skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, a great presentation that really quantifies how insane the appstore economy is. I think we might be bucking one or two trends mentioned in the deck, but for the most part we've had our share of success and failure with various app pricing strategies.

The question I struggle with is whether or not these consumer trends are created due to the AppStore's hit-driven structure, or simply the purchasing & usage habits of a VERY large demographic driving the economy on iTunes. ie: people ages 16-21. look @ the top music/movie charts.

Here's where we are winning. If you're going to do a free app (and you produce paid apps), do your own internal marketing and banner ad system. Don't pay someone else if you don't have significant volume. AdMob ROI is too low for most small shops with small budgets. With our ad system, we're saving a lot of money and it's responsible for roughly 25% of our premium app sales. Plus, we get a 5% commission through linkshare, so we take back profits from Apple's 30%. For the record, we're currently delivering ~2M ad impressions a month.

It doesn't take much to setup your own system. You can do it easily with a Webkit frame + Google AdManager or OpenX. We use AdManager, the interface is easier IMO and GOOG hosts everything (no costs).
Most Infamous Software Bugs Of All Time
Here is the data for some stories on HN:

-8, 8
-7, 4
-6, 9
-5, 4
-4, 2
-3, 7
-2, 9
-1, 12
0, 26
1, 656
2, 385
3, 243
4, 182
5, 133
6, 76
7, 51
8, 37
9, 38
10, 32
11, 19
12, 21
13, 15
14, 24
15, 13
16, 16
17, 10
18, 10
19, 9
20, 10
21, 4
22, 12
23, 3
24, 3
25, 6
26, 1
27, 7
29, 2
31, 3
32, 1
33, 1
34, 1
35, 4
36, 3
38, 1
39, 1
40, 2
47, 1
48, 1
49, 1
51, 2
58, 3
64, 1
90, 1
98, 1

have fun with the graphing :)
The list only considers the last 10000 item ids.

Although it is a sign of growth that 10k item ids used to be a window of about 6 weeks, and now it seems to be more like 10 days.
It's a bit reddity to see the joke presentation so high on the front page while an actually informative coverage of the even is in obscurity.

When I browse Slashdot I turn funny posts off. If you turn them on, you'll see +5 funny all over the place, and they are indeed funny, I would just rather get information then jokes.
Ask HN: Your startup is worth 100.  So what is 51% of it worth?
Please don't respond with:

51 + [whatever control is worth to you].

Hard numbers. Pretend someone approached you on the street and you had 10 minutes to answer. Real business stories (with hard numbers) even better.
"Since they did not consult our developers, our ads were not implemented correctly, and we weren't getting paid (even though Boxee's users may have been seeing the ads)."

Honest question: don't you normally pay for ads, rather than getting paid for them? I must be missing something here.
they haven't had integrity for a long time. sadly for their VCs, it is becoming universally understood that this site is local-payola, it will be impossible for them to earn back that trust now. VCs need to drill "don't be evil" into their firms earlier.
If your interest is tax deductible then you are only paying taxes on the 1% that's above the interest.

Government bonds are a hedge, I would still have lot's of stocks, but the goal is to avoid needing to sell stock when the market is down. Normal bonds have higher interest rate until inflation hits or the company goes bankrupt at which point you might not get your principle back.

Owning your home ties you to that location and selling property can be a major issue. If you are living off your savings then having a single investment with 30% of you money tied down is a huge risk. If your single and there is a 20% chance you will move in the next 10 years buying a house is a bad investment but feel free to run the numbers in your area including: tax, the high cost of buying and selling, the loss of liquidity, maintenance costs, appliances etc.
Someone should do the proper experiment. Create a fictitious retail business, and generate a stream of reviews for it. Any other reviews would have to be faked. If they are writing fake bad reviews and removing them for money, you would then have strong evidence.
I already have a couple people on board the expert sexchange deletion effort.

