skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I focused on growth: app downloads grew from 1 to 1355 a day
Typeli Notes (http://www.typeli.com)

Imagine putting a ton of work (months of development) into building outstanding software, pricing it at less then a cup of latte (2 minutes of 'development'), so you can reach everyone, and then only being able to get on average 1 purchase/day. Discouraging, no? Well, that's my experience with Typeli- a note-taking app I launched a few months ago.

On the upside, those few "spenders" who bought it, loved it. And not only did they like it, they thought the app was worth the money.

So I researched a bit and it seems that we've collectively exhausted our trust. I think we cried wolf way too often- said that note-taking app, a todo list, a chat-client was ground-breaking, revolutionary, worked like magic- except it didn't. And $1.99 after $1.99, our patience steadily diminished. When you buy a $5 Starbucks, you know what you're getting. When you get the $2.99 Typeli, all you have is the sour taste of some unpleasant previous purchases.

Now, we can't easily change the status quo, but once we understand the environment, it's much easier to align yourself with people's expectations. So since yesterday, I'm been giving away Typeli for FREE.

Reaction? New daily purchases grew from 1/day to 1355/day.

Obviously my revenues are $0 but I think of this as an investment. I'm acquiring new users for $10/each (average price for similar apps). Once I have the base I can then add value by offering extra features that people need and are more than willing to pay for.

(e.g. ability to type auto-highlighted code- hell yeah I want that for $1.99, pictures in my notebooks- definitely worth $0.99 etc.)

I wanted to marinate you with this data to get feedback and spread the word about the realities of the Mac Appstore. Please feel free to share your thoughts and questions.
And I'll assert that it just doesn't matter for this discussion.

Look, as someone said elsewhere, this is an impossible problem. You have too many factors to figure out. Have a family? Want to own a house instead of rent? Do you need a car? What lifestyle do you maintain?

The point here is that we're trying to assess what it would cost to maintain a similar standard of living in two different cities. Food. Transportation costs. Housing. Rents. Healthcare. Forget 52" TVs and trips to Paris for the time being.
The resolution on a MacBook Air is low enough that you can resolve the individual pixels at your normal viewing distance.

The difference here is that a 720P TV already has pixels smaller than the resolving power of your eyeball at normal living room viewing distances; 1080P even more so. Going to 4K is completely pointless unless you're viewing the screen from sufficiently close up that it makes a difference.

People doing film editing want these kind of displays because they are going to be putting the data in front of viewers who will be close enough to resolve features at that kind of resolution. But that's because they're going to be putting the data in front of the viewing audience at their local multiplex, not in their living rooms.
1. Always use jslint.

2. Read good JavaScript (as others have said). The jquery source is a good place to start. Underscore.js is good, too. Unfortunately there isn't consensus about what is and what isn't good JavaScript. Some people seem to be suggesting Prototype as an example of good js, which I would disagree with.
Not using Unity?
I'm sure that if you go into developer mode you'd be able put Linux on the machine--and with that all the software you mentioned (I know what you mean though, it would be nicer if you didn't have to jump through hoops).
This failure has consequences. America ranked 31st of the 56 countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, which assesses the academic skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds.

Two "easy to fix" reasons why our school sucks: Summer vacation and sleep depriving school schedule. Sleep is necessary for learning, but high school students don't get enough of it because their biology collides with school schedule. Summer vacation have a reputation for destroying education gain, because they're not spending time reviewing what they have learned. Review is crucial to the learning process, since our knowledge decay due to little or no use. That's why adults will have rusty math and know a lot less than high school seniors unless said adult is an engineer or a doctor.

They are easy to fix, in theory. All you have to do is distribute summer vacation days into the rest of the school years. All you have to do is shift starting time to something more reasonable like 8:30 AM or 9:00 AM.

However, they are hard, because of politics and culturally mandated stupidity.
We can pretty clearly see that lowering risk is increasing the number of software startups. You can see a pretty clear micro example of this just by looking at YC applications.

The number of YC Applicants has increased as the risk of doing YC has gone down.

When someone going into YC had an expected outcome of basically $25000, less people were willing to leave jobs to go start companies. Think about pre 2009 YCombinator.

Now consider post 2009 Ycombinator.

As the process became less risky: more guaranteed capital (the Ron Conway, Yuri Milner portfolio strategy), and more Acquahires. The value of the average company went up, the downsides went down, and the risk to starting a company went down. Thus, more people were willing to apply to YC, and Paul and the YC partners were able to accept more companies.

You could probably argue that this was a function of the popularity of YC. I believe that founders are rational, and the popularity of YC again decreased their risk. How many founders do not quit their jobs until they get into YC? (many)

This is a separate argument from whether or not we need government healthcare, but I think it's pretty clear that risk evaluation is absolutely part of being an entrepreneur.

