus newsworthy). The rest of the article is fairly grounding, too.
I think the efficacy of everyone "faking it" depends on the morality of the lie - that is, are your lies moral or immoral?

If people fake appearances in order to reach a viable result (as with the Microsoft story he tells), that's often moral - a "white lie". Most of us lie in this way many times each day - it eases relationships (business or otherwise).

What would suck is if everyone just told lies to get ahead while breaking the promises made in the lie. Microsoft delivered the operating system they bluffed about to IBM. If you lie and don't deliver, you're just a scammer and your lies are immoral.
Did you pick McDonalds.com because of this?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds.html

Because that's the first thing that came to mind reading this complaint. That was back in the wild days of the Internet, when official company spokespeople could say:

"Are you finding that the Internet is a
big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful
McDonald's media-relations person, with
whom I spoke a short while ago.

Same thing here. 18 months ago, Twitter's namespace was considered worthless. Now Twitter leads to live commentary on cable television, celebrities use it, and companies need a Twitter Strategy.
Foxit has been my choice of PDF reader when I am working on Windows. It is fast and does the job. I am pretty sure they can pull of good reading experience but the questions is how will the documents get there in the first place?
Prof. Dawkins is possibly one of the few sane people left on this planet. Cool video.
The strength of the kindle partly comes from the tight integration into Amazon.

This is interesting if you've got alot of documents on your pc but I don't see it being much more useful after the fact.
Seems very strange that two iPhones can't communicate. Why such a huge oversight?
Youtube Launches HD Offering
> I agree though, that outside of one or two people (robg?) , most of us aren't very knowledgeable about the subject.

The neuroscience side, yes - but I think the philosophical implications are anyone's game (that's the beauty of philosophy really - no license required).
The author did not present any evidence that Twitter made money on this. It's only his speculation based on his own valuation of the name.

Since when does Twitter make money anyway?
The argument that its not a free market (a market in which property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers) is poor.

However, the point that iTunes placement is the biggest factor in marketing an app, and placement is driven by sales volume, which in turn affects the way the market acts is interesting. Maybe iTunes should judge apps by some sort of hybrid rating system (volume + ratings). Seems like a tough thing to come up with an accurate metric for.
I'll put in another vote for Vim, but I'm biased, as I'm a systems guy by trade. Losing my skills with vim would be death, because it's often the only working editor on a truly hosed machine.
Then I am sorry, I didn't think you meant the question serious. My criticism of the whole consciousness debate is that nobody knows what they are talking about, so I am the last person who could give you that definition (since my point is that there is no meaningful definition of it).

People have this notion that there should be this something called consciousness, but they can not say what it is supposed to be. This becomes especially clear in Searle's Chinese Room where Searle describes how an intelligent process is supposedly not conscious, but he still dodges the question what he means by consciousness. To me the chinese room shows that there is no such thing (ie the notion seems to be that a human speaking chinese does so by employing his "consciousness", whereas the chinese room example basically proves that consciousness is not required).
Even the 3 IQ points I am not sure about - it might on depend where on the curve the difference appears. 30 points is a very big difference apparently (IQ 100 makes you smart enough for high school, and IQ 130 makes you smart enough for the Mensa club of highly intelligent people, or something like that). The 3 is not "3% difference in intelligence". I am not familiar enough with the whole IQ thing to be able to judge if the difference is significant, though.
Facebook have shown that IM on websites is really just a commodity at this point. The technology is not the hard part but them owning the social graph is powerful here. I do believe that Facebook Chat will succeed and I think it already is.

However, chat have never been easy to monetize so right now it's adding to the amount of time that users spend on facebook. Which is good
I use vim and do R, ruby, and python mostly.
Still, recently I've spent more time with IDEs and now I can appreciate them. Netbeans is a very good RoR IDE. I'd prefer it over Vim. for Python, the IDE that I like (and current favorite) is IDEA. Basically it's a matter of how big your project is; with 10s of thousands lines of code, I prefer an IDE, and also when you are learning the language or reading someone else's code.

Often, I don't have but a terminal, and there vim shines.
To get back on the horse.

To be unusually frank on the Internet: 2008 and 2007 have been incredibly bad years for me, in a way that I'm just not willing to detail on a public forum. The goal for 2009 is to keep plugging away at my startup, hopefully for our January launch, and to try and enjoy life -- something that hasn't been possible for a few years.
Oh noes!! It's not just me!!

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/the+internet
For what it's worth, I wish I had spent more time on the boring crap in high school.
Thanks, indeed! That's exactly the one I was thinking of.
> I don't know if they will be able to encrypt and mimic http or mail protocols though, the volume and behavior of traffic just wouldn't match up.

You're right; traffic analysis would be able to tell between filesharing and typical use of email or http. However, traffic analysis wouldn't be 100% effective and there would be plenty of false positives -- particularly people who used email or http in non-typical ways. I doubt if ISPs would (a) want to write software that propabilistically catches p2p-over-protocol use, or (b) piss off their customers by falsely accusing them of illegal filesharing. And I doubt if governments would enforce cutting off people's internet access based on probabilistic traffic analysis.