Yelp was really useful to me for a while, but now I am worried about. I know a couple of local businesses that received a ton of business from the reviews, more than they could handle.
"rare position" indeed but that also means it's a solid business. Congrats!
It'd be fun (and educational) to try, though.
no, actually the rate on bonds is set in the market. it makes no sense for a seller to give you a better deal because you have a lot of money

in any case, in the bond market, ten million is nothing. a hundred million is nothing. in the time it took me to write this, five billion in bonds were traded
Larrabee: Gamer or Game Changer?
In theory, I could be happy to live as a disembodied mind, without drinking water. But I'm built out of a specific technology, and that technology has an agenda.

In a sense, this validates Ted K's paranoia. Each of us is actually a colony of living organisms, but we don't think of ourselves as such. We don't, for instance, mourn the daily loss of millions of skin cells, barely a month old. We have no emotional attachment to our substrate; up until a few centuries ago, we weren't even aware it existed as such.

Given the option, I'd bet many of us would choose to be made of something more durable and predictable, to move beyond cell colonies. In some distant future, might not the larger system -- comprised of humans and their technology -- think the same thing?
Two paragraphs lead off with the "Now, <statement>" construct:

"Now, our funding situation is that..."

"Now, we understand that..."

I'm starting to get sensitized to this construct. The 'now' is like an 'um' -- i.e., filler -- except, it's an 'um' that says, "I am about to say something authoritatively."

Obama uses it a lot, too.

I'm starting to flag it as sort of poser-ish.

The content of the article was super high quality, and outweighed this nit.
nothing legal
Home based business that helps to make money online
Make money online from home with IPCWORX. We change your life and your lifestyle! With the IPC Program you are in full control of your financial future and there are no limititations to the income you can make - you are on a level playing field.
Thank you for the feedback. I'm not sure how to interpret it... but it probably means that we need to do some more work on the 'call to action' and clean up the design a little bit. Thanks again.
Try having a look at the Motley Fool website.

www.fool.com
Junk bonds are yielding about 13 percent right now, but there's a huge default risk:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=jnk

Muni bonds are at about 7 with much less risk:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CEV
Laughing in code
OK then, reimplement everything in ASP.NET!

DHH, the Ruby guy? Sorry about posting that Lua vs Ruby benchmark link.
Hey everybody who's never seen these funny quotes before and is upvoting this, here's more new and funny stuff:

http://crossthebreeze.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/feature.jp...

Also:

http://roflcaust.org/images/hammerzeit.jpg

Lots more here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/

Enjoy!
In search of Microsoft Genusies: Why MS should copy the Apple store.
Please don't post a link to your own blog when all it does is link to another post. Just link to the original.
How expensive is your product/service? If it costs enough that cold-calling would give good ROI, then you can use the yellow pages to get numbers, or just drop in. I was recently in an attorney's waiting room when a salesperson for a software company walked in on a cold visit and I was really surprised at how well received she was even though initially they weren't interested.

Alternately, you can call a few local ones and offer them a free subscription/license in exchange for contact names. An actual name of someone to call is infinitely more valuable than just a number. A name, with the recommendation of "Suzie at Flowers4U told me you might be interested" is even more so.

For Adwords, I think you just have to get creative to find words that are cheap but effective. Trial and error!
$2500 * 12 * 40 = $1,200,000
Well, 49% really would be worth 49, but to hand over control that is quite a different kettle of fish. It very much depends on how much you trust the party you are dealing with, to me if you sell 51% you might as well sell it whole in most cases, so I figure 51% = 100 - (whatever risk you think is acceptable).

Not sure if that makes sense like that, but that's how I would do the calculation. In other words, the risk factor determines to a large amount how close to the 'real' value of the 51% we'd end, if I think the risk is large (that the party that will now control the start-up will crash it or disappear into the night) then I want it all now.
It wasn't a matter of hiding what I said. For legal reasons, I can't really comment on my experience. I'm sorry that I can't back up my opinion.
The problem isn't image, it's the actual location. Building a technology center along a ring road leads to a sterile and depressing office park wasteland. (I lived there for 5 years.) Cambridge or Somerville or even downtown Boston are good places to have tech companies, because you're part of an intellectual community. In a Route 128 office park there's nowhere you can walk to, so you never interact with people except in your building.

