skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: my Mac app is part of a bundle What do I do now?
Heya, gang;
I'm a relative Cocoa newbie, but after months of working away in my spare time, I finally got an app together that I'm truly proud of — DragonDrop. About a month ago, it got fireballed, and I got to talk about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3946404 It was an amazing thread.

A few weeks ago, I read the Dropzone developer's account of their* day in the Two Dollar Tuesday deal ( http://aptonic.com/blog/my-sales-from-two-dollar-tuesday/), and it inspired my fiancée and I to try to get DragonDrop in, to.

The fun news: we're in today's bundle! http://twodollartues.com/deals/dragondrop/

But, so many questions! How do we promote it? How does the copy look on the TwoDollarTuesday web site? What do you gals & guys think? We're just stumbling around indie software publishing in the dark.

I'd love to hear what you think, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. Plus, if anyone is interested in stats, let me know — I'd be happy to publish results here once the promotion is over.

* Using the grammatically incorrect "their" in favour of randomly picking a gender pronoun, since I can't seem the find the author's name on the Aptonic Software web site.
I think of it in terms of respecting someone's boundaries vs. respecting their character or ability. I wonder what other words might help express this concept.
Can anyone familiar with DD-wrt/OpenWrt/Tomato comment with their relative merits against each other?
It's really been more of a trojan donkey on Windows Phone.
Watch Brave Online Free
Watch Brave film adoptation is by Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman, and Irene Mecchi which is edited by Nicholas C. Smith. The motion picture is distributed by Walt Disney Pictures under Pixas studio which is due to be release in movie houses on the 10th of June, 2012 in Seattle International Film Festival and June 22, 2012 in the U.S.
Can this be extended to more than the top story, ie top 5, 10 etc?
Are you sure your browser or proxy is configured to use https? In my case, HTTP://p0f.popcnt.org is correctly anonymised, while HTTPS://p0f.popcnt.org is not and leaks my originating IP address.

I was concerned, so I tried a bit of troubleshooting before realising I configured Firefox to use no proxy for HTTPS traffic (because I don't want my banking to go through the proxy). So really, there was no problem.
Dress like idiot, be ready to be seen as idiot.

Pink skirt? Face paint? Guy in a suit with comb-over would be treated with similar condescending stance unless he could prove he actually plays.

I know it sucks and I hate it but people profile you by your look.
There are a lot of calculations where 100ms latency isn't acceptable. "the cloud" can't really replace having fast local processing power.
A year ago you'd be right - but things are very, very rapidly shifting to tablets, including the ipad, with the appropriate corporate tools to manage/deploy/wipe/control/etc them....
It's going to change, and fast.
Young, Ambitious Back-End Web Developer Needed
Young, Ambitious Back-End Web Developer Needed for a promising startup based in NYC. We want someone who could be a permanent part of our team. Any back-end guys who live in/near NYC who want to get involved in an early-stage startup that will have a huge impact on the community, please email ryan.babikian@gmail.com
the short answer is yes, but it was a quick slap together project last night over a few beers instead of studying. So probably not till I get spare time and motivation.
I think that for the vast majority of real-world software applications JodaTime is bloated and unnecessary.

Most applications need only three 'classes' to represent time:

1. A timestamp (ie. number of milliseconds since midnight on 1 January 1970 GMT)

2. A Gregorian Date (ie. three numbers representing day, month, year)

3. A TimeZone (to convert between 1 and 2)

In Java the first and third types are perfectly represented by java.util.Date and java.util.TimeZone. The second class can be represented by something like this:
http://calendardate.sourceforge.net/

(Disclaimer: I wrote CalendarDate)
I've had a similar idea, but it involved supermarkets and selling data to governments and companies for economic statistics and makershare data, respectively.
"Here’s the idea: create a beautiful, easy to use, inventory application for brick and mortar stores: then give it to them for free."

