skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait a sec, a blogger goes to great pains to state that he won't shill for a company that's paying for his trip to a trade show. He verifies that this is okay with the company several times, and states categorically that he will cover other products and be impartial about Samsung's, repeatedly.

How does this "raise larger concerns" about these blogs? It seems like the blogger here has gone out of his way to ensure that his impartiality isn't challenged.

This sort of behavior - from Samsung or otherwise - is despicable. They need to be held to full account for this sort of fraud.
Created an iOS dev company few months ago w/ a friend.
We made $50k in August from a successful free iphone app. (around $40k in a regular month).
We are only two in the company and we are still college students.
Don't know what to say more about this but feel free to ask any question (except what is the app ^^)
I think the article is right in what it says but is wrong because of what it doesn't say. Apple succeeded where others had failed, and that is certainly commendable, but now we have a problem: Apple doesn't have a patent on "an iPad" meaning a device with all the individual characteristics that make an iPad an iPad and make it successful, instead they have individual patents on all the individual features.

But the individual features are the things that Apple didn't do. Yet that's what they sue over because that's how patent law is set up.

So now we see Samsung lose big in court and popular reaction is split, and here's why: People looking at the actual facts of the case are outraged that Apple could win that way because the actual grounds of the win had nothing to do with copying or Samsung's actions and everything to do with the fact that anyone with a million over-broad patents on obvious "inventions" and laws of nature and mathematics can win in court against anyone who produces a computing device, arguing that any actual copying on the part of Samsung is irrelevant. On the other hand, we have the people who look at the result and the fact that Samsung's devices do actually look entirely too much like Apple's and think Samsung got what was coming to them, ignoring that in order to do it Apple had to adopt a long list of bully tactics that they've now demonstrated that they or anyone else with a sufficient patent arsenal can successfully use against their competitors (including those whose devices aren't intentionally copied, because there are too many patents to possibly even attempt to avoid them all).

Nobody seems willing to say that Apple should potentially have some remedy against Samsung for actual copying but that what they got is the wrong remedy in the wrong way, not least which because the same tactics can be used against anyone whether they've done anything wrong or not.
You really think the hierarchy of the headings matters to Google?

I doubt that the order of the text matters either, but if it did you could create a tool that would order the output.
$25k in revenue, ~$15k in net income (at 12-15% monthly growth) from http://jivosite.ru (English version http://jivosite.com is yet work in progress). This is online chat for e-commerce web sites sold primarily to russian-speaking audience, USA & Europe sales start in 2-3 months. Bootstrapped, no office, 2 co-founders (1 business+tech, 1 tech), 3 employees (1 marketing, 1 customer support, 1 programmer).
in·no·va·tive/ˈinəˌvātiv/
Adjective:
(of a product, idea, etc.) Featuring new methods; advanced and original.
(of a person) Introducing new ideas; original and creative in thinking: "an innovative thinker".

This definition does not tie innovation to invention. I think it would be hard to argue that Apple's work is not original relative to their competitors. Apple out-innovates their competitors in marketing, in supply chain management, in product lifecycle management and in design. It's impossible to invent every (or even most) components of a general purpose computer. But to select the right pieces, assemble them in a way that maximizes user experience and market them in a way that makes them stand apart from competitors' products made with almost the same components - that's innovation, just the same way that Netflix' model for mailing DVDs (they didn't invent the mailbox, the postal service or the DVD) was extremely innovative.
"The ad is almost two weeks old, but I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about it. It is absolutely absurd."

Whats up Techcrunch? I just watched the ad and whether or not you like the humor it does show the tablet's basic functionality.
The detail and personal experience make it feel more adventurous than a normal cookbook or recipe blog.

I have a few questions:

* Are you building on top of a blog platform, or is this mostly custom? (The BuiltWith page makes this site appear full of tech [1]).

* What % of the revenue comes from Amazon referral links?

* Are there other revenue sources?