@robg: reconsider? Your life and work would be better if you were within walking distance of a university and other startups. Yes, it's cheaper in Lincoln, but you would be happier and more connected with half as much space in Central Square.
All true, but that's a lot of ifs.
How To Land A TechCrunch Guest Post
There's also a bikepath that runs through the downtowns of Bedford, Lexington, Arlington, and stops at Alewife. If you're pretty in-shape it can be a decent transportation route, though at 9 miles from Bedford to Alewife, it's quite a hike.
Computational Thinking without Programming
Ask Reddit: what's the "hello world" program for multicores? : programming
Migrating US Government applications from Oracle to MySQL
I don't have a conclusive answer but a few inputs.

I think it drastically depends on the state a company is in. An established business which is listed on the stock market probably has much less of a markup for the 51% than a very young company.

Also, I don't know for sure about the US, but in Switzerland and a few other European countries 51% don't give you full control over a company, 2/3 is needed.

If I had to say what I would pay for 51% of a StartUp? I think I would pay a markup which is within of my evaluation of the company.
Did any startup founders here consider Massachussett's foreign corporation laws and tax structure when deciding where to start their startup?

Or was it more about the intellectual community, weather, coffee, social scene, presence of other startups, availability of talent, venture or angel capital, customers, partners, and potential acquirers?
I am in the middle of a Quote 1 now... :(

The nice thing about Quote 10 is that 9 people effectively dilutes the responsibility.
> Building a technology center along a ring road leads to a sterile and depressing office park wasteland.

You mean like the Shoreline/Charleston/Rengstorff loop in Mountain View?

Silicon Valley has its share of sterile office parks. Actually, Silicon Valley seems more like a suburban wasteland than the Route 128 belt - at least the streets are crooked in Massachusetts, and most of the towns have walkable town centers, and housing tends to follow old cowpaths instead of tract subdivisions.

BTW, I think the Sun/MITRE/Middlesex Turnpike/Burlington Mall area has a lot more going for it than the Google/Mozilla/Microsoft/Charleston area in Mountain View, except for the companies themselves. You've got like 5 restaurants just across the creek from Sun in Burlington, and the mall is a half mile away. The Mountain View office park has nothing but offices, movies, and marsh trails.
ahh, the old story of hackers and journalism. I expected more from torrentfreak.
Tech needs to expand beyond Rte.128. Rte's 95, 90, 495, and 146 make working in tech more viable for those of us south of the pike. Having more tech clustered in Boston around Back Bay and South Stations would be a huge boon given the commuter lines.

128 has been where all the really good work is, relative to RI, but the 3 hour per day average commute is unbearable.
I believe these are the slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/pfreet/wifi-cat-startup-riot
#2 might make sense for if you are in States, but it doesn't yet make sense in Canada. The real estate is going kaput and pretty rapidly, but the prices are nowhere near their low point .. they are more like only half way down.

Just to give you an idea why this matters. First, a decent house in Vancouver area would cost you from 800k and up. Something for 400k is going to be in the area that few people would like to live. Second, spending cash on a real-estate during recession periods is the biggest no-no. These are the money that are hard to get out, leave alone getting them out without substantial losses.
The Turn Of The Screw
I'm not sure what you mean.

From an investment perspective you would ordinarily go through an exercise to determine what the business is valued at. There are various tools and methods to these calculation, but the outcome is that you get a mutually agreed upon number.

