skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find these articles looking at the economics of the app store interesting.

I'm still learning mobile (iOS) development having got back to software development last year although I've been doing Rails contract work for much of the time. I released my first real experiment http://itunes.com/apps/fastlists (yes it's another lists app but it is currently free, with no ads and has a couple of useful features making it especially useful for reusable lists for shopping, packing etc. The design is functional rather than beautiful).

I'm currently adding some in-app purchase options to test the reactions of the users.

My current idea is to offer the following options:

1) No-ads (tier 1 price)

2) Privacy - No anonymous usage collection.(tier 1 price)

3) Raise item limit (by 100 to 200 items) (tier 1 price)

4) Unlimited items (tier 3 price)

5) Everything including future in-app features (tier 5)

For me option 5 is important because like several other commenters I hate feeling I will need to keep paying bit by bit for something. It will include everything that doesn't need server side support and expense. I actually hope most customers choose this, the other items are there largely to justify the pricing of this item.

Ads and anonymous usage monitoring will come in releases after the purchases have become available and for ads I will probably make the first month of use add free to try and get the user stuck in. I may also add some alternate skins as in-app purchases too later although that is lower priority than using the iOS 6 social framework as a way to try to get users promoting the app for me by sharing lists.

There is currently no item limit so I will allow users with more than 50 current items to have their initial limit be 50 higher than the current level.

At the moment this is just a small scale test because I haven't done any promotion for the app yet so the current numbers of users is small although the reviews are currently very good (despite a usability issue leading someone not to work out how to reorder items - but I'll add some help in the release after next).

To become self sustaining as an independent developer I'm expecting to need to keep a small suite of apps ticking over. Some will be more ambitious than this although others may be even simpler with different unique features or niche target markets.

Any thoughts on the pricing model? Or the app?
I'm not sure that I fully understand why the author considers message queuing via something like ActiveMQ to be complicated or difficult.

1) Install ActiveMQ (or my preferred option, ActiveMQ Apollo http://activemq.apache.org/apollo/).

2) Write an email script that subscribes to the message queue, and sends an email for each message received.

3) In the web app, publish a "send email" message to the message queue.

That's it - nothing more complicated required. Look at the number of libraries that use the Stomp protocol, and you can be up and running inside of a few minutes.

Spinning off a separate thread to perform this work is entirely sufficient and much simpler

I strongly disagree with this advice, if only because it's so incredibly easy to screw up from a security perspective. If you want to handle errors or other unexpected issues, doing so via spinning up background threads is going to lead you to a world of hacky pain.

One of the most inspiring articles I read about using queues is 5 subtle ways you’re using MySQL as a queue, and why it’ll bite you:

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/5-subtle-ways-youre-usin...
No way it would stand up at trial, way too obvious.
evolutionary psychology is known trash and isn't really evolution or psychology, please stop basing your worldview off of it
Andrew Rawnsley on the Five-Ring Circus aka. Olympics
The Backbone + CoffeeScript book is ready
Give it a play. For me it's a "beautiful" roguelike. Like making a simpler, more straightforward Nethack and somehow adding it stunning... ascii graphics :D
Shownotes are a good thing, will do my best. Knowing the time commitment to podcasts, I'm gradually working with a virtual assistant to outsource as much as possible, in order to make the show sustainable. There's a training overhead there which means it will be a few weeks before we can realistically do something like this.
quite relevant: http://www.commandlinefu.com a great collection of cli uses and abuses

one of my favorites is querying dns to get wiki excerpts

dig +short txt bmw.wp.dg.cx
"(BMW), is an independent German automobile manufacturing company founded in 1916. It also produces motorcycles, is the owner of the MINI brand and is the parent company of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW"

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2829/query-wikipe...
Did anyone else find that article meandering? The description of the game, in particular, struck me as especially pompous wiring.

The metaphor with the elephant and the goldfish had absolutely nothing to offer either, it was just a rehash of the previous sentence.
This was already in the works pre-Mayer...
Show HN: Hacker News Comments
Thats not a very generous reading of the OP.

He is reacting to the implied (though I didn't think it was very strong) characterization of local hunters as poachers. They're hunting to eat and using (presumably) the same type of traps that they're used for generations. That fact makes gph feel some sympathy or solidarity with them and I think a lot of people agree.

I'm absolutely not a relativist. That said this is the extreme example were not looking at things relativistically at all is absurd. You're expecting people who haven't changed their lifestyle and environment in recent generations and live off the land to assign similar values to animal conservation as you do.

That is not too far from telling a remote indonesian tribeswoman to cover her breasts because she's been immorally immodest.
Thanks for the kind wishes, and yeah it's something I feel pretty strongly about.