* Can you discuss your visitor distribution (first time vs. repeat), and traffic sources?

1: http://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fwww.theyummylife.com%2fRe...
This is the exact kind of thing I need to read right now. Thank you.

Over 100 new paying customers per month is incredible in my opinion. Especially for what I would guess is one of the most competitive SaaS markets out there. If I can reach that many total customers on my cheapest plan I will be ecstatic.

If you don't mind me asking, what user acquisition channels have you found most effective for selling to small businesses?
Yes, blame the victim.

Not to mention your remark about being stranded in Berlin not being so bad.
How many people ever had more than one sound card in their computer, let alone a need to switch between them ?

http://xkcd.com/619/
Jiro's Dream
I won't go into numbers, but I make a living running http://www.improvely.com , http://www.w3counter.com , and http://www.dialshield.com

Improvely is a monthly subscription with a free trial period, W3Counter is freemium, and DialShield is pay-as-you-go. They are all bootstrapped and profitable.
Wow, that is brilliant PR.
I don't suppose you made it to the next paragraph where the author says:

> "By this myopic logic, Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity..."

i.e. he agrees with you.
it's only fair to note that Linux supports a much greater variety of hardware than OSX.

Entirely true, but I also don't have to look up what is or is not supported by OSX. I just buy an Apple computer. Of course, there's obvious tradeoffs here about having the freedom to buy whatever hardware you want.
An honest question, why support the people who caused this situation in the first place? It really seems like supporting other groups would be more appropriate.
I think it's better to compare Apple to a high-end restaurant. You don't get three Michelin stars just by making the customer feel special and having lots of fit and finish, the food also has to be something special.

Yet still, of course there are lots of people that will claim that those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price, and _has_ to be mostly about making the customers feel special, after all they use the same basic ingredients as the restaurant around the corner.
Perhaps to prevent them seeing demos of anything else and reviewing them too?
thnx for letting me know, ill fix it asap :)
Few questions, if you dont mind :)

1. How long did it take to reach this level of income?

2. What is the total monthly traffic that generates 122k?

3. How much time does it take to manage the whole thing in its present state?
Thanks, And how about for the Saas software itself? I note a lack of pure black text, it's always a dark shade of gray...softens the look nicely. Little touches like that, anywhere those tips come from? Any blogs, forums or such to follow on the design of saas software, specifically webapp deaign?
Sorry, I wasn't sure if I should address that in this post or not. I'll write another one about finding and validating a developer/designer/whatever. It's a mix of methodology and black magic...so I wanted to keep this post on-point for one topic.

For small things, I use oDesk. The PSD-to-HTML slicing and part-time developer were both found through oDesk. I've also found good help on oDesk for other things like audio transcription and data-entry.

I found my designer through Forrst.
Great, thank you for the detailed overview. If you don't mind me asking, do you ever end up having problems with consistency? (I imagine it could happen if some data was written to 2 databases and the second one rejected the transaction.)
"I believe a well-funded tyrant with good taste could create a viable desktop though."

The counter-argument, of course, is Mark Shuttleworth and Unity. :-)
I read a while back that one of the biggest issues with a human mission to Mars is the landing, I can't remember the article but a brief search turns up this one that covers the relevant points:
http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-...
The problem with Android is its diverging from the Linux desktop path (i.e. X11->Wayland). Being completely incompatible put Android apart and it arguably can't be called a Linux desktop at all. The split it caused in the mobile devices (with no drivers available except for Android) is a horror, and like Aaron Seigo called it - Android is the best friend and the worst enemy.

The real future of the Linux desktop and mobile is Wayland, and Android it seems will stay apart forever, going its own path.
I think this article makes some good points but overlooks the crucial question - what inventions are patentable? Like a great chef that combines known ingredients, apple has made excellent products, but apple has not produced new innovation that is worthy of patent protection. Apple's path to success should be winning customers, just like the chefs he describes, not through patent litigation.