(As an aside, dealing with healthcare is just one of many things that we as founders have to do that provides very little net benefit to our business. The less of this BS we have to do, the better we will deploy capital and the more focused we will be on important problems)
Raspi ALU Case
how long before someone starts slappRabbit.com ?
99 Life hacks to make your life easier
The last point is the one it took me the longest to understand. Telling everyone who will listen about your business ideas (not just prospective clients) helps you to anticipate common objections, understand which aspects of it are easiest to explain/understand, which aspects of it are most valuable (focus on those), and iterate towards improvement before even getting a single user. It happens to also be excellent sales practice, but don't treat these conversations like sales calls.

(The process requires reading between the lines a bit because people don't always know what they really want or don't know how to explain it.)
When I read these I wonder what gripe the author has with the industry. If 4K is 'stupid' as he claims not enough people will buy it and folks will stop making them. But of course public sentiment is rarely well nuanced, by this logic plasma screens are 'stupid' too. My own personal experience is that the 1080p 'blu-ray' experience is better than the 720p DVD experience [1]. Now there are a bunch of changed variables there from decoding of content to display to television implementations to screen technology. So really its not like I could pin it on just the change in pixels.

I expect that the collection of things, media, player, and display, in a 4K world will seem better than a 1080p world, and of course big displays will eventually be very common (I really do think that at some point entire walls of video capable display might be the norm with a controller that can segment off parts to various displays)

[1] And I tried to watch an extended play VHS cassette the other day and found I just couldn't stand watching it. That was unexpected, I knew it would be bad but wow.
It has a 16GB ssd.
> Countries with much broader safety nets for entrepreneurs are not producing the risky innovative companies that America is.

But the fact that they have broader safety nets may have nothing to do with that. Maybe the reason they produce less risky innovation has to do with other ways that they differ from America.
The point is to overwhelm the system. Public civil disobedience brings the issue to the public. Ghandi didn't protest in private.

What you would want to do are:

1) Bring the issue to the public. Make sure that it ends up on the evening news more often than not.

2) Dispel most of the myths associated with drugs (e.g. all drug users are out-of-control crazed lunatics on a homicidal rampage to kill you and your kids!).

3) Get more people on-board. If more and more and more people are getting arrested very publicly for using drugs, then at some point, the government will have to do something, because they can't afford to have a significant portion of the population in jail.

These are the end-goals. Mostly to change public perception and to get the majority of the population on your side. Then you want to bring the issue to a head.
> But apparently you will be doing so in violation of the law.

Clearly not. According to the article, the law deals specifically with institutions provide education, not individuals soliciting the courses.

This is much like poker laws that made it illegal for banks to process financial transactions, but never made it illegal for players to participate.
Sure there are. I'll be starting at Google Switzerland the coming month with a considerably larger base salary.
I'm nothing fancy at that, a fresh university grad with only a year of real programming experience.
[video] The Internet is your Application Blueprint
There around 10 in there that I regularly apply myself.
Clojure: The real world of partitioning, interleaving, and regular expressions.
"When I reviewed JVC's DLA-X90R, I sure didn't see an increase in resolution. Admittedly, this is far from conclusive, as there's no native 4K content readily available"

There are several 4k downloads from people using 4k cameras (RED for example) and youtube (yes, there is a 4k macbreak weekly). They look stunning in person and the 4k screens screens already in production show an amazing difference from 1080p.

That said, the weak link is Cable TV bandwidth. They cannot even supply a good HD signal compared to broadcast. To see for yourself, watch the same sporting event on cable and over-the-air. The difference is amazing.
For most languages (however, notably not Java), Emacs can have great auto-completion. I personally really like auto-complete mode. It might take a little bit of effort to configure auto-complete mode to work very well with your favorite language, but I've found it well worth doing: it's far, far easier than learning some new editor and lets me keep using the rest of Emacs's great features in any language I happen to be using.

EDIT: Reading some other comments, there is Emacs-eclim that gives you Java IDE features inside Emacs. So forget what I said about Java: Emacs can now handle even Java well!

For dynamically typed languages, Emacs can essentially be as good as possible fairly easily. I've been using it for JavaScript and Racket lately, and it's been really great for both. For statically typed languages, there are often type-aware tools that make it as good as any IDE--for example, I've used TypeRex[1] for OCaml; there is also ENSIME[2] for Scala and similar tools for a bunch of other languages.

[1]: http://www.typerex.org/
[2]: https://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime

Just because Emacs is a great text editor does not mean it isn't a good IDE. It has some very good support for a whole bunch of languages. I'm under the impression that Java is an exception to this rule, but I really don't know--I haven't used Java in a couple of years and really hope I will never have to use it again.

