skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if i could upvote this twice, I would.

found this post really useful. 3% of iPhone owners bought the most popular app.
There are others, freer markets, where you don't have to submit to a faceless master that uses his definition of hygiene and beauty to control what can and cannot be done.

Heck, you could even, I don't know, sell your software on the internet, by creating a page for it.

Seriously, I'm a libertarian, and apple's policies, specially in this area, bugs the hell out of me.
This is another one of those "reeeeeeally stretching the meaning of 'hacker'" stories, innit? He's, like, hacking your conceptions of your house and socially engineering your hiding places and stuff, right?

(No, I'm not complaining this isn't HN-worthy, I agree it is. This just sort of amused me in light of the usual complaints about the definition of "hacker" that show up.)
Wow! I can get Carrot Top to tweet my product?

Where do I sign up?
NERDTree is ridiculously awesome.
Tad Williams’ Shadowrise to be two books
"Eighty percent of success is showing up". ... Woody Allen;
I don't get it. All this doctrine seems to make finding a partner a pre-requisite to working on your idea. This seems to be the same 'bad advice' from the dot.com boom that asked for a business plan that predicted the next 5 years with growth expectations. It's garbage!

If you've got an idea, then go work on the damn idea! If you happen to have a co-founder that believes in the same vision, then good for you; otherwise, keep forging ahead and focus on what needs to be done. You may encounter that in order to be effective, you need another person to do 'X" because you literally cannot do 'X' effectively; but don't confuse that with a need to find a co-founder.
Researcher says he found Malaria's origin
Practical, extensive, and timely piece on the nuts and bolts of weaving Hadoop and EC2.
Try vimmate.. it is easy to install on ubuntu ;)
I would say that MAP/FILTER/REDUCE are relatively trivial applications of Functional Programming. Add to that lack of side effects, then it gets really simple. What would one want to test with these simple examples. But how about more complex code, like an XML parser in a functional language. No tests? I doubt that.
That's absolutely the opposite of everything I love about vi -- that I neither need nor want to customize it!

I can sit down at a new Unix box 25 years in the past or future, and not be frustrated editing a file.
What's the innovation here? The luminescent-painted frame?

It looks weaker than the traditional internal triangle...which is ironic considering they are framing it as "a tribute to the triangle".

Bicycle turn signals aren't new...you just never see them because they are useless. They can only be seen in the dark, and hand-signals and head-nods are much more visible by drivers, who wouldn't even notice another small blinking light on your bicycle.

Other than that it looks like a normal fixie. Pedal cages, front disc brake, and messenger bars. Awful for riding long distances or up and down hills, or making frequent stops.

We don't know who would be manufacturing the frame, wheels, or components, or if they are quality or not.

This is basically just a "look I make shiny bike tiem" post.
That's because folks forget that Puritans were just one of a number of oppressed religious groups in England who shipped out to the colonies - or, for that matter, that Georgia was a penal colony, too.

It's always strange and interesting to hear people harp on one particular minority group of colonists as exemplars. Contemporary conservative religious groups have little or no connection to Puritanism at all.
> It's irrelevant what they valued it at: no evidence means no damages. Period.

...

> That's a problem under recent due process / punitive damages jurisprudence. Per the Campbell case, you cannot have punitive damages that grossly exceed the actual damages.

...

> Your argument is that Congress can simply sweep these issues aside, lump them together in a statute, and be done with it.

> That's not how constitutional law works.

But if we adopt such an uncompromosing position, the maximum possible "constitutional" penalty by your own criteria is surely not more than $5 (for each song).

I submit that your constitutional arguments would lead inexorably to a situation in which it is, in effect, impossible uphold copyright ownership. The deterrent to unauthorized distribution is for all practical purposes removed. Moreover, litigation simply due to the costs, becomes economically irrational, removing the only vehicle of redress for any damages inflicted.

