skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've had our sales revenue killed overnight by one review when we pushed out a big update a few months ago. We were doing ~$150 a day from one app, running up the Top 100 charts in Social Networking and about to break the Top 50 fold when everything went downhill as soon as that review was posted. Sales dropped to under $30 a day.

The review was written by an Apple technician who worked at an apple retail store. His review sounded very "authoritative" to the average consumer in terms of features and problems with our app. He even cited the SDK but I knew he was misinformed when many of suggestions were forbidden (integration with Calendar, re-route native SMS/phone calls through our app, etc.) Nevertheless, consumers trusted his review and that was all she wrote for that month of sales.

Long story short, we tried contacting Apple to have it removed, no response as usual. After about 3 days of google stalking, I found him on Flickr and sent a PM. I gave him free app codes for his friends, and asked that he kindly change his review so it's factual. I told him I didn't mind honest feedback, but that his post sounded like an authoritative developer and was in fact wrong. He kindly changed the review, and we exchange emails to this day. He's trying to get into development.

Sales recovered some but certainly killed our momentum (and momentum is a big deal on the appstore, the more folds you can break through generally means more stable revenue for a time). The one-way street review system is extremely frustrating... yet another major complaint I have about the store. Wayyyy to much power given to the consumer.
apart of YC

what a delightful typo
Send me an email if you would like to be a beta tester: amichail@gmail.com.
A rare smackdown of a BOFH character.
Indeed. This is absolutely trivial to defeat, and anyway the space of possibilities is just too narrow. Even with faces, the amount of similarity between top pixels of the middle row, and bottom pixels of the top row, are a lot bigger when there is a match.
Buell has always made amazing bikes, pretty hard to compete with the cheaper japanese bikes though but they always seemed to offer something a little more unique and different than their japanese counterparts.

I'm sad to see them go.
Very cool. As other people have have said, a pay as you go payment plan would be pretty cool. I'd use it.
Yep. And you can count the leverage at every single level
It was indeed a godsend. However, my own young brash impatience for fortran to change led to a very fun career in compilers.
Good health. When I'm feeling well, almost anything can interest me if it keeps me learning and feeling of use.

My point is, that inspiration builds upon a foundation. If you are not feeling well, that is a primary problem to address, on the road to regaining inspiration.

Maybe I'm just stating the obvious. But for a while, I