skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone writing their software for these things in a language other than C? I have tried cross-compiling various Schemes to run on these, but am not having much luck. (Scheme implementations seem to do a lot of weird things...)

I have not tried ECL yet, though, which might be easier... and I like CL better than Scheme.
Whoa! It's Phil!

The store is setup in a kinda stupid way, so the best thing to do is make kinda stupid apps, just done well. What's S. doing, like $600/day?

Anyway, if you figure out the dynamics, are a good programmer, and shoot for the right kind of programs, then your chances are much improved. Still a gamble, but a sane one.

Cheers from Phily,
Joe
Statistics on healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP are freely available around the net. Have a look. The US spends substantially more than European countries and gets worse results.

If you add up what you pay for healthcare in taxes, and what the average American spends in taxes and private insurance, you'll find you spend far less. Your high VAT is likely needed because of any other number of government programs not available in the US.
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its ok to grant a temporary monopoly. yes. But what is not obvious is that the duration of 8 years (and 20 for a more extensive protection) is way way too long for software patents. Most software patents (especially these days) are blatantly obvious and yet granted. What is not taken into account when a patent in granted (again i can only talk of software) is how much "effort"is required to come up with the idea (or rather the method of implementing the idea). Id say any more than 2 years is being too generous and enough to stiffle innovation.
Another interesting fact is the prison population rates per 100,000 of the national population. US has the highest rate in the world.

US: 760

Netherlands: 100

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb...
The tech sector had a crash (remember that one?!) and it was not based on decades of old technology. I fail to see how the banking sector is based on decades of old technology. If you ask my friends at GS or Citadel (who went to CMU for CS), I think they'd give you an earful for that line. It could be argued that the bubble was amplified by technology that made it easier to bundle and trade CDS's. Once we snip that bit, it becomes:

They lack transparency; they are overly complicated industries.

It should not be difficult to see how this encourages bubbles. In such industries, it'd be difficult to guess the real value being created, and we know from psychological research that people are apt to create speculative bubbles even without being given this nugget (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior).
It sounds like they live in a collectivist (as opposed to individualistic) society.
But does it take into account the cost of not having the same protection from a welfare system. Poor people in the US may have more money to spend, but what happens when they get sick, or need higher education?
I think this was more a reason to talk about the singularity and Kurzweil etc.

I still think it's a very lopsided understanding of the future.
The sun is a cause of cancer, but not the only or even a primary cause. The real "cause" of cancer is cell mutation, which can be triggered by sun, chemical exposure, or simply sheer random chance -- part of the thesis of this article is that, since whales have so many more cells, the "random chance" type would be more likely to happen. And one tumor is enough to kill us, so why not whales? That's the question they're asking.
$5/hr * 40 hrs/week * 50 weeks/yr = $10,000/yr salary is not really enough to survive.

$15/$5 * $10,000/yr = $30,000/yr is.

The point is not to make minimum-wage workers rich -- just enough so that they should be able to survive without having to work insane hours.

And by your logic, if businesses can hire X new employees per year at a $5 minimum wage, then they should be able to hire 5X new employees with a $1 minimum wage. So should we lower the minimum wage even more so that businesses can hire more people and thus lower unemployment rates?
This is the most ridiculous opinion I've heard. The entire article and almost all the comments about it are based on the same assumption - yes, the market is oversaturated. So the question I think everyone should ask is this - what are the data points indicating that the market is saturated? My attempt to do that is ignored.

Being at certain positions in niche categories is not a data point. His claim that other apps are not making money is not backed up. There is practically no info on market saturation, but the entire article and all the comments are based on that assumption.

Logic involves using data to come to conclusions. What is happening here is that you all found an article you want to be true, so agree with it and make no attempt to pick apart the data behind it. This is shoddy thinking.

If I go to a fish market, there are 10 buyers and 20 men hawking fish, then I know the market is saturated. This information is not available to the author of the article.
Freemium has its own problem: you have to be careful that your free service is not perceived as "neutered", while still leaving a reason for users to pay you for the premium service. (Expect to see at least two blog posts on HN in the next two days on this topic.)
The triumph of DOS was the licensing, not the technology itself; that's what made Bill Gates so rich. Even by contemporary standards MS-DOS was a half-assed operating system full of design flaws.

