skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I succeed in the educational apps market?
So two years ago I decided to get into children's educational apps and games. For the same reason a lot of programmer parents probably find themselves in, because they have kids and want to make programs for them to learn. I teamed up with an artist friend and we've made around 10 games so far part-time with no luck. We've done lots of tweeting, facebooking, paid press releases, keyword stuffing, and blog reviews but we are not able to penetrate the market, going below break-even.

We just released what could be out last try, Exotic Pet Puzzler. Its unique in that it has exotic animals with 4 type of alphabet learning games: connect the dots, word puzzles, picture puzzles and letter tracing. It's at least medium to upper in terms of quality compared to the top competitors, at least I hope so!

We've tried advice from people who make regular game apps but their marketing and profitability strategies don't seem applicable to us. Am I approaching the educational games market wrong? Am I just in a crowded market? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

http://www.littlefivegames.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/exotic-pet-puzzler-complete/id725273987
http://randsinrepose.com, who wrote Managing Humans[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159059844X?ie=UTF8&tag=beig...] (not updated all that often but good content usually)
HealthCareless Cartoon
This is certainly a major change, compared to the past, in which there was no free decision to make whatsoever, and adulthood too consisted of tweaking the parameters within a prearranged formula of a life.
Wouldn't it be easier to just say you prefer people who work on OSS as part of the job listing, if that's what your hiring practices end up doing?
It's like Craig Shergold all over again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Shergold
exactly. the number of submissions is simply too simple a measure for too broad a site. what about karma distribution, responses, flames and all? you might have a site with ten submissions a day but of those ten nine are a good read, and another site with 100 submissions but also nine good reads.
These are called rewrite rules and you can find a lot of previous work on this to reference and build on.
>WoW is harmless

Citation please.

I play FPS shooters sometimes, it affects my behaviour and I'm a [reasonably!] well-adjusted adult. Perhaps I'm an outlier with undiagnosed mental issues but I'm not inclined to be convinced by such assertions.
Your comment is not only off topic, but a perfect example of whataboutism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I've always been fascinated by the collision detection behavior of various Breakout-like games. They always seem to have some idiosyncrasies, like the ball bouncing the wrong way when it hits a corner, or clipping through blocks when it's moving very fast and/or at the correct angle. I often wonder what a fully correct collision algorithm would look like.
I say "minarcho-capitalist" because it's the accurate terminology (though you guys tend to prefer "anarcho-capitalist"). The problem being that anarchists as a whole are against property as well as anti-state; most anarchists are left-anarchists.

Hence why leftists aren't called "statists" by the way: because the Left includes anti-state, anti-property leftists (who see no contradiction there: they hold that it's the state which creates property in the first place and property arrangements which create the superstructure in which the state acts!).
Startup Science
Pedantic but Aereo doesn't cut into retranmission fees, antenna viewing cuts into their retransmission fees. They are saying they don't want more people using antenna instead of cable. We can speculate why that is, probably antenna customers are less profitable or perhaps retransmission fees are a more stable income.
I am not offended, but quite bluntly I don't see any 'work' that has gone into this project, it is basically the incidents that happened in reddit (/Askreddit, was the pizza case?) behind Bootstrap with very little content in FAQ and non-existent critical content around such projects: Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. Not even a copyright notice.

I am sorry, but that is just not good enough.
Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to nodeknockout.com
Sony exec details the six years of work it took to create the PS4
My main point was to be experiment driven and let the requirements flow from that. The idea of filtering by early adopters is just a suggestion on how to think "experimental results first" and that you don't need to run your experiment across 'everybody' in order to get the results you need (as there are surely some people in this set who demand polish/perfection). In regards to what you are saying about early adopters giving you false positives, it depends on what assumptions you are testing in your experiment. What is your hypothesis in this experiment?
Email addresses of the City Council: http://www.seattle.gov/council/councilcontact.htm