One you've reached that stage, 51% of the company is worth 51% of this valuation number. If your business is valued at $1,000,000 US, then 51% is worth $510,000. Most investors would be happy to take 51% of the business for some number LESS than this, but as a rule of thumb none would take 51% for MORE than this amount.
Free Application WebHosting From DreamHost
1. Get in great shape.
2. Help the poor.
The website is down (at least for me). But there's also some information on the official ma.gnolia site: http://ma.gnolia.com/
Nothing tops the Microsoft anti-trust judge who declared in open court one morning that he had separated IE from Windows on his PC, and he didn't understand why all of these Microsoft guys were saying it was so tough. When they took a look at his computer, he showed them how he'd deleted the IE icon from his desktop.
The Average Shelf Life Of An iPhone App Is Less Than 30 Days
I worked for a couple startups in the Boston area, then moved out to Google in Silicon Valley.

In my experience, the difference is culture. In Boston startups, the message is "Pay your dues." In Google, the message - from the start - is "Change the world." Which one is more appealing to a hacker fresh out of college?

It also doesn't help that Boston startups tend to focus on B2B areas with predictable revenue streams. There's no brand consciousness about Boston startups, because they generally don't sell to the public. So when you're out with friends and they ask what you do, you have to answer "I work at some startup you've probably never heard of" instead of "I work at Google."
If I want to give up control of the company but still keep part of the future profits of the company (which is basically what this question asks), it makes more sense to just sell to a public corporporation for a mixture of cash and stock. This is basically the same idea.

You get Money, give up control of the company, but also the rights to some of the future value generated by the company. The waters are muddied a bit by the fact that the corporation has existing business that affects the dividends received, but in theory that's already priced into the stock by the market.
So apparently Myspace asks for a penny pic to get support
1 step to getting upvoted on HN:

don't linkjack via digg.
It makes no sense to say that the dictionary has it wrong. If you discovered that human beings were actually created by aliens for some sinister purpose then we would be their technology, but unless that's what you're proposing then the word just doesn't apply.

Technology doesn't mean 'impressive, complicated thing'. You can't say 'people are really special and a product of evolution' and infer that people are technology. It's like saying that red is a really beautiful colour and therefore is actually a shade of blue.

But even if you could say that it would be irrelevent, because it would be misconstruing what the unabomber meant.
It sounds like he thinks he's an expert on what being an expert means.
When I'm on the "About Us" page, I couldn't find my way back home. The logo image doesn't take me home.
Quality cherry pickers for sale
best and quality cherry picker sales at platform rentals. Here you can get various types of quality cherry pickers.
Not only at the idea stage.

VC's obviously want a team that isn't simply capable of launching a site and get 10.000 users. They're looking for a team that can make it into a business that's worth millions.

Not many teams can do this. So yes, people matter, both in the very earliest stages, mature companies and everything in between. If you don't believe me look at Apple's stockprice every time there's a story on their CEO's bad health.

The team that built a site and got 10.000 users may not be capable of driving it forward to a real large-scale business. Maybe they just got lucky, maybe they don't really care for the money but just want to have fun, maybe they have no idea how to manage other people. The team in a companys earliest stages doesn't say a lot about how well they will perform in the setting of a larger company, which they will hopefully become.
Why would you ever give a single investor 51%?
Was it necessary to bash Reddit?
Yeah, no one ever does that :)
51% == 100%
Monitor network utilization on the shell with Slurm
Good Question.

It depends on whether someone is trying to buy the 51% or the 49%

Selling the 49%: 49 by what I assume the definition of "worth" to be.

Selling the 51%:

If: You think the buyer can run the company better than you
Then: 51

If: You think the buyer can run the company tolerably well
Then: 60
- Extra money to account for loss of control. Note that now the $$$ worth of the company will be changed such that the new worth is 117

If: Don't think the buyer can run the company
Then: Forget it, no price
Unless: You need to sell. Then I guess negotiate what you can get.

EDIT: I guess this is basically a formula based on the expected future worth of the company, but I can't think of the expression at the moment.
Rarely a month goes by that someone I know moves to a startup I've never previously heard of.

I'm very surprised to hear that culture difference... are you sure it's not just a per company thing?
thats what everyone compares to
Why consider active investing at all? Just buy and hold an index fund if you want exposure to stocks.
Oh yeah, make sure you come say hi next time you're visiting Mozilla.
Because they paid for it?

Because you needed the money?