Never would reach critical mass. Stores have legacy systems in place that are integrated and do many things. Keeping on top of inventory requires input and discipline to keep it up to date. So a store with an existing inventory program is not going to switch the best you can hope for is to get a data feed from them. And to be helpful to the end user you'd have to get enough stores to make the app do something worthwhile. (Lest you think some store is going to ditch their legacy system for a startup's free software where the company could fold..)

Bottom line is you can't even begin to think about an idea like this without doing some research into how things are being done now which from the post hasn't been done. The OP had a manic moment where anything seemed possibly. Then
they came down to earth (sugar high wore off?)

The OP seems to realize they need to keep learning, and most importantly, if I might add, to get some real world experience:

"What I’ve come to realize, however, is that I still have so much to learn and so many things to do before I really feel comfortable"
Benchmark against NFC though... :P
Well the only place where moore's law is still working is in doubling the amount of transistors, not doubling the speed. So you can get multiprocessing, but that's very hard to take advantage of, and as far as I know there's basically no concurrency in javascript regardless.
I recall the newton did a better job of recognizing my handwriting than I did...... so that won't hold.
HN is not harsh. HN is one of the main marketing channels for YC-funded projects such as this.
Exactly. I had this idea ages ago - ever since smartphones became ubiquitous, all the technological pieces have existed - it's just a matter of getting some competent engineers to put them all together.

You could have all kinds of cool extensions, such as ordering ahead of time on your phone and having pick-up drive-thrus at big box stores and supermarkets, where payment could be taken care of automagically, via NFC. You could sort not just by price, but by price + time/distance from current location (the latter for gas costs) + tax, sort of like Hipmunk's "agony" sorting feature for airfare. You could make a shopping list and the app would optimize which stores to buy which items at, and in which order you should visit the stores, based on things like individual item costs, geographical locations of stores, opening/closing times, delaying of purchasing of frozen foods, etc.

But retail outlets will never cooperate. They'll be the big losers here, as the last barriers to comparison shopping disappear and customer loyalty is replaced by the cold, hard facts.
Parse - The New App Dashboard
Tomato is really simple and stable but supports fewer devices. OpenWrt has more of a general purpose embedded Linux feel and lots of people build cool Wi-Fi enabled electronics projects with it (for examples: http://hackaday.com/tag/openwrt). I've never personally used DD-WRT.
> I certainly don't think we're close yet

Perhaps not for the Hacker News audience. I'd assert that an iPad -- perhaps with a bluetooth keyboard -- is already enough computer for 70% of western world.
I'm picturing a specialized truck that has a tank of water on the back and contains the rest of the machinery necessary for power washing. I've seen transit agencies use them to clean bus stops. Makes sense to own one if you're in the business of washing sidewalks.
Most people put in those situations would freeze up exactly like she did. I'm surprised you would think a game journalist who had no prior expectation of this happening would, when confronted with such a situation, automatically think to "demonstrate confidence and tear down the misconception."

The 20/20 hindsight in this thread is ridiculous.
To dissect the frog for you: the "look at teh shinay" with an absence of (or grossly overinflated) specs was the standard MO for Microsoft through much of the 90s.

I'm pointing out that such tactics are not particularly effective when there are existing products which have not only captivated the public's eye, but also captured much of the market. Yes, I'm aware that Android are registering 900,000 new activations. Per day.

By some reports, Microsoft's prior Great White Hope in the mobile space, the Kin, sold a total of 500 units through Verizon. I'm seeing significant marketing for the Nokia N900 Windows phone while reading about spectacular business concerns with Nokia. I'm not holding out great hopes for Microsoft's Surface. I'm thinking it may prove to be a tad ... unstable.

Sure, there are some nifty design features that might well be ripped off by others (steal from the best, as the Krell say), including cover-as-keyboard, but as for the rest of it, I'll see it when I believe it.
Hi,

Completely agree with you that Mom & Pop shops still rely in technology. They still arent conversant with Dropbox or Google Docs as much as we think they are. In any case they wont be the early adopters of such technologies.