So, all told, I think this oft-repeated advice to use an IDE instead of a text editor like Emacs is misguided: Emacs is much more an IDE than just a text editor. Perhaps it's accurate for Vim, which I've never used (and I wouldn't be surprised if Vim support IDE features well too), but it isn't anywhere near true for Emacs.
This is a really interesting article. Multi-core ARM seems to be the first really mainstream processor architecture that behaves this way. There have been others, like Alpha, but none have achieved the ubiquity that mult-core ARM has achieved. I suspect a side-effect of this is that many of the "threads are hard" effects that are hidden by x86 will come back to bite a lot of programmers. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more "threads are hard" and "threads and weird" posts in the near future, and hopefully better learning material about threading issues in the longer term. Even more hopefully, this might drive more research and development into abstractions for providing parallelism and concurrency in ways that hide the complexity of threads.
I have to say, I really enjoy TextMate's autocomplete word.
It's not fancy, but it saves me tons of time.

Also, not listed there, but TextMate's autocomplete word can also be used with [Shift - Esc] for the reverse direction.
In my experience it has nothing to do with evidence. People are emotional creatures and said emotion pervades every choice they make, whether they think themselves to be rational or not. Incidentally, the rational ones have the most trouble accepting their emotions which in the grand scheme of things makes them among the most ignorant of society.

I think that the changing attitudes are simply due to the old guard dying from old age and disease. When there are sufficiently few people who grew up in the era of hardcore anti-drug propaganda then there will be a policy change.
The first few chapters of

ET Jaynes: 'Probability Theory:
The Logic of Science': http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf

Are great (and free) as a thorough introduction to bayesian reasoning.
This is really very impressive! Loved it!
I read this article as "My children are gifted and the government should fund/educate them and forget about all other kids."

From the article:
>America ranked 31st of the 56 countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, which assesses the academic skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds.

So how exactly is nurturing genius kids going to help that?
Shouldn't education for everyone be the goal?

>First of all, we need to train teachers to spot giftedness....

How about training the teachers to teach? There seems to be a lack of good education in the US, at least for people who are poor.
Trouble With Women in the Workplace? This 1950s Film Is Here to Help
I don't mean to bash the guy, but when it comes to small software projects on a shoestring, that seem more like a side project than a stable income, I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself. It's not that he could have kept the ball rolling the hard way, all by himself (though he could, had he been the lead programmer instead of placing that weight on a volatile hire), it's more about the morale in knowing the biggest stakeholder is also knee deep in the guts of the game. It does wonders to programmer employees, and might not have ended up with them quitting so early on.

I've been noticing this trend on Kickstarter that more and more people seem to be coming up with coding projects and then waiting on the money to solve their core problem: getting the project coded, since they can't code themselves. I don't know if it's good or bad, it's definitely good that designers can bootstrap a coding project this way, but then coding is becoming increasingly easier that I'd rather see these people learn to do it and then bring their full vision into a product. Otherwise they deny software projects their biggest advantage; that they can be done on the side with no resources but your own time, which you are more than happy to spend doing that wonderful hobby which is bulding things and seeing them work.
How One Guy Raised $1.3 Million for a Tesla Museum
<< All you have to do is distribute summer vacation days into the rest of the school years. >>

How would that work... would working parents have to take off those days to watch their kids?
One of things us Linux heads liked the Ubuntu of old was how customizable it was. Ubuntu Tweak allows you to tweak the OS without having a PhD in Ubuntu or the command line.
What is the issue with summer vacation, and how would breaking it up throughout the year mitigate that issue? Genuinely want to read up on this. Thanks.
Reading the article informed me that they are banning Coursera because universities are conducting classes on the site. That's not the case for wikipedia.

Additionally, said universities are referring to themselves as their traditional name (e.g. "stanford university") and not "coursera."
One big cluster: How CloudFlare launched 10 data centers in 30 days
Speaking as someone with over six figures of student debt (doh) and trying to do a startup at the same time, I'll say this much: I will, so long as I am as far in debt as I am, never go without a good paying day job. This means I am restricted to working on my startup for about 20 hours a week, and only after putting in a 40 hour work week. I can probably only pull this off because I have no kids and a fairly independent wife who will tolerate it if I spend every sunday working all day. Progress is slow, but I don't really have another option with student loan minimums over 1k a month.
That's true. The non-commercial clause makes it incompatible with almost everything.