sally.clark@seattle.gov

sally.bagshaw@seattle.gov

tim.burgess@seattle.gov

jean.godden@seattle.gov

bruce.harrell@seattle.gov

nick.licata@seattle.gov

mike.obrien@seattle.gov

tom.rasmussen@seattle.gov
LinkedIn is better. You rise above all that coding bs as you get older and has a career. Instead of just a code monkey forever...
Random Quotes from Breaking Bad, GoT, LoTR as an API (written in Golang)
How does this compare with Epoxy for Backbone.js?
Interview: New Mill CPU Architecture Explanation for Humans
Maybe not, but in Japan, rapes per 100,000 population is less than 1. In the UK, it's around 25. So maybe watching rape porn isnt the issue.
Hey, there is a project going on that is much like you'd like. I took my 12 year old through it, and it's a bit rough, but not bad for how cheap it is:

http://www.pyroelectro.com/edu/digital/
The NHL is a shadow of its former self after losing support during the lockouts.
Don't hire "rockstar" developers. The ones I've worked with ended up being toxic to the team: withholding details from their peers/managers, acting passive/aggressive when asked what they were working on, etc. It's not worth it in the long run, as time progresses the effort need to manage them starts to outweigh the benefits.
If you want simple and practical RSS reading in a terminal window, use Newsbeuter.

http://newsbeuter.org/
Dating a programmer is a double-edged sword
I think you're on to something there. That in this age group games used are more likely to be parent vetted whilst TV may be assumed to be benign and so subject to less scrutiny?
Number of participants in secret santa might be a nice metric to throw in with the growth metrics too.
I agree that it wasn't exactly posted in a tactful way, but I actually broadly agree with omeid2's assessment. What is this site other than a very simple data-entry page with an (entirely uncustomized) bootstrap theme on top of it?

I appreciate the concept of getting a feel for the market on an early (very early in this case) alpha, but I don't feel this is productive for HN. I mean, how simple are we going to allow ShowHN to get? A single static page with an H3 tag and the text 'good site coming soon'? I mean, that'd require some work -- almost none, but some -- so should we just say "The OP worked to create this, so I'll give feedback instead of pointing out the obvious and saying that the OP needs to put more effort into ShowHN submissions"?

Frankly, this feels like an AskHN masked under the guise of a ShowHN. I felt almost duped by the site, as if I were looking at the earliest skeletal structure of a site and being asked to rate it as if it had had significant development time applied to it. Maybe I don't understand HN well enough yet, or maybe I'm just cranky from working 27hrs straight, but that's my honest feedback.
I find your reaction... odd? He's won a grant to develop a tool that has the potential to help out people with a real problem. Why should that disgust anyone?
America during the resumption of the metallic standard underwent overall growth, but with frequent financial panics in which thousands of people lost everything, went bankrupt, and in quite a few cases starved to death cold and alone in a ditch.

That sounds like a great model /sarcasm!
Indeed... I mean, we could just "compile" it if we really wanted to optimize for line numbers. It's neat to see what can be done in tiny amounts of code, though.
Gameplay video de Dragon Nest Monje / Paladín
fixed, sorry about that!
How to Create an RSS Feed Using PHP and PDO
WinForms are still an option in VS 2012-how are they not supported? Is this just an alarmist piece of writing, or are WinForms no longer around in VS 2013?
This is the core calculation to all of Bayesian statistics, so it's used pretty much everywhere. Almost any time you try to compute p(unknown|data) you run into computational issues. It's a high dimensional integration problem that has no closed form solution. There are models that can be simplified, but they are the minority.
Don't know what your idea is.. but a thought or plugin is what about an anonymous place for people to vent or answer the question.. Why I wish I were dead: I have 6 toes on my left foot. others can respond anonymously..about that... some sort of peer group online/ facilitated instant support group.
So are they making some sort of legal argument, or is this just a thinly veiled threat?
Not sure why the one needs to go through extra system administration hassles and LXC containers to develop wordpress plugins or themes?