You are, in other words, proposing to use a relatively expansive constitutional interpretation of due process in order to usurp another explicit constituional right, namely that provided by Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

I think this stretches constitutional law too far (I would go so far as to say that it makes a mockery of constitutional law -- but, hey, I'm an adherent of originalism). And I would certainly hope and expect that were the supreme court to be presented with such an argument it would reject it as frivolous.
I have red state blues. Really it is depressing living in Alabama. I have lived in Europe and all over the us. This place by far is the worst. I can go into many reasons, but alas once I finish grad school I shall move elsewhere. For the time being I am a bookworm and a computer addict. Looking at the local newspaper is depressing, racism and anti- progressivism abounds.
What's with all the "dying" articles lately?
If you don't know what Counterstrike is, that app is structurally identical to any Fart app, just with SWAT team noises.

The reviewers are clearly not of our world -- they're probably the same people who were reviewing audio + video for the store before apps came along.
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716818
Many Hurdles to Tech I.P.O.’s Today
Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer?

It comes down to optimism again I think. A European devout Christian would certainly pray for their sick child - but they would not expect their prayer to be necessarily answered, so they would also take the kid to the doctor. If the doctor cured the child, they may attribute the good luck to a form of divine intervention whose instrument was the doctor.

The problem in the US is that many local forms of Christianity have set themselves in opposition to science - either/or - and so the doctors are not instruments of God but His antagonists. I don't have a really good explanation as to how this came about.
I got the sprucing message too, but it wasn't clear by the time it said (7.20).
If you know some C and what OO code looks like, you shouldn't have much difficulty getting started with Objective C. And if you don't care about the quality of your code, you can ignore all the details, such as the iPhone not having GC support.
Woman can't get job after graduating; sues college
Amen. Once you get the hang of it, you won't know how you lived without it :)

In fact, it'll start taking over in how you interact with your whole coputer. I find that I type "<ESC>:wq" in chat windows, comment boxes, etc..
Roll Your Own UNIX Clone
Similar advice is given to travellers - keep a "mugging wallet" with a bit of cash, a low-credit-limit or expired credit card, an old piece of ID, a photo of an ex-girlfriend - you get the idea. When accosted, just hand it over. The theory is that as long as it seems enough to be worth their while, the muggers will take it and leave you alone.
It's slightly ironic that BBEdit is dismissed as "lost in the pre-OS X" world by someone who went on to evaluate emacs and plumped for Vim•. Especially since BBEdit solves all the problems he had with TextMate.

(• This isn't a diss of Vim or Emacs, btw, just that they're both rather less "OS X era" than either BBEdit or Textmate -- but that's often a strength)
Quick-UX Credibility from Likexo to Etsy
Researchers find that outcome of a coin flip is not 50-50
On the subject of Detours, I suggest checking out EasyHook: http://www.codeplex.com/easyhook

It's under a free license, lets you write hooks not only from C/C++, but also from any .NET language (architecture-independent). It makes any sort of API hooking a breeze.

Edit: Forgot to mention, it automatically sets up a remoting channel for you. That way, you can do IPC between your hooking application and the hookee trivially.
Chris Rock says to hide it in your books. 'Cause books are like kryptonite to a, um, burglar.
The information age is about to give way to the era of synthetic genetics
Uhm, this is patently false. California is gerrymandered to hell, there are safe Republican districts which elect some rather far-right representatives, to both national and state legislatures. It's actually very hard to be a moderate Republican in California. You're not right-wing enough to win the Republican districts, and still have the Republican stigma in the Democratic districts. It's only in full statewide elections that being a moderate Republican works, hence the governorship trending mostly that way.

It's actually the far-right Republicans who are part (but not all) of the problem with regards to the budget issues. They are mainly unwilling to compromise, any sort of tax increase is anathema, even the idea of bringing tax rates back to to late-1990s levels.
In East Germany everyone was a spy. On Twitter everyone will soon be a marketer.