The examples given by the OP actually support this point. It's true that Einstein didnt discover relativity first - both lorentz and poincare had worked out the mathematics, but Einstein articulated the concepts best. I often use this case study as an example of how innovations often arise independently from different inventors simultaneously because the conditions are right. The other famous and illustrative example is newton and leibniz inventing calculus independently.

As a VC, I see this all the time - the market conditions are right for a new idea, and suddenly 4 or 5 companies appear doing variations on the same thing, none aware of the others. Let good execution and the market decide which one is best, not the date on a patent filing for something each came up with on their own.
The 'final' Frontier in Java
I believe in incentives. In this case, more potential free all expenses covered trips are stacked against "I'm a professional, theres a way for me to do this and stay neutral".

I don't think that ever really worked out.
A flash game I built in high school (about 7 years ago) went from an average of $30 per month on AdSense to $500 the next month, to $3,600 the month after that due to an unexpected surge in traffic for a keyword for which it ranked #1 on Google. The $3,600 month happened in May, and it has since dropped steadily to about $1,500 a month now. Regardless, it was a nice surprise since the game was just sitting there from when I spent a weekend building it a long time ago.
great job!

These are the sort of success stories from you regular joes that are more common than the typical "1 billion dollar acquisition" startup.

A couple of questions if you don't mind:

a) What technology stack are you using/did you use to develop planscope?

b) How did you deal with scalability?

c) Are you doing everything by yourself? Support, Development, Marketing, etc.

Thanks in advance!
thnx for the input mate, ill try to add discussion forum in the future.
In my experience, when you're first headed out on your own with (probably) a used vehicle with tires that are of unknown age, you're more likely to burst one than simply have a small puncture/leak. Maybe that's just because my state (IN) sucks at road repairs though.
You're right, my statement was too broad, but I submit that it is still correct for health insurance, when the goal is (I hope) to get affordable health care for everyone. The difference is that if vehicle insurance for your tank is unobtainable to prohibitively expensive, you can choose not to drive that tank. You have no choice in getting type 1 diabetes, or appendicitis, or an MRSA-infected bug bite.
Dress Up: Famous Date Dress Up - Free Online Games
Twisted Rock Manager, amazing rock game...
Tires should be patched, not plugged (and only when the hole is nowhere near the sidewall). I've never had a tire plug hold, or a patch fail.

Patching them can still be done at home but I've always let the guy at the garage do it, because he sees a couple of cases a day instead of one every 3-4 years like I do.
Perhaps another example of original innovation: the swiss army knife. Look at a victorinox. Look at a knife, a corscrew, a scissor, a toothpick, and a tweezer sitting on the desk. Sometimes an act of integration is enough to be transformative.

iOS is a great example of radical originality, even if not a breakthrough technically. The Concept of the ap - a litewight, bandwidth efficient, modular, reconfigurable element integrated into the OS - was certainly original. It was also thus, highly innovative. It was reductive smaller, lighter, less complex.

Edit: clarity
It's your life at the end of the day, on the grand scheme of things, it's just a job. Sad read but like jakejake said, gotta get tough with yourself

Hopefully he'll use something like Kickstarter and finally make a hit game for himself
Some thoughts on Android benchmarking
I would be interested in hearing specific recommendations for self-study of statistics from you.

I currently have Feller (based on reading www.ams.org/notices/200510/comm-fowler.pdf) but don't have a good "taste" for what would be the best books for a self-study approach to statistics. There is also the "Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks" book and I was considering dropping it into the mix.

I am probably over-thinking the book choice and would be fine to just dive in to anything, but if I would prefer to not pick up references that are going to drive me off a good path to start . . .
I used ruby on rails for backend, then xpath to parse through each sites for links
Clojure number crunching performance
How about after hosting costs? I took a look at some image sharing sites today, some of the financials are painful to read. Key point is they're hoping for a buyout on the traffic rather than generating revenue themselves. We're talking break evens at 20mb per ad click. Possible for a blog, a balancing act for image sharing.
"Apple" and "Breaking Bad" in the same article. Awesome.