Just click a button on your hosting CPanel, install wordpress and get off to the races in an environment as close to production as you can get.

Perhaps there are other (better) uses for docker, but Wordpress development in unlikely to become a pathway for docker adaptation.
... What? Do you even know what /r/AskReddit is? Because it's definitely not this. It's for asking questions and then getting them answered by lots of people.
If simple basic police methods sufficed here, then simple basic police methods must suffice everywhere?
Creating a 2D game with Unity
"But I also believed Microsoft was exaggerating his fears of Netscape."

Microsoft is still in the same position as it was pre-Netscape. It still effectively owns the OS and office software markets. It just wasn't entirely able to take over a couple of new markets.

That failure was pretty bad: MS is no longer seen as a "hot new thing", or a producer of hot new things. But in terms of doing damage to Microsoft, nothing from outside MS has done anything, as far as I can see. (Antitrust lawsuits notwithstanding.)
> But if I was looking for guarantees for worst-case performance, I'd (pretty much) never use a HashMap.

I wonder why none[1] of the major dynamic languages offer the option of running with the built-in associative-data structures implemented using a Red-Black Tree. Seems like an obvious thing to do.

There are interface issues, of course. In particular, for a new type to be usable as a key, it would need to provide an ordering rather than a hash function.

But if only built-in types are used as keys, then there might be no reason to change the interface at all. Just re-run the same program with a different option and you've traded some average-case performance for a guarantee on worst-case performance. And the Red-Black Tree is already written (somewhere out there ...). So why not?

[1] To my knowledge.
Wow, what lousy grammar for a Times article! It might be different if this were breaking news, but the article refers to an earlier story The New York Post.
MCMC isn't strictly serial; you can run multiple chains in parallel and get decent results (provided your break in period isn't too big), and this is commonly done for multicore.

The "all the data" problem is interesting. It seems solvable if each node summarizes the likelihood function for part of the data. I'll have to read the paper and see if that's what they did.
Go go dancers galore. Hemmit "Everything Is Fine"
Whoops, with typo. Fixed here: https://gist.github.com/eveith/7532528
Evidence of Granite on Mars Discovered in Ancient Volcano
didn't know about it, thanks! :)
I'm surprised this article didn't mention Google's Bid Simulator, which allows you to see a very good estimate for the number of clicks you can receive for a given keyword/creative pair (or adgroup, campaign) at bids you're currently not using:

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2470105?hl=en

More speculatively, Keyword Planner allows you to add a bunch of keywords with bids to your account and see what kind of traffic you might expect:

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2999770?hl=en

Obviously this is less accurate since you don't have a lot of account history with these keywords, you haven't selected creatives yet, etc.

Disclaimer: I've worked a bit on all of these tools.
You're just started, do it yourself.
Hey krrishd, I also offer my help. It will be the most useful for front-end web design, or maybe some minor backend things.
Cloning A Clone
The frustrating thing is that more people would pay up for MLB.tv if they didn't have these stupid blackout rules in place. It's the way business is done in the industry, but I can't stand it. Let me throw my money at you, MLB.

Right now I have to hit Aereo for a good chunk of my team's blacked out games since I'm in a terrible spot for reception, thus I can't get it on my TV. They can still see me in their viewer metrics, and I am still adding value for their advertisers with Aereo. For the stuff I can't get on Aereo, I can sometimes find it on MLB.tv, but not always (depends on which network is the primary on the game and whether there are blackouts).

Sports broadcasting rights are a mess, and they're missing out on a lot of money by not doing something less stupid.
Whatever that price is, the sooner they go PPV, the better. It works for UFC and WWF, doesn't it?
What's funny to me is… isn't this exactly how cable TV came about in the first place? Putting a broadcast-TV receiver on a hilltop with good reception, then piping the signal to homes without good reception? Cable's business model has changed over the years, but I wonder if most of the case law supporting Aereo's use would be cases originally fought by the cable companies themselves.
I don't think it's easy to distinguish an MVP that failed because there was too much usability friction that discouraged usage from an MVP that didn't hit the right spot.