I wonder if the number of tweets full of fake enthusiasm will suddenly go up dramatically. I'm talking about tweets like: "I'm so incredibly excited by GeneriCorp's latest logo redesign. I never realized a shade of beige could be so life-changing!".

If people have been doing this for free I can only imagine it's going to get worse now that they can get paid to do it.
I'm a bit thrown by the mention of Kara Neumann. It's as if he's trying to suggest it was some major trend that wacky American law allows, as opposed to a freakish event that lead to her fanatical parents being convicted of reckless homicide.
Yeah, def not familiar with what "iCounterstrike" is, but I do know what real Counter Strike is and it's amazing to me that apple would approve something so that so blatantly capitalizes on another, well-known commercial product's name.
Developers should know going in, that there is a huge risk in getting your app approved. It's unfortunate that there are tangential casualties like this, but, again, this risk should be well understood going into development.
Actually I would love to see usage patterns among the free apps. Do people download a lot of free apps and use them, download a lot but delete after a day, or do people just download 1-3 free apps relevant to their interests (usually a better weather app, AIM, and Facebook) and not really "browse" the full gamut of the App Store?

Because I would not be surprised to find that only 25% of iPod/iPhone actually use the App Store beyond the above simple apps.
I've read Paul Graham's essays and followed his projects ever since I stumbled upon his essay on Java (as an ambitious teenager dreaming of hacking), but I've never actually heard him talk. I was surprised, gathering from the manners of expression and enthusiasm, how well he fit my image of the hacker and nerd - although I had all the reasons to expect that. It's not the voice I've heard in text.

Anyway, it got me thinking how much being surrounded by young (be it yet intelligent and stimulating) hacker people affects the way you think and talk.
By the features and functionalities that he writes, the software that can kill MS Word seems to be Google Wave.
Occasionally, there will be a patient person in a heated debate with a jerk. That's when I expect zebra stripe commenting. I think people will naturally up-vote a comment they agree with more than one they don't. If the tone of all comments is civil, and the argument is well thought out, I wouldn't expect to see light colored comments. Maybe scores of 1, 37, 2, 54 etc... but not comments downmodded to being light colored. I haven't been seeing that too much.

Perhaps we can see some examples of what you're talking about?
I'd say that this "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". It is interesting that the traditional thought process of "hide it really really good" is wrong. This is about understanding personas and motivations.
When you start, be sure to first go through the vimtutor (just type "vimtutor" in your shell).

Then, if you have questions, come to #vim on freenode. There are lots of very, very experienced and knowledgeable people there that will be happy to help you learn.

Then, if you still need more, there's:

Vim tips wiki: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

The best collection of vim scripts: http://www.vim.org
Transactor Launches Beta
var hiddenDivs = [];

jQuery.fn.divroller = function(options) {
settings = jQuery.extend( {
visible : 3,
pause : 3000
}, options);

start(settings, this);

function start(settings, container) {
var divs = container.children();
//hide unvisible divs
while (settings.visible < divs.length) {
var removedDiv = $(divs[divs.length - 1]).remove();
hiddenDivs.push(removedDiv);
divs = container.children();
}

setTimeout( function() {
roll(settings, container)
}, settings.pause);

};

function roll(settings, container) {
//Dom manipulation.
container.prepend(hiddenDivs.pop());
hiddenDivs.unshift($(container.children()[settings.visible]).remove());

//Efect
$(container.children()[0]).hide();
$(container.children()[0]).slideDown("slow");

//Repeat
setTimeout( function() {
roll(settings, container)
}, settings.pause);
}
}
Tip: Instead of :wq you can just type ZZ
There's a lot of data about this if you google a bit. One of them is this: http://www.pinchmedia.com/appstore-secrets/