CNN doing SEO spam now.
I suspect that this feature's "pre-announcement" will probably result in "copies" of this feature showing up in other apps, possibly before Enterface itself even reaches general release (assuming it's even in dev).
You're not doing something wrong per se. I started out at the right time in the right niche, that helped me get away with a lot. I started out when in high school, when I had no costs of living, which is a great way to learn risk-free. As a result I now do 'marketing' as well as technical stuff, which keeps margins high, and gives me breadth in all those fields, which, I think, hugely contributes to my success. But mostly it's a matter of right place, right time...
>So what exactly can I do with one of these?

The processor on this chip is an ARM cpu with floating point support, probably not something that most would consider exceptional. But for a microcontroller like this, the most interesting aspect is the on-board peripherals. Most MCUs will have some sort of analog to digital converters, counter/timer blocks, etc. You can download the datasheet for the Stellaris chip in question from here: http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/lm4f120h5qr

Some of the highlights:
12 counter/timer blocks. They each have a capture/compare block which can be used, e.g., to measure timing of external events or output a PWM train (for digital to analog conversion). The timers can also trigger the start of a DMA transfer or the start of an analog conversion.

A 1 million sample per second A to D converter with 12 bit resolution. The ADC has hardware decimation support (up to 64 samples), which can be used to trade off sample rate for sample resolution. The converter also has a 12 channel input multiplexer. Also, unlike the ADC in your sound card, this has DC-coupled input, so there's no lower cut-off frequency.

A DMA controller with support for scatter-gather modes. Transfers can be triggered by the completion of an A/D conversion, the comparators, the timers, or by software.

Two analog comparators: The comparator output can be used internally to trigger interrupts or start a conversion on the ADC.

*There are 8 UARTs, 4 synchronous serial ports, and one each I2C, CAN, and USB controller. So you can talk to a lot of peripheral devices. The UARTs support rates as high as 5 Mbps.

So, what do you want to do with these building blocks? It's kind of up to you. One application I can imagine is a substantially less-sucky (compared to all the other ones out there based on MCUs) audio-frequency oscilloscope. The ADC sample rate is almost high enough to support it, particularly if you designed a decent front-end, and the analog comparators could be used to do interesting things with triggering (lots of MCUs try to fake it, badly, with software triggering).
I do not fully agree with no-innovation comment. Many of their products, such as the iphone were indeed innovative.

I however, do agree with the latter that it has no footprint of its contributions. Research, and computing in general, builds on others work and in that sense apple comes as across as a douchebag - no white papers, publications or even blogs from employees. Only public documentation is usually served by an army of lawyers.

Until a year ago, they had steve jobs to justify this selfish behavior. And now there is no steve jobs and such behavior will create a huge PR hit for apple. Unless they can create a fantastic product record pre-jobs, it will be very hard. For example, the first feature sans jobs was Siri and it wasn't an universal success by any means. Good time to buy microsoft stock.
Check out http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates - lots of quality ready-to-use templates there
I would have loved this kind of thing when I played junior golf. I spent a lot of time making spreadsheets with all of my statistics. Have you tried marketing towards junior players? AJGA and some of the really competitive junior tours have a lot of serious players who would love to have comprehensive stats on their rounds.
HP Launches WebOS into Beta
187GS
An open source project for JavaScript and CSS with a great idea ready to pop-off. Looking for input on what features would be great to implement. The name stands for Gross Script 187, or simply the action of murdering gross script.
Ironic that the site creator has deactivated zooming on iOS devices, so the font icons' vector capability is in vain.
Any tips on getting traffic to an app?
Check out theme forest, as a coder with very little design skills I generally grab a design from there Then once you are sure people want the product hire a design er to overhaul and improve your design (or you can do it yourself)
1) 6 years