If you get people saying - hey cool! - and then not returning, is your product simply unfinished/unusable, or is it a neat idea that's just not practical?
New Volcano Found Located Deep Beneath Ice In Western Antarctica
They didn't authorize me to eat a ham sandwich today, but that doesn't make it unauthorized.

More to the point. If I recorded a game on my DVR, and the DVR streams it to another DVR in my house, that is not an unauthorized transmission, either.
They're still keeping the search and address boxes separate? :\
So awesome. healthcare.gov is the comedy routine that has fresh routines every day.
“The court’s intervention is now necessary to restore clarity and certainty in this area and to prevent the unraveling of marketplace built upon the licensing of rights rather than the expropriation of such rights through technological chicanery,' the brief states."

The hypocrisy of an industry built, in large part, on the suppression of fair use rights through "technological chicanery" is amazing. I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Have you tried Evernote for this?

You can create to-do lists with checkable boxes, they have a web interface you could use for inputting, but then once it's written it's available through the browser anywhere, or on your computer or mobile device through the Evernote app. I use this all the time for grocery lists because I can input it on a keyboard much more comfortably, but then I always just have it with me.
This is what's really weird to me about every conversation that pops up with people complaining about R. I've been using R daily for nearly 8 years now, and there are plenty of things that I could complain about.

But other people always seem to have big problems with things that never even occurred to me.

In this case, I've been using R to pull data out of SQLite, SQL Server and Oracle db's every single day, for years. And I've never had any problems at all. It wouldn't even occur to me to think that R's ability to get data out of a db was anything other than "just fine".
It's actually legal semantics, which are the only relevant semantics here. Aereo must jump through these ridiculous hoops for their service to remain within the letter of the law.
> "The distrust of the political system is unhealthy," he says.

Tell that to the dead souls of the Jewish, Russian/kulak, Native American, Cambodian, Central American and hundreds of other communities that were beneficiaries of these State-centered political systems that Sunde supports.

Trusting politicians and political systems is unhealthy. Healthy behavior is antithetical to politics.
Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst
Drawing Code for iOS 7 Rounded Rectangles
Does anyone see subreddits making forums obsolete?
Lean biz dev: Partner development
> Aereo installs an individual antenna for every person to skirt around existing rules.

One person's "To skirt around" is another's "To comply with".
+1 for emacs live
Credit Cards Under Pressure To Police Online Expression
Suggesting to anyone serious about suicide that an app will help is insulting. You have to be naive and unwilling to understand or a megalomaniac to think an app will help.
Until Brian has produced videos for Mac and Linux setup too, you can find written instructions here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_Firefox_buil...

Setting up a Firefox development environment on Linux or Mac is actually quite a bit easier than on Windows. (For example, in most Linux distributions, you just need to check out the source code and then run "./mach bootstrap" to install the full set of tools and dependencies.)
Yes- and that's why I don't support what they're doing. They're directing their legal wrath against Aereo (and so, Aereo's users) rather than attempting to solve what is actually a problem between the broadcast networks and cable companies.

But I do still get the root cause of what they're doing. And I don't particularly want my cable company to make even more money than they do already.
​How to Train Google Now to Give You Better Suggestions
It seems like this library is just a less well-thought out version of component/reactive[1]. It makes the mistake of jamming way too much logic into magicky strings instead of using existing semantics to render things. For example, there's a

data-each

attribute for handling looping, but then instead of solving polymorphic children in the same way, with a

data-polymorphic="role"

attribute, it's solved with a weirdly hacky appending of "Polymorphic-" to a class name.