Saying that Kildall made a much better operating system misses the point. The operating system is not what made the money; Gates could have sold practically any OS with his licensing deal and made the same fortune. He literally sold the license before he even owned DOS.
I haven't used Lego in a decade and yet I might buy this set. Architecture fascinates me, Lego used to, and I'm really happy they're doing an entire series on architecture.
Lawrence Lessig: The Solipsist and the Internet
War usually does the job.
Downmodded for Reddit-snark.
It's important to note that there are plenty of well-paying jobs at larger companies, and that startups are likely to be unprofitable for quite a while.
>I feel that there's a lot of niche apps yet to be made.

Do tell. :)
Oh, is English supposed to be sane? I hadn't noticed.

You're right, of course: I was using "unbounded" in a loose fashion. There are a finite number of phonemes used in English, and I suppose there must be some upper limit to the number of phonemes in a word.
"The tech sector had a crash (remember that one?!) and it was not based on decades of old technology."

Was it?

I've heard a rather compelling argument that the cause of the 2001 recession wasn't Sept 11 or the dot-com bubble, but the huge drop off in corporate IT spending after Y2K. The enterprise software market enjoyed a huge run-up from 1996-2000 as enormous companies replaced their aging COBOL mainframes with new Y2K-compliant enterprise Java systems. Most of the Indian IT consultancy market owes its existence to this, and many other domestic firms (notably Sun Microsystems) also benefited heavily from it. The consumer dot-com bubble was a relative sideshow compared to this. And enterprise software is about as price-opaque as you can get.

When Y2K rolled around and nothing much happened, all that spending evaporated. Suddenly, all these companies that had hired a bunch of mediocre Java-monkeys to do quick Y2K fixes found themselves without customers.

It does seem a bit different though; in the examples he cites, the industries themselves collapsed, perhaps because of outdated technology and lack of transparency. In the tech industry, the tech industry's replacement of its own outdated technology created a huge bubble, and then collapsed once that bubble was no longer necessary.
WW2 killed "only" 60 million or so. Population control would require having 2 billion or so killed. Unless one goes for nuclear warfare, I don't see war solving the overpopulation problem.

Unfortunately, there are not enough resources to guarantee everyone a high standard of living. Poverty is the result, and poverty leads to people breeding like rabbits. We are doomed.
If they truly have a dimensionally accurate Fallingwater, I have to admit that my ability to resist it even at a high price would be quite low...
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I develop and sell my own Mac and iPhone apps and have built up a business over the past few years, and I've recently gone full-time on it.

I'll mention this to someone at a party and they take instant interest in the iPhone part. While the investment of time I've put into iPhone apps has been a very profitable one, it's not quite what you'd expect.

Indie development virgins that I know seem to think that the app store is the ONLY feasible way to launch something you've developed on your own. And lots of people I've met who are web developers just want an iPhone app that launches their website or something because they think it'll magically make their website popular.

The reality is if you publish something on ANY platform and get it in front of people and put a price on it, you'll make money. It's just that it's intimidating for people who have never published anything on their own.

The App Store is certainly has some nice upsides. But the cool thing (and overwhelming thing for newbies) about publishing on normal platforms is that there are a LOT of variables you can control in how people actually find and buy your software. This lets you reach people who might not find you if there were only one big software directory.
“Ads are an inefficient business model, making indirect revenue as a result of behavior and advertising to people who don’t want to see them or for whom they’re irrelevant,” said Jeff Bonforte, Xobni’s chief executive. “Premium is a very direct and efficient model.”

I wish more people understood this: if ads are working on your site it is because someone has figured out how to monetize your users. (At a multiple of how much you get from the ads!) Why isn't that someone you?

Conversely: if you are not charging money because your users are just piss-poor at actually paying for things (like most apps focused on music -- where most of the cool crowd hums "yar har diddlee dee, being a pirate is alright to be, do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate" under their breath), then ads aren't going to succeed either, because no one wants to buy ads targeting people who don't spend money. (Well, OK, Madison Avenue loves selling those ads and chalking it up to "branding", but advertisers are gradually learning to actually measure ROI on those spends, too, and they're terrible.)
Gee, what a great idea. I've explained a hundred times. It doesn't stick.

An icon comes up, and people click on it. It's natural and there is no indication of what you've done wrong. Then later, they have no idea where the app went.

DMGs serve no practical purpose. They are confusing to new users, and wasted clicks for power users.
It's also interesting to compare the number of slaves in the USA before slavery became illegal, to the number of prisoners in the USA working for almost nothing.

That's right... there's now more slaves in the USA than before it became illegal.

Most prisons in the USA are run by private companies. They get paid by the states to hold the prisoners. Recently there were some judges convicted of sending innocent children to jail in exchange for financial payments from some of these private prisons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?_r=2&h...
> War usually does the job.