2) 8 million monthly uniques

3) Hard to say. I can take a month off and it'll probably go fine. If it crashes, I'm on it 24/7 (if I care for my wallet). I do work on it full time, but that's working on growth as well as managing the present state. I try to outsource as many chores and secondary tasks as possible, leaving the multi-disciplinary work for me.
This all strikes me as an example of a sunk-cost fallacy. Either memristors will make more money, or they won't. If they will, it doesn't matter that you have a billion dollars invested in X that won't be useful anymore, because you've already spent that money. If memristors won't make more money than making flash products using existing infrastructure, then it's not ready for commercial use and there's no conspiracy behind the delay.
MobileWorks (YC S11) is hiring an Account Manager
Attention Arbitrage
If you need background processing then you really can't afford to not introduce some new stuff in your stack.
SQLite is awesome too. I use it whenever I can.
I don't have any questions, but I'd just like to say I'm an avid follower of your project and blog, and I truly appreciate your transparency.
a) Ruby/Rails on the backend, Backbone.js on the front

b) I really don't have any scaling issues. I have about 120 paid customers, and on a given workday half of them login at some point. It probably takes quite some time for the average B2B product to run into scaling issues (unless you're doing some sort of extreme number crunching or something)

c) I do everything. 20% of my product time is spent coding, the rest is marketing. Support whenever I need to (usually less than 30 mins response time if I'm awake)

Feel free to drop me a line with any other questions, I'm pretty much an open book :-) brennan at planscope.io
A few dozen sites, with a couple doing about 80% of revenue. About 8 million uniques.
What's your backup revenue plan in event of an adsense ban?
I think simplicity isn't the only story, it's usable simplicity. If simple was the only game in town, Apple would only need the iPod shuffle and something like John's Phone (http://johnsphones.org/) to rule the world.

The iPod and iPhone has added lots and lots of functionality over the years, yet the interface has stayed simple. It's possible to add lots of new features in ways that doesn't make the interface more complex, however it's a big challenge.
Is he behind all the UI decisions? Does he have the final word on everything there?
Error messages in iTunes Mac are just as bad.
Come along to http://www.meetup.com/Find-A-tech-Job-In-London/events/77826... this Wednesday
OpenVIBE | Software for Brain Computer Interfaces
I launched http://bestattendance.com 20 months ago working solo while holding a full time job. Profitable and bootstrapped. Growth was slow at first, but things are really starting to take off now. It still does not support a full time income but I project that it will soon(ish).
A lot of people think memristors have the potential to change computing in fundamental ways (requiring new architectures) and bring forth true AI. I'd call it revolutionary.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/mo...

http://www.neurdon.com/category/synapse/

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4088605/Memristor-em...
what state do you live in? Taxes vary, and can shift the salary by 15-20%.
Good job you've done there! Thanks for the info and good luck!)
What would be those 3-5 different website architectural styles?
Everyone with headphones or headsets using Bluetooth or USB.
I make about $5/month on Food Trucks Near Me [1] through ads. At least it's not losing money!

[1] http://foodtrucksnearme.com
Not sure what you mean by lack of developer friendliness and what specific tools you find it lacking. Postgres is a great choice for new startups that need an RDBMS and like having schema for their data. There is built-in JSON support in upcoming 9.2 release and most JSON-to-schema mapping should be done in application anyway. Sharding is easy to do at application level; you would lose ability to do certain queries across shards but most solutions offering automatic sharding are designed specifically not to allow most types inter-shard querying and instead offer map-reduce.
Deadly Weapons You Should Never Ever Make Out of Harmless Household Items
Reddit's database has only two tables
It's a win-win for everyone.

I really like publicly journaling how my products are evolving over time, especially since it seems to be either helping or inspiring some people. And plus, I know I've received direct or indirect customers from doing this.
Apple invented the ability to take geeky stuff and turn it into cool stuff for normal people.

That's a pretty big feat in itself.