There are obvious problems going this way (how do you get people past the hurdle of paying for a game they haven't played?) but it just feels... better.

It also seems like a better way to build trust between the developer and the player. The way I see it is if you've taken the risk and bought my game, I love you! We're best friends now! So here's the best damn game I can give you for trusting me enough to pay for it.

And then hopefully they'll come back for the sequel.
Balloon launch to celebrate Samaritans Newry 24/7 service
If this stayed the same for long enough to be meaningful in evolutionary terms, this would end in very smart apes.
I don't know, but typing that slowly means that there is a barrier between the thought and the deed. It like if you wrote a poem, then started speaking the letters one by one in Morse code --- and you refuse to learn Morse code so you have to look up each letter's code as you go.
What are you doing to generate ideas?

To come up with sellable subscription products for businesses, you need to obsessively study and interact with your potential audience. Good ideas won't just spring into your mind.
Domeinhosting voor de laagste prijs
Webhosting vanaf 0,75 en een Domeinnaam vanaf 9,50. Goedkope Domein Hosting staat voor hoge kwaliteit en de laagste prijs, pakketten zijn er al van 400MB met 2GB dataverkeer en gratis Installatron op uw Website. Via Installatron kan je eenvoudig webapps als Wordpress, Magento, Joomla, osCommerce en nog zo'n 60 andere apps installeren.
Verbing weirds language. -- Calvin
Räumung wien
Räumung Wien, Räumungen, Räumung, gratis, Burgenland, Niederösterreich, baden, St. Pölten, Tulln, Wiener Neustadt, Eisenstadt, Wien Angebot 2Männer+lkw 33,00€ Pro std.
Räumung Wien, Räumung Wien, Räumungen, Räumung, gratis, Burgenland, Niederösterreich, baden, St. Pölten, Tulln, Wiener Neustadt, Eisenstadt, Wien Angebot 2Männer+lkw 33,00€ Pro std.
I would hope that as more telecoms try to get their piece of the google/fb pie, more companies relying on the internet will come to see the benefits of supporting network neutrality.

And for anyone wondering how things fit together, check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
It is Amazing What You Can Do In Less Than 50 Hours.
Note that it has changed in python3

> python3 -m http.server
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...

> python3 -m http.server 8080
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ...
Really? Cause there are such suburbs all over Europe and I'm pretty sure our local neo-nazi rally also draws buses from Scandinavia.
Does RescueTime have any data on this? ISTR Tony posting here once that they measured the amount of time each startup in their batch spent in front of the editor, and the very top end came out to about 7 hours/day, with most clustered around 4-5 hours/day like the rest of us.

Edit: Found it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209195

7 hours was his personal max, 4-5 hours was his personal average, 10 hours was more than anyone in the group ever spent coding.
Generating ideas requires fairly intimate knowledge of a niche. The only niches I have that kind of knowledge of are geeky interests (such as games) which are already hugely overserved with quality software. I need to acquire deep knowledge of the more boring interests, where opportunities exist. But I don't see how to get there...
Great contribution Nathan, looking forward to using this to embed comments after my next blog post. Can you let me know how the comment system works? Are you scraping HN?
> The issue is not Swedish rape laws, it is Swedish extradition laws.

Agreed. And that's what we should be discussing, not the rape laws.
How a hacker became a shit-hot entrepreneur: the Alistair Petersen story
The fact that you can't treat an URL as static doesn't make it "worthless", that's ridiculous.

If you want long term storage, you can always GET the content and store it locally. But if you only get a copy of the data, you can't do everything else (PUT back updated data, poll for changes, etc).

A loooong time ago there was a web site that hosted comments (...) The comment site got sold or acquired and someone put up malware on every single inlink. Blammo armed and dangerous.

And for all you know you can get malware from a data copy as well. Using URLs is not a reason to disregard basic security practices, like verifying the content that you receive from the other service.

The concept the OP is going for is 'deferred work' which is to say not to pass around data that isn't going to be used. And that is indeed a noble goal, but you must have a way to vet that the pointer you passed still points to the thing you thought it did

Which you have: the documentation says the URLs are valid for 4 hours.
everyone is wrong, everyone is right. just use what tool you know best.

resque, or beanstalkd or zmq push/pull whatever
Slider Zipper: Importance to the plastic bottles in today’s world 
The plastic is the most helpful product that has been invented till now. The problem was solved by the introduction of plastic bottles. Then the plastic containers helped these people.
BPTP New Project Gurgaon
PTP Group presents a new residential project in Gurgaon. BPTP New Project located at Sector 37 D Gurgaon. BPTP New Project Gurgaon Offers 2 BHK in affordable prices. If you don't like the traffic and noise of the city then this project can be your best choice.
Will be really great if they returned Flickr too. And come back to the acquisitions table once they've figured out their purpose!