So does education, higher standard of living and positive outlook towards the future.

Think positive thoughts, for your own happiness.
Btw, that apple link you pasted shows no such reason to use a DMG over a zip.

If I missed it, please explain.

Also funny how so many developers provide zipped dmgs.
Wow that's misleading linkbait. The actual article describes it as philanthropy targeted at availability of contraception, female education, and higher standards of living world wide, things that are correlated with lower, more sensible, birth rates. This title makes it sounds like there's a secret organization trying to kill us all.
Conversions stalled for me too. This app is busted
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Let the conspiracy theories begin....
Actually, war is a leading cause of population growth. The baby boomers are an example.
Wanna end over population? Offer free, unhindered family planning services. Curb the rampant influence of organized religion on private matters. Foster a healthy appreciation for one's children, male or female, so families aren't forced to get rid of their daughters through early marriage. Remove the stigma around condoms; we all fuck and it's a beautiful thing, just be careful kids. Empower women and give them equal employment so they have more time to reach for their dreams and less time popping out kids to latch onto a single source of income personified as a male patriarch. Develop family farms and agriculture and introduce automation to the process, so farmers don't depend on their offspring for labor.

etc.
"Sex is the poor man's opera."
There is no conspiracy. Rich people want MORE people on the planet so they can have more people to be richer-than ;-)
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You are free to employ sarcasm and indignation as you see fit but in that case I shall bow out of this otherwise interesting conversation.
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I can tell by looking at the model that the proportions are off, but Falling Water doesn't look that bad considering. The Guggenheim, though, is a proportional disaster, and of course they can't match the iconic reverse vertically sloping walls. But I sure do applaud the effort :)
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i heard a talk by one of the guys from AdMob and based on their data he claimed you could buy your way to the top paid list with $10k in ads. this is based on their hypothesis about how the ranking works (greg yardley from pinch media hypothesized a 7 day rolling average)

its an interesting gamble. next time i have $10k to spare i might see if i can test it
The point is not to make minimum-wage workers rich -- just enough so that they should be able to survive without having to work insane hours.

$30k a year to survive isn't some natural law - when you make minimum wage $15 an hour, the prices for goods and services based on minimum wage labor goes up, and $30k a year is no longer enough to survive, so somebody gets the bright idea to say "hey we need to make the minimum wage higher..."

also, you didn't refute my argument - if the minimum wage has nothing to do with the unemployment rate, then there would be no reason not to raise the minimum wage to something extremely high like $50 an hour. Of course, in reality, there is a very good reason not to make the minimum wage $50 an hour - it would cause much of the country to become unemployed.

So should we lower the minimum wage even more so that businesses can hire more people and thus lower unemployment rates?

Not to lower unemployment rates; you should lower it because a marketplace of individuals making voluntary exchanges is much better at deciding the value of someone's labor than the government is.

The bottom line that for some reason people refuse to accept is just because you legislate it doesn't make it so. Wal-mart greeters don't make $50 an hour for a good reason - their labor doesn't generate anywhere near $50 an hour in extra revenue, and many people are willing to do the job for much less. (Sure you can arbitrarily decide to pay them $50 an hour, but don't act surprised when a candy bar becomes $10 and a gallon of gas goes up to $25 to compensate).
The problem with those measures is that they take decades to yield results. And in a few decades we will all be fucked anyway...
its joe!

i agree, understanding the market is pretty important in deciding which apps to pursue. i am surprised on some of the dumb sh!t people buy.

i think one big issue for folks like us actually trying to make a living off the app store is how sustainable the income is. we've both made our respectable apps that have held their rankings for 6+ months. we've also both made gumball apps that get downloaded/bought a bunch initially and then just disappear.
>> That depends on what "it" we're talking about.

>Random stuff. May include foodstuff, may also include random luxury stuff. Obviously for the former it's important, while for the latter it's supposed to be normal.

Not so fast. The claim was "If everybody in a country is making more, the price of living will be higher as well. If you're in the lower x%, you'll still have a hard time to pay for it."

I took "hard time" to mean that you can't afford something important, where it matters.

> This has lead to something called the "Balkenende-limit": no one in the public or semi-public sector is allowed to earn more than the prime minister (Balkenende currently). While this is reasonable (it is public money after all),

Is that standard necessarily reasonable? Lots of US medical doctors who work for public hospitals or medical schools make more than the US president, let alone the various state governors.