It mentions that only 30% of the users use a free app after the first day, and more stuff like that.
The Wilderness of Childhood is Gone
Why's that? If I'm not following any of the eventual shills, I never see their message. Manage who you follow and twitter retains its utility.
I have been a hardcore Vi(m) user for the past many years. Over the years I have learnt the mastery of Vi editing and I love editing in Vi. But one thing is for sure: Vim (at least for Mac) sucks badly. The scripting language is a joke, the development is stalled (or really slow), the syntax highlighting is a joke and the implementation is really slow for some things. There is nothing worse than being slowed down by lags in the text editor. I have tried to switch over to Emacs for at least 4 times now, but unsuccessfully, since the editing is not that natural for me. (I know at least one other Vim hacker that has done and tried the same switch).

If I was to invest shit loads of hours into learning to use a text editor I would pick Emacs - - simply because the environment that Emacs offers is amazing (Vim environment looks good, but the more you customize, the slower things get and the more you look around, the more issues you find).
By all means, if you have an idea, go work on it. Don't wait for anyone to validate. But if you are going to get a company formed around your idea, and start selling to customers (and supporting them), and (ack!) hire employees, having at leats one co-founder is almost a requirement.
I think the opposite - it strikes me as much more an insight into the ideals of English culture than anything about the US. Particularly the stereotypical assumption that you can understand a vast country by living for a while in Charleston and the District of Columbia. :)

To be fair, it's from the POV of someone who's managed to spend eight years in a society without learning how to tell a joke to a stranger, but there's a reason why they say, "Americans think 100 years is a long time, and the English think 100 miles is a long way."
That's exactly my point. You can do that with apps, too.
Resubmitting, hopefully replacing the <p>'s:

SaaS Rails Kit (http://railskits.com/saas/) with Active Merchant used with gateways such as Braintree or Authorize.net seems like a flexible and cost-effective option for recurring billing. PayPal looks like a fast way to get started, bearing in mind the horror stories (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198516 ).

Two questions:

1. What solutions are available to automate tracking, reporting and payments to channel partners (resellers, distributors, affiliates) using the gateways or PayPal? I’ve heard that Avantgate (http://www.avangate.com) supports multiple tiers of distribution, but their fees (http://www.avangate.com/help/vendor-faq.php#bottom10) are higher than the gateways, and only the name "Avangate" appears on the buyer’s CC statement. PayPal enables payments to affiliates using simple scripts with PayPal’s Mass Pay, but you have to create your own reporting. Amazon FPS appears to only support per-transaction payments, not aggregation of payments (http://tinyurl.com/l6zvkd).

2. How easy is it to switch gateway or platform vendors if they’re storing the credit card info? If you’re using Auth.net but want to switch to Braintree, how is the credit card info transferred so that you can continue billing monthly without interruption? This question has been asked before (http://tinyurl.com/mj9zgp) but not answered that I’ve seen, except that CC info can’t be transferred from PayPal (http://tinyurl.com/lyupgg).

Thanks!
Instead of identifying yourself as a "YC Reject" why not state what your startup does?
How to figure out what your app should cost.
It got my attention, but now I want to know more... like blazamos says, what does your startup do. Also, why were you rejected by YC?
Fasting is considered to have some health benefits by many, so maybe you can kill two birds with one stone here. Though I guess 12 hour fasting would be too short to benefit.
There's some choice advice in the comments:

My parents inadvertently had two strategies: 1) Have only one valuable possession: an upright piano. 2) Keep the house extremely messy so that it is a danger just trying to get through the place, especially while trying to carry a piano.
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.

I don't believe any society has managed to prevent murder; all they manage to do is try and sentence the guilty when they catch them, as the state of Wisconsin did to the girl's parents.
Or, just do it with a natural nutritional supplement available OTC in the USA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin
This is where your PR department needs to kick in. It's not just engineers that need to go mad right now, PR folk need to join in on the fun.
I thought "YC reject" would grab attention.

Transactor (my company) makes a backup tool for programmers, called Code Agent.

It provides backup and version history in between checkins.