The same goes for the use of class names to begin with. Why rely on hacky parsing of class names that end in dashes, when you could just have

data-text="firstName"

and be done with it. That's the route reactive takes and it's much more flexible.

And then another piece of critique, the frequency that people actually use curly braces in their attribute names is so incredibly low that it is absolutely worth having a nicer syntax for interpolation by dropping the leading # to end up with

href="{interpolated}"

Not only that, but check out something like ianstormtaylor/get[2] to see how easy it could be to add support for backbone-like models alongside regular properties and terser, single-method models.

And finally, the API for creating a reactive instance is also much nicer in that you aren't relying on ever-present singletons that you have to tightly couple all of your modules to. Instead, you just get your template however you want, get your model however you want and call:

reactive(el, model);

Very clean.

Sorry if this comes off as harsh, I just think it's a shame that people using Backbone (or more frequently Angular) are constantly making poor API decisions for their plugins because they're exposed to so many poor API decisions in their core toolkit.

[1]: https://github.com/component/reactive
[2]: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/get
If you type a word into the address box, it tries to look it up in DNS. If you put a word in the search bar, it goes straight to search.
Something can be both unauthorized and perfectly legal.

They don't want it to happen, that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6453401
Many of these technologies are certainly supported (WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, etc). It's just that there isn't and won't be any new development on these products in the future. Microsoft is putting all of their focus into WinRT and Web development. On the one hand, yeah it kind of sucks that the platforms they built over the last 10-12 years are obsolete. On the other hand, they're moving an incredible pace around developing tools for WinRT and Web development (especially Web, which I keep up with in my day job).
Google Chrome's top 10 hidden features
> But again, that's probably because the FTB subreddit has less overall subscribers (less incentive to post for karma, as there are less potential viewers to reward you)

Hold up, you might be on to something. What if reddit divided karma received by the number of subscribers in the sub where something was posted? They'd need to then multiply it by some constant multiplier or something, there'd be some details to tweak, but that might do a lot to mitigate the problem of subreddits getting crappier as they get more popular.
I'd think "ordinary usage" would be by cryptographers and other cryptography-related personnel, not laypeople. Most of the people around where I live don't even know what cryptography is, and it's hit-and-miss whether or not they've heard of encryption.

From a theoretical point of view, hash functions are not only a subset of block ciphers: hash functions and block ciphers are equivalent. You can take a hash function and build a block cipher from it (use a Feistel network). You can also take a block cipher and build a hash function from it (use the Merkle–Damgård construction).

But even if you can build one from the other, saying something is 'encrypted' implies, in even the meanest definition, that it can be decrypted. If the layperson definition does not include this aspect, then it is, well, wrong. Even if you disagree on this point, I would expect a tech journalist to endeavor to use the correct, field-standard terminology, regardless, because as Pxtl says, anyone who is familiar with even the basics of cryptography will interpret "encrypted password" in an incorrect way (i.e., they'll see it as what Adobe did).
I prefer it this way...The address box works as a search bar but the search is persistent (ie. I can search for something, close the tab and come back later in two key presses)
This is a likely to be a very challenging project. A few things to consider:

* Anonymity is vitally important, especially since you are an inexperienced programmer with a high risk of introducing security holes. Don't collect any personal details (including email addresses) that could cause problems for people if they were leaked. Don't implement Facebook or Google signin!

* If there are any social components at all, consider the potential impact of trolls. This project may require 24/7 moderation.

* This is a major emotional commitment. Talking down suicidal strangers is not something to go in to lightly! Make sure you have a professional advisory network in place.

Since lots of people have offered to help, I suggest getting them added to a mailing list ASAP while they are interested.

You could consider building the project in public on GitHub - that would allow technical advisors to review your code for you and use the issue tracker to discuss features.
Stating things without sources/facts doesn't mean much.
Is The Internet Domain Land Rush A Land Rush At All?
Nice post. Still trying to convince myself to upgrade my Alfred...this may have convinced me.