On data
1. on dev stats-about 52K independant devs out there hacking on iOS and Android. Not sure if there organizations out there that have 52K dedicated devs building mobile apps.

2. on WebGL stats-51% of browswers support it currently.
http://codeflow.org/entries/2012/apr/25/webgl-statistics-and...
HTML 5 seems to be around 58% (Slightly dated data)
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/stat-of-the-...

3. On Digital natives-
http://www.johnsoncontrols.com/content/us/en/products/buildi...
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Older-adults-and-int...
I worked for a guy who had the exact same idea ten years ago! Never figured out how to execute on it though.

What I have seen people do recently is focus on a single vertical such as say used cars or hardware stores. You could start regionally and if you can make it work in say three cities you might be able to raise the kind of money it would take to go national.
Hey mark - slight off topic, but why do you have to run through them, why not just offer it for 1.99 in the app store every day?
Oh come on. That is possibly the most absurd criticism I've ever heard. They "don't get it" because their marketing team used a design rendering instead of a photograph? Clearly, a product shouldn't be judged on features, user experience, price, reliability, performance, or potential for changing the market. It should be judged on whether the little glossy pictures on the website were photos that were 'shopped until they might as well be faked or CGI renderings that are pretty much good enough to be real.
OP is extremely late to the game.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/technology/22shop.html?_r...

http://googlemobile.blogspot.ca/2010/03/in-stock-nearby-look...
"While many teachers relish sharing lesson plans, some say they might also hesitate to simply give away materials they have spent years fine-tuning.

"“It was the first time I paused and thought, ‘I have spent 10 years developing this unit, tweaking documents,’ and I wondered, ‘Do I just stick it all up there?’ ” she said."

YES, if you want to maximize your reach. You're very unlikely to sell it, so the only objection left is that some teacher might become more effective, and somehow compete better with you.

Contrast that with students around the country, around the world, directly benefiting from your 10 years of expertise. Wouldn't you like to look back on that in retirement?
> Once Apple can get iOS working well on x86

I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that iOS already works well on x86 and has never not worked well on x86. After all, the core OS maintains ongoing heritage with an x86 OS, and every single app in the store has already been successfully compiled for x86...
Ask HN: How do you measure credibility of a dev shop?
Let's say you are a startup and you'd want to bring on board, a dev agency. (In an ideal state, unencumbered by the choice tools/platforms available now in the market)How would you assess the credibility of an agency before contracting work to them? What kind of data would you collect?
Well, we could, but $4.99 is the price point we're comfortable with. We're trying this promotion as an experiment — TwoDollarTuesday helps get the word out, so hopefully, we'll end up selling enough extra copies to compensate for the temporary price reduction.
"Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about what I believe is a $1 billion, or maybe even $100 billon, idea."

As a side note to anyone who comes up with an idea - any idea. Do some research. Go out on the street and talk to some (for this idea the one the OP has) merchants to vet the idea. See how hard it is to get in front of a decision maker. Whatever effort it takes you as a student or someone doing research it will be magnitudes harder when you are actually selling something (business owners tend to have a soft spot for students and younger people who they see as non-threatening). They love to help people with their research. They aren't so eager to talk to salesman.
That's what RIM thought. It's not clear that there's a "business tablet" market separate from the "consumer tablet" market.

Similarly, there was at one point a vibrant "business mobile phone" market as distinct from the "consumer mobile phone" market. That distinction has been erased, killing RIM in the process. The jury is out as to whether there will be a viable business tablet market. My money says no, that at a significantly higher price point than the iPad, business users will continue to buy laptops.
It's easy to tell someone to give everyone a shot at understanding when you're not on the receiving end of it all the time. She had this happen multiple times, so she rightly assumed what anyone would: These PR reps assumed she couldn't play their games because she was a woman.
Goals as a Service
If so, then either you can't use it in portrait mode or text looks significantly worse when you do.
How about in CT?
That's called a teaser.
You bring up a very good point, and I don't really have a answer for it.