> wouldn't it be easier to mimic voip or some other streaming protocol?

VoIP may well be easier, especially if it included streaming video, since there would be more bandwidth in which to hide stuff.
Faking: I don't really think so. It took me a while to flesh out the "stories" about my past jobs to the liking of employers, but even though, I don't think I am faking it. Rather, it means to realize that one has indeed done the one or other thing that was interesting, even if at the time it was just a job. And also, in the sense of "faking", to realize that even not so special things are not so bad after all, because all other things are not so special, either.

As for hiring people without degrees, I must admit that I also have a certain sympathy for people who might be thinking to themselves "I toiled through years of university and startup hardships to get to the position where I am now, and now I am supposed to just hand the same thing to this hotshot on a plate?". Maybe it sucks a little, or employers miss out that way, on the other hand, a certain test of determination might be helpful at times, too.
$ whois 65.55.165.94|grep NetName

NetName: MICROSOFT-1BLK

$ host 65.55.165.94

94.165.55.65.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer msnbot-65-55-165-94.search.msn.com.

$ host msnbot-65-55-165-94.search.msn.com.

msnbot-65-55-165-94.search.msn.com has address 65.55.165.94
I think that defining difference could be language. While on a biological level we are not much different than primates and other mammals, what we do have that no other animal so far has exhibited is language. Humans communicate on a level above and beyond anything else in the animal kingdom.

This leads into my biggest question regarding consciousness: how does one think without language? We all have an inner self speaking in one language or another, but what if we had no knowledge of any language?

Does language define consciousness?
I love Foxit, but I think that comparing this reader to the Kindle isn't a fair matchup.

Specifically, the Kindle includes an EV-DO wireless transmitter. Basically, anywhere will Sprint cell coverage you can connect to online resources (as well as buying books that way) with no monthly charges. From the specs listed for the eSlick, it doesn't even have WiFi. The eSlick seems to use a USB sync.

I'm not saying it's a bad device. Just that EV-DO transmitters are expensive and that paying for free EV-DO usage in perpetuity (even if it's not that much data) costs money too. Wireless companies charge in the $10-30/mo range for data access. Even if Amazon got a sweetheart deal for a tiny fraction of that, it's going to cost money.

All that said, I still think I'd rather a more open device as this one seems to be.
I practise the 'path' method of speed optimisation: If you can not execute a piece of heavy code every 10 in 100 runs, you save a lot, just by a simple data/value check before it.

As for memory opts, pass by reference instead of value (in C++).

I've sped up code by a factor of hundreds by doing some crazy stuff (without going to assembly).
Don't forget the free snack.
First: If you think you want to write your own editor, you've answered your own question. You need to learn emacs, vi, or TextMate immediately, because these are editors that make it very easy to change their behavior by writing your own custom extensions.

I wouldn't write my own editor until I had learned all three of those editors. After that... I still wouldn't write my own editor. ;) Spend your energy on a problem that urgently needs solving.

Now to your question: First, I can't answer it, because I'm not really a user of any IDE. Second, I think it is ill-posed. It's like asking which is more productive: using emacs, using Ruby, or using Excel. If you're an expert in one of these tools, you can use it to replace the others to some extent (I just encountered a programmer who was using Excel to compose hundreds of SQL queries. I have to admit that it works, although it would never occur to me to do this; I'd reach for emacs instead or, failing that, Ruby or Perl.) But, in general, these three tools are designed for different problems, and each tool has its sweet spot.

There are languages for which the vast majority of programmers use an IDE. (I'd probably use one if I had to do any Java programming; Mac development in Objective C might tempt me to use XCode to write code; I'm pretty sure .NET programmers use Microsoft tools.) But you become a different kind of programmer when you use something like emacs instead. For one thing, your text editor can be used to edit anything that is made of text: Python, PHP, Javascript, SQL, C, Ruby, Perl, Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, Java, shell scripts, config files, HTML, CSS, LaTeX, directory listings, version-control logs, long emails, documentation, outlines, to-do lists, blog entries, Wikipedia articles... ad infinitum. If you improve your emacs skills, your skill at editing all of these things increases. If a new language comes along, or a radical new way of using an old language, you needn't be one of those tiresome people who sits on the sidelines, complaining, because the New Thing lacks IDE support: You've got an editor that works fine with the New Thing, and which you already know how to use, and you can incrementally improve that editor by teaching it some New Thing macros, and before long someone (maybe you!) will write some emacs modes to support the New Thing.

Meanwhile, emacs skills do not become obsolete. The editor is quite possibly older than you, and will almost certainly live as long as you. It's cross-platform and open-source. Because it is not tightly tied to one language, platform, version-control system, workflow, or vendor, it has transcended and outlived all of these things.