[Edited for my stale information on what they did with Delicious, last summer. Phew!]
Petit Computer brings the power of BASIC to Nintendo 3DS and DSi
This is why I chose not to provide real-time analytics for Instahero[1]. Apart from being very constraining, implementation-wise, it simply does not provide that much business value.

Much in the same way that looking at an A/B test invalidates it, it's better if you let your metrics converge before you look.

[1] http://www.instahero.com
Get latest informations on logistics, supply chain and Transportation industries
Subscribe to our free, weekly email newsletter to get instant access to recent late-breaking news stories, feature articles, market updates, and industry events dedicated to helping logistic & Supply Chain Industries.
You are no doubt a great programmer. But that at most proves you are a great programmer not the entirety of the software world.
no, and i never implied that if you read carrefully. Still, that doesn't answer my question.
delicious was sold over a year ago to youtube founders
If you didn't trust any web site, you wouldn't click on any link.

Trusting a website doesn't mean you have to trust them indefinitely. You can trust that the URL will be kept alive for a certain length of time - minutes, hours, days, etc - and deal with them accordingly.
> "The new background server GC in the .NET Framework 4.5 offloads much of the GC work associated with a full blocking collection to dedicated background GC threads that can run concurrently with user code, resulting in much shorter (less noticeable) pauses. One customer reported a 70% decrease in GC pause times. "

Concurrent garbage collection. Not that impressive in 2012. Java has had concurrent GC for at least a decade:

JDK 1.2.2
Java had a switch for that in the late 90's already:
-Xconcgc Use concurrent garbage collector (1.2.2_07+)

JDK 1.4.2
http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc1.4.2/#4.3.%20When%20to%2...

also:
http://research.sun.com/techrep/2000/abstract-88.html

The world has moved on:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/g1-intro-...

http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project_sub...
Yahoo returns Koprol, a startup which they acquired, back to Barito Labs
> With the following command we test google with 20 concurrent connections for 30 seconds

Even though this is Google and they probably don't have a problem with this, I don't think you should benchmark servers that don't belong to you. It's not nice and could be mistaken for a DOS attack.
ant ?
Thanks! I'm respectfully scraping. I've rate limited all calls to YC's servers and am caching all comments on my side.
I just hope that MM values inside talent and does not go on a startup shopping spree. Yahoo has great undervalued, underutilized assets, and with Yahoo's distribution and reach it can do great things without overpaying for "frothy" startups with dubious value/products.
Thanks, that one I totally missed.
Delicious was sold to the founders of YouTube last year: http://avos.com
We don't intend to open source it
I'd note that this theory applies rather poorly to gay feminist developers, but you probably have an even more repugnant hypothesis for that.
Even if you're going to pull it down, passing an URL around is still better. It means the client software can schedule the download for a few minutes or even hours to reduce peak bandwidth demands, they can PUT an updated version back, they can poll for changes, etc.
Can the Terms of the GPL Prevent GNU/Linux being used for War?
There's been a lot of noise on the internet recently about the fact that the Windows-based software being used in the remote control system of drones use by the American military has been hit by a virus and this has caused the Department of Defense (DOD) to use GNU/Linux which is a more secure option. This has, predictably, caused raised eyebrows and demands by some that any military organisation should be prevented from using GNU/Linux in offensive weapons systems.
Go at SoundCloud
In India, A Customer Does Not Buy A Product – They Buy A Phone Number
Sorry about the fifth point not being clear. Will try to make it clear.

Some designers produce effects using indirect methods instead of using the photoshop effects. These should be avoided as much as possible, for the code to be clean.
He may not be an idiot for that, but he'd have a hard time defending himself in court from being accused of aiding and encouraging persons unknown to commit theft (or fraud, depending on which is the more serious offence). Now placing yourself in that position would be idiotic.
And there may be exemptions for high value, non-perishable goods.
I've heard that argument before. I don't think I did anything that other people cannot do.