I don't necessarily think that it completely ruins the idea though—bigger brands wouldn't suffer from the same problem and if you could get more than a few in, the momentum would start to build.

To be honest though, this post was less about the idea and more about reflecting on thought of committing to a big idea at a young age. It's cool to see all these people giving real, and great, feedback on the idea, but I think that's kind of overlooking the idea. As many have said, there will always be huge ideas, and all ideas will always have problems—maybe that's why I don't yet feel comfortable committing a huge chunk of my life to just one.

As the OP, I might get torn up for writing this, but I thought it was worth sharing.
There was a simpler and more engaging alternative someone had shown me the other day. It is to replace captcha with a small game. You've got to play and complete the game to enter (like solving a jigsaw puzzle or swatting a fly etc.)
Execution is the thing.
Yep. There will be people buying them to replace laptops only to find that they can't use them in their laps.
These comments are asking why she didn't do this or that, or saying she shouldn't be upset because that's just how it is, which is textbook victim blaming.

And judging by the comments in this thread alone, I hardly think it was posted to an audience that already agrees.
Ask HN: I don't like programming anymore. Help on a new career please?
Hi guys,

I've been a programmer for quite some time and just recently, I hit a wall. I seem to not enjoy programming the way I used to.

I'm thinking about what other stuff do I like or interested in.

I remember from my experience that I really like tinkering web servers and I'm very interested in making them perform at their best. I love reading highscalability.com and now I'm wondering, should I make a career change? If so, what should I get into?

If you guys want to know more, ask away!

I'd really appreciate your help guys. Thank you in advance!

P.S.
I don't know if this might help but I seem to be very good at Yahoo NBA Fantasy and Magic the gathering :D
I'm just throwing it out there maybe it could help. Thanks again.
Nice idea. Good to hear the app makes you money. I enjoyed the the way you could move cut&paste and drops to the side on a Newton, then change apps etc and move it back. Like storing it on the side lines.
Genius idea. Pure genius. Kickstarter has shown that they are less about ingenuity and more about public opinion. I hope your project gets funded 10x.
> every single app in the store has already been successfully compiled for x86

Really!?
That is an excellent point, and well expressed. I do see how anecdotes and stories can be used in a very positive way to shift opinion; there are definitely some grey regions. (How do you know you're on the right sight?)
My biggest takeaway from the announcement was that this was a very Microsoft-like approach to the tablet market, and I mean that in a good way.

When I think of an iPad, I think of something that's a natural progression from the iPod and iPhone, running bigger and better versions of the apps you can get from the Apple walled garden. It's a fantastic piece of hardware and a tight ecosystem.

Microsoft isn't just trying to compete by offering its own similar piece of hardware to run its own similar apps. They are looking to offer high-performance hardware (an Ivy Bridge chip in a tablet!) with great design, and they're looking to run full-fledged Windows applications.

They're not just competing with iPad, they're offering a possible desktop replacement tablet. That's a bold move.
A related nitpick: since Python's integers are arbitrary size, technically operations like - and / are not constant time, so your claim of an implementation "with constant-time and constant-space operations" is not true.

However, I understand if that complaint is just too nitpicky for you to want to mention it. Great post btw.
I'm the guy who runs Two Dollar Tuesday (I'm also a Mac App Developer):

A few reasons why you wouldn't necessarily do it every day:

At $1.99, he would have to sell more than twice as many copies as he is selling now to make the same revenue. Plus, he'd have more support requests to deal with. $1.99 may not be the optimal price point.

The reason to participate in any "bundle" like Two Dollar Tuesday:

- Mailing list: TDT has a mailing list of thousands of Mac users who've asked to receive the deals each Tuesday. We have a phenomenal open rate (last week was over 80%). MacUpdate, MacZot, etc., all have the same kind of thing going. Thousands of Mac users eager for discounted apps.