It helps with the "svn revert... Oh shit" and "it worked before lunch" problems.
I could see Apple doing the Wrong Thing with this very easily, but in this case, I have to agree with him.

This developer was violating copyright for the purpose of selling useless junk to users. Unlike some high-profile rejections, it's very clear in the written agreement that violating copyright is not allowed. It also doesn't appear that there was anything accidental about these violations; the developer understood exactly what we was doing, and no reasonable person would have thought it to be legitimate.
There's a substantial difference between omitting information and writing down incorrect information. The second is much worse.
HN policy, as stated by PG on several occasions, is that companies should not identify themselves as "YC rejects". There are several good reasons for this -- search the archives if you want to know more.
Working out sales strategy has turned out to be the most difficult thing for our startup for precisely this reason - none of us are sales people! My partner and I are both very introverted, and although we have a great product (i think), we're having a hell of a time with PR, marketing and sales.

Laundry lists like in the linked post are useful to reflect upon, but don't give great specifics. I think that sales is a very human skill and undertaking, and it may be something you have or don't have.

Does anyone have any resources that have helped them learn?
The process and the outcome (gaming the system) reminds me a great deal of the current state of the patent system.

In both cases, I think that the original reason for the process has been lost in the actual implementation, and there is a great risk of losing true opportunities for innovation.
Well I had no idea.
Ok, great. Does this run on my OS of choice? Will you send me spam if I put my address in that box? I'm assuming the answer to both questions is no, but you should have that information on your website.
I've been using Vim for work all summer, and returning to TextMate is a bit of a challenge for me. I guess it's time to make the leap to pure Vim!
I went through the same realization and even wrote about it a few times (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216108 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238770).

Basically, the value of unit-testing everything drops considerably when you move from OO to writing mostly side-effect free code and testing expressions in a REPL. That doesn't mean that unit tests become worthless; it means there are more cases where they aren't worth doing because their cost exceeds their benefit. One area where the benefit does still exceed the cost, in my opinion, is when you're working with complex algorithms. But that's a far cry from test-everything.

The weakness of the test-everything school is that they don't take into account the cost of writing and maintaining tests. They act as if the benefit is non-trivial and the cost is trivial, which is why they think something's wrong with people who don't agree with them. But the cost isn't trivial.
As I said in the comment you're replying to, there are lots of times I write down that can be usefully processed without being reduced to absolute time. My text editor doesn't know how to do that. (Much.) I'm writing here precisely because I think it's a problem that often needs to be addressed precisely and accurately, and neither automatically falsifying data on input, nor making an application that's harder to use than pencil and paper, is an acceptable solution to the problem.
I agree with the point, but may draw different conclusions from it than most will.

My point of view is informed by the book, First, Break All The Rules. That started as a study by the Gallup organization on what divides great managers from normal ones. They learned that great managers implicitly understand that people have skills and talents. Skills, like how to drive a car, you can teach. But you can't remain focused on the road for hours, enjoy doing data entry, or make someone feel listened to without having a talent for it. And grownups are too hard to change to make it worthwhile finding talents they don't have. So it is best to make people productive by shaping jobs to their individual talents, and not by trying to "grow" them into people they aren't.

So I absolutely agree that world class performers enjoy performing at that level. You don't reach that level without having a talent, and you don't develop that talent without being wired to find pleasure in what you do. But that's better thought of as a way of recognizing existing talents than as a way to change people.
I don’t think it was smart for you to identify your startup as "yc reject" here, you will be eaten alive : (
I never have had Chase Paymentech or Bank of America's system go down; but PayPal has gone down many times.

Of course since I'm a pro, I have a queue setup for processing transactions and a backup processor, so the users experienced no problems.
excuse my language, but any psychologist who uses a rorschach test is a fucking moron.
Tests are a technique to manage programmer anxiety about code.

Sorry, but I think this is bullshit. If it were true, you could replace unit testing by medication.