Why should "status" offices, especially elected ones, be high paying? Surely you're not arguing that you have to pay them a lot to keep them from stealing? And, if they feel that their skills are so valuable, shouldn't someone be willing to pay them voluntarily?

Yes, I'm one of those folks who don't think that folks "in public service" should be especially well paid. I make an exception for folks who could do the exact same thing in the private sector, but legislators, judges, and the executive branch don't qualify.
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So, if you pay attention to history, you can see that there isn't actually a predisposition which affects this.

In the 1980's, about half[1] of computer scientists were women. Now? 10-20%. Something is being done, and it is being done wrong. So it's not as simple as "They don't want to" or "Society makes them".

[1] I believe it to be about half. However, it might be slightly more or less. Definitely far higher than today.
I am aware that the U.S. spends way too much money in health care and gets less than brilliant results. I will never understand how that is possible...
The secrecy does not make them look good.

The best way to slow population growth is simply by making the poor more prosperous. What about some re-distribution of wealth....
everyone wants to curb overpopulation, these people are just in a position to act on it.
Here's hoping they come out with a Robie House, which has a very special place in my heart.
What is it about Japan that is curbing population growth?

http://www31.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+growth+in+...
OSS may be free in terms of purchase dollars, but not free in terms of time needed to learn how to code. Just like getting X-Men production props is free in terms of purchase dollars, but not free in terms of time needed to build those connections.
He was an outstanding programmer: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_wri...
is it...i don think so. Its verd hard to segment the captcha.Could any suggest some ida to split in to individual characeters
...which was exactly what Gates proposed. Investment in health and education to raise living standards for the world's poor.
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if ever.

Unless you have insight into the business of a startup (i.e. you have experience in their market and you can size up the potential yield) I would recommend against joining a startup for the salary.
> Yes, but you may have noticed that I described a definition after my statement, which is the generally accepted definition of poverty in The Netherlands, the country under discussion. By all means, disagree (I'm not sure I agree with it myself), but brushing it aside as some random statement with the usefulness of "wearing yellow pants" is not really fair.

Since I dealt with its substance later on, I didn't brush it aside.

That said, when the only support given is "lots of folks believe it", is brushing it aside unreasonable? Does it matter if they're Dutch? Should I have argued about the number of people who believe that position, whether they're Dutch, or whether the Dutch are authorities on this subject?

I thought not, so that's why I argued against a valid reason for their position and disussed its implications.
There's a great paper from about a couple of years ago that dives deep into what a gene is and provides historical context. As you'll see, the definition of a genes as being an explanation for heredity is somewhat dated.

http://genome.cshlp.org/content/17/6/669.full

I do like the definition in that article

"The gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products."

Personally I've always had issues with the idea of patenting basic biology, and genes are fundamental biology of a species, since no one manufactures genomic sequences. How that biology can be controlled, modified and used for all kinds of purposes is a different story.

I would also argue that patents break down completely in modern science, where there is too much complexity for any one organization or people to control what you can do. It hampers science, it hampers innovation, perhaps even to a degree that it's harming human health. This from someone who believes pharma companies should get more control over their patents with the caveat that "me too" drugs should be thrown out once an extended patent period is in place.
Frustrating that even if you make more than 100 million dollars, you can still be bitter because somebody else made a couple of billion dollars.

I hope I wouldn't be like that. There is the aspect of recognition (who was the first to invent X), but in these modern times it is probably a good idea to realize that the concept of the sole inventor is overrated.
how to segment the captcha's text
"decades" is nothing when the result is the uplifting of the entire human race.

large-scale literacy campaigns started 200+ years ago, and even though we have much left to do, you can already see the effect of childhood education on the world.
What about some re-distribution of wealth....

Which merely exhibits a superstition about money, as though it is separate from what it represents. Merely redistributing money does nothing about the disparity in wealth. Modern wealth is a derivative of education, natural and human resources, ambition, hard work, the rule of law (wealth won't exist for long where the nearest thug can walk away with it unhindered), and other factors.

Merely telling governments to force people to "redistribute wealth" won't solve the problems that lead to the wealth inequality between third and first world nations, and the money will merely evaporate, as most aid money evaporates today...into the pockets of local banana republic leaders and their supporters. Fix what's broken about government, education, and ideology, in those third world nations, and you'll solve the wealth gap.

There is no way to "redistribute wealth" without redistributing the engines of wealth. And most first worlders, particularly those most successful at creating wealth, aren't going to jump at the chance to live in third world nations.
Why Japan instead of Ukraine?

http://www86.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+growth