This is all really a hypothetical exercise anyway.
I don't understand how you could safely beam that amount of energy down to earth as microwaves. In times of war could this be co-opted as a directed energy weapon? What happens if a plane or birds fly through the beam?
I don't get it. Why submit this to Hacker News?
That's what Photoshop Elements is for. The idea Photoshop does not have a well-designed UI because the learning curve is steep is ridiculous. The "user" that Photoshop is made for is the professional designer or photographer. There's plenty of room for lower-end consumer products, but there's nothing wrong with the Photoshop UI.
"Usage time declines by almost a third in the first month after use, stabilizing at just under five minutes"

I would argue that the presentation is biased to those iPhone app developers who are casting a very wide net to people who download/buy apps to satisfy a short-term impulse (e.g. people who download or buy a (cheap) application and lose interest after a couple times.)

I believe there will always be room for quality in the AppStore. For me, quality means that I actually like using the app because it is useful. There are many learn Spanish apps that I bought - that I do not use. Because they weren't as good as I wanted them to be. I don't use them anymore but because I bought them I hate to delete them.

For example, Tweetie's integrated Summize search alone made it well worth the nominal initial cost and I still use it. I'm sure it's supporting the developer well.

I love iPhone Pano for easily taking panoramic photos up to 3581 x 586px (you used to have to manually stitch in Gimp/PS).

My point is quality niche apps will have a better long-term market. If your app only makes $150-$200/month - that's good - you can build a suite of apps. That's what I'm planning on doing once I get past the memory management/graphic design/etc. learning curve.
I have no knowledge on corporate taxes, but having lived in both CA and MA, my income taxes and car insurance was noticeably lower in MA than CA. Aside from heat/power, the rest of the household budget stretched farther on the right coast.

I thought there were problems in MA re: non-compete and other management vs. worker rules?
datacenterknowledge.com seems to be having some issues right now (the HN effect? ;) Here is the gist of the post:

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that
all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the
Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service
offline. That means that users who were unable to
recover their bookmarks through publicly available
tools (including other social media sites and the
Google cache) have lost all their data.

Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff said last week that the
service’s MySQL database included nearly half a
terabyte of data. Yesterday Halff informed users that
a specialist had been unable to recover any data from
the corrupted hard drive. ”Unfortunately, database
file recovery has been unsuccessful and I won’t be
able to recover members’ bookmarks from the Ma.gnolia
database,” he wrote.
We had hyperinflation in the early 20ies in Germany. The country survived that --- though in a bad shape. At the end of the twenties / early thirties, we had a deflation (like you in America) and the Nazis came.

Choose your poison.
I've seen Monte Carle estimation of pi done, in Halloway's Clojure reference.

The problem with the concept of a "Hello World" for concurrency is that there's no intuitive way of illustrating decent parallelism (try explaining livelock or race conditions to a CS 1 class) whereas the success or failure of a "Hello World" program is obvious: does it print?
because he's a spammer. Click the 'flag' link if you have it at the top right of the list of links. Typically the account is only a few minutes old and the link has nothing to do with the topic of the site.
We found a small cottage on 22 acres (and surrounded by conservation land) that's 2 miles from the commuter station. Know anywhere like that less than 12 miles from Cambridge (or Silicon Valley)?
Sprockets: JavaScript dependency management and concatenation (SvN)
"I am generally hostile." apparently.
I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces

I don't either, but empirically you have to concede that open source hasn't succeeded in the content creation domain. The closest thing is OpenOffice, and that's the least creative end of the spectrum, just one step away from databases and other back-end software.

If I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's because programmers don't understand the domain. You can't create good graphic design software without graphic designers on the team.
There is a whole class of financial planners who only work for rich people. They typically want you to have 500k net worth before they'll talk to you. They provide better advice for much less money that the retail mutual fund pushers at banks.

Google Baskin Financial and Doherty and Associates, and ask around for somebody like that local to you. Take meetings with them and discuss their investment strategy and philosophy until you find a good match with someone you can trust.