At least the code is properly licensed, though.
I completely agree. When you have a family with serious (but treatable) medical conditions health insurance is not an option. Even if starting a business or doing freelance work would lead to a bigger paycheck: it wouldn't offset the loss of employer health insurance.
Well, even you'd have to admit that this comment flogs the goat. There is so much goat flogging going around on HN, it's no surprise. Obviously we're lacking a gilded trough.
You're sitting close enough to a large screen that you can benefit from 1080p. Indeed, at that distance, I think you might just be able to get some benefit from 4k.

Most people do not sit 1.5m from a 50" screen however.

(I'm assuming that the calculations in this blog post: http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter/ are correct.)
Because with a sufficiently small government, ISPs would not enjoy a government-mandated duopoly?

BINGO! Give yummyfajitas a cookie. Government inhibits competition and innovation more than it helps.
And all the iPad 1s can't upgrade.
But you may have run across monads. What are they, if not a design pattern for "dealing with global state"?

This to me belies that the author doesn't actually do much programming with monads. They're more like the core abstraction of an interpreter or a sequencing algebra than a design pattern for global state.

Considering functions s -> (a, s) as "global state" is closer to a "design pattern", though.
Workflow with GitHub
Frames of reference for a startup community
Genuine question, what's the difference between semantic markup and OOCSS. My understanding of semantic markup is that you only use classes when you're referring to trees of markup e.g. .section p{} as opposed to just p{}. What's the practical difference when using OOCSS?
Only partially; read the other comments.
A couple of issues in Chrome (stable): I can't type in or move the cursor between sub-fields on the phone controls.

Where does your country-state data comes from? I've never seen a list so complete for countries outside the US!
and this is why you don't implement your own mutexes and use the ones provided by the OS.
> I would go ever further, and say that 4K is still not yet good enough. It looks great, but still not like reality.

Are you sure it doesn't look like reality because of a lack of resolution? The "different from reality" that most people are more likely to notice is the lower contrast, lower dynamic range, restricted color gamut, lack of color accuracy and possibly the lower frame rate.
I quite like Unity once I've tweaked it. The only thing I still don't like is the global menus (a UX abomination), and I can live with that.
There aren't probably any PNaCl specific aspects to these.
This is untrusted code so naturally there will be limits.

You could start at http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/ppapi/api/
> non-expressive languages like C#

C# is a quite expressive language in my opinion. And i'm quite versed in Clojure, which seems to be your language of predilection. It does have limited type inference and lambdas, which makes it a lot less painful than Java.

It really depends on the problem you have at hand anyway. But even if you have a problem where you need a more functional approach, with immutable data structures, you can use F#, which is an amazing language.

> But anyway, even without these Eclipse bridges, if you do really think that someone using, say, Visual Studio to develop C# code is more productive than a programmer using Emacs to develop Clojure code I'd like to have some of the stuff you're smoking because it looks good ; )

I use Visual Studio to develop C# code. I use Eclipse if i have to code Scala. I use emacs if i have to clojure, i actually used it to develop Clojurescript's Lua backend. Most of them have good vim bindings anyway, but in emacs i prefer to use emacs.

C# with Visual Studio can be the most productive of languages, provided the good use case. And you sound like you know nothing about what you're talking about.
I would differentiate between "Purchases" and "Downloads" here. Purchases mean people paid for the application, while downloads imply no revenue.

It's great that your app took off when you dropped the price to free, and it's a good idea to pivot to offering extended features to power users. You're pivoting your app to a more 'freemium' model.

You might consider taking a survey of your users to find out what they want out of Typeli. iMockups has done this a few times, and it's worked well for them. Are you sure that your users want "auto-highlighted code"? You'll experience the same disappointment with sales if you build something before considering what your users actually _want_ from your app.
THX for all the comments on my article.

I have learned that it was a bit too short and maybe a bit too superficial for the HN community. In fact the original version was much longer but i decided to trim it to the core message.
I'm not sure that there is a large group of developers that "jump from one ORM or VCS or editor or framework or DB or design pattern or language to another twice a week" actually. I think there are enough developers around these days that when they occasionally try out new tools or technologies and blog about it, it creates the impression that everyone is switching all the time.

It's hard to measure this, of course. But I have a hard time believing that there's this population of developers out there that are constantly switching tools/frameworks/platforms/etc. and getting any work done at the same time.
He's wrong in the "Constructor Invocation" example.

function Foo(type) {
this.type = type;
return type;
}

var bar = new Foo(5);

`bar` DOES equal 5. When you return something in a constructor, it returns it instead of returning the newly constructed object. This is a neat way for constructing different types of things.

And most of his complaints are just because he doesn't understand how `this` scoping works in javascript. If you don't understand something, don't just blame it on "bad patterns". It might not be the most intuitive, but once you learn it, it's fine. Sure, I have to bind `this` to a different function here and there, but these problems are not that bad in real world javascript.