My overall point is that if you start believing that programming is just rote work that takes no skill, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because then you never take on the challenges that will get you skills, and you're unqualified for jobs that will bring you more challenges, and eventually you end up falling so far behind that it seems hopeless. It really has very little to do with ability and a lot to do with constantly looking for ways that you can make the user experience a bit better at the expense of making things a little harder for yourself.
I wonder how they expect it to happen?
Users pay their providers for network access: if they don't get network access.... they won't pay.
Otherwise if they block facebook/google: by their own admission they will loose 40% of traffic: those users quite possibly going elsewhere.
Firefox 16 unprefix CSS Gradients, Animations, Transitions & Transforms
I think he accepts it a priori as a historically persuasive letter, and he reverse engineers techniques from it.
see also Curlish: http://packages.python.org/curlish/
Process involved in developing the iPhone apps
Nowadays people are aware of the technological impact that is taking place in the mobile world. The iPhone apps development has been gaining the higher preference in the mobile application development industry.
The penelope link at the end of the article is WAY more interessting than all the php vs the world rant.
Here’s to Contraceptives | Quazen
Wow, I really like this, great work!

I've previously thought that comment threads on blogs tend to die down fairly quickly, whereas discussions on HN tend to last a bit longer, so this is doubly cool.

I guess the only downside is the near-impossibility of letting people comment directly from the page without having to log in again.
I'd also point out that URLs aren't exactly pointers as they don't (all) support writes in addition to reads.

return &"Read only data";
"intent to defraud" would be very difficult to defend yourself against. Publishing the means by which others could commit fraud might be classed as "incitement". I'd say Tesco's lawyers are about to have a little fun.
If I were playing Split or Steal, my strategy would be exactly this: tell the other player that I'm going to choose "steal" and if they choose "split", I'll give them half of the winnings. We would shake on it on national television which forms a nice contract: an offer, consideration for both parties, and acceptance. The beauty of this is that if they're not an idiot they'll choose "split" and we each walk away with half. However, if they are an idiot and they also chose "steal" then nobody gets anything and I can sue them for violation of the contract in the amount of the 50% I would have won.

Sadly, I suspect everyone would then copy that strategy and much like everyone choosing the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E in Wheel of Fortune, it would quickly become a formula and would ruin the suspense the show hopes to create.
Tired of re-writing code over and over again at your web design job?
"worst case your going to get done"

Your WHAT is going to get done?
The problem with this and other photoshop > CSS tools, is that you're still stuck with Photoshop. We should be elevating design by designing web native and making it beautiful, not using the same old fixed desktop beasts. Edit Room [1] and the like (typecast [2], etc.) will be the wave of the future. Great web design requires great human communication, which means great typography. You can't get close to the real web type display with Photoshop, and this tool won't help there.

Unlike Edit Room, using Photoshop + Markupwand generates all units in pixels - not too useful for real multi-device prototyping. Others have mentioned the tag soup. It's fine for those who can't move on from Photoshop, but more and more folks are interested in trying something new.

[1] http://www.edit-room.com/ (my project, friendly critiques welcome)
[2] http://beta.typecastapp.com/
If typing is hard then you're less likely to go back over your code and correct typos and minor errors. At any rate, hunt-and-peck typists tend not to spend time going back over the code and formatting it nicely.
PaaS on Hadoop YARN - Idea & Prototype
Low Tech Magazine: The Chinese Wheelbarrow
The metaphor might have been a little over-the-top but I support this sort of creativity in blog posts, if only because it can ripen into something much more aesthetically pleasing. There are places where it goes way too far -- Gödel, Escher, Bach comes to mind -- but this is only a couple paragraphs.

In this case it does have something to "offer": it offers the insight that the only value that looking at past states can offer is a sort of "strategy tomography" to tell you what the other person's conditional probabilities actually are, but that once you know this, your strategy is first-order Markov, just because their strategy is first-order Markov. (This term, nth-order Markov, just means "depends only on the last n game states.")

It's true, however, that this leads to a very interesting consequence which is not discussed in this context, something quite convoluted: "I will commit to a first-order Markov strategy in order to prevent my opponent from using a higher-order Markov strategy, so that my own analysis of their strategy simplifies." It is a curious statement that your own ignorance forces someone else to be ignorant, which you can then exploit.

This is proven in appendix A of their paper. To state the conclusion in their words, "In iterated play of a fixed game, one might have thought that a player Y with longer memory of past outcomes has the advantage over a more forgetful player X. For example, one might have thought that player Y could devise an intricate strategy that uses X’s last 1,000 plays as input data in a decision algorithm, and that can then beat X’s strategy, conditioned on only the last one iteration. However, that is not the case when the same game (same allowed moves and same payoff matrices) is indefinitely repeated. In fact, for any strategy of the longer-memory player Y, X’s score is exactly the same as if Y had played a certain shorter-memory strategy (roughly, the marginalization of Y’s long-memory strategy), disregarding any history in excess of that shared with X."