- Cross promotion. Someone looking for a discount on a different app might discover your app through TDT.

- The "limited-time effect" -- people are more likely to pay $1.99 for something if they know they only get one day to get it at that price. Were the price always at $1.99, you lose the sale/impulse buy effect.
Amazon Explains Recent Cloud Outage was Caused by Power Failure
i've been trying to put unused stuff on my github https://github.com/th0ma5w and i've received great comments, and people thanking me for showing general concepts and such, so that's been really great to hear, especially from crap i just had sitting around at dead ends.
You spent too much time thinking creatively on your own, and not enough time understanding how the world works. If you want to improve the world you have to understand it better. Go understand whether you can design a business process (involving your software) that's better than the ones they brick and mortar stores are using now, and then sell it to them (or "give it away for free" - or is it worth it to pay them?). THEN think about the implications.
Wow, you're in NYC, so you must know that advertising for "Young" is highly illegal. Please rethink your goals. As written this is highly offensive.
Every app that has been run in the "simulator" has been compiled on x86. The simulator is not one. It's really a cross-compiling trick.
Think of a few things you would enjoy spending your time on. Now, pick one of those, and make a web site that lets you do whatever that is.

Or:

QA, tech writer, book writer, blogger/consultant/freelancer (where your blog supports and builds your brand and credibility).
My exact thought. Except I was going to add a "fuck you."
hi antidoh! thanks for your suggestions. I'm curious about being a QA and consultant. How do I get started?
I live in Austin, please don't do this. Not to mention our sidewalks aren't nearly as dirty as say LA, and it won't look as nice. A few years ago whrrrl put down a bunch of chalk on the sidewalks and never cleaned it up, it's still there and now it's just embarrassing. Graffiti is graffiti. Etching your name into dirt is still etching your name into something.
eBay also owns Milo (http://milo.com/) which tackles this idea head on
App Developers Too Young to Drive
ah, actually you can find all the stats here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6016/microsoft-surface-we-go-h...
As a woman in tech, I am dumbfounded by comments like this one. It is equivalent to saying, "Well, yeah, she was raped, but look at what she was wearing. Maybe if she hadn't been wearing that..." Disgusting.

I can assure you the sexism doesn't change when you stop wearing skirts and start wearing pants. I speak from years of experience. And honestly, as a man, you don't have to even think about whether what you choose to wear would suddenly get you treated as if you were a vapid teenager, or a toddler. You do not have to make a choice about what you wear in order to avoid getting a keyboard snatched away from you by a member of the opposite sex who assumes you are stupid because of how you look.

If anyone ever wonders why there aren't more women in tech, you don't have to look much further than these comments to understand. I am a proud, strong fighter and I have been a successful tech CEO for years. But even I grow weary of battling these types of comments so often.
It seems like the main advantage of the Surface will be Windows 8's ability to be used both as a mobile OS and as a desktop OS. In your case, Android doesn't let you run unported Linux programs and Debian, if you booted into it, wouldn't support touching the screen. If the Linux kernel supported the Transformer Prime's touchscreen, and if a touchable lightweight window manager were designed for mobile use, and if the Android emulator for Linux were much faster than it currently is, let's say by using full-speed virtualization or something, a tablet/laptop combo like the Transformer Prime would be the perfect computing device for me.

Mac OS X 10.7 and the future 10.8 are converging on iOS's UI, and I wouldn't be surprised if 10.9 or Mac OS 11 or Mac iOS or w/e the next Apple OS will be called will run on desktops and mobile devices. If so, it will be interesting to see if they merge the iPad and the MacBook Air into a Transformer Prime equivalent that has a full OS. If the Microsoft Surface becomes popular, maybe they'd even rush to do this under Mountain Lion and provide an iOS emulator/virtualizer or something. I get the feeling this will happen sooner than Linux meeting my above-stated requirements, but I'm optimistic that there will soon be at least one alternative to the Surface that runs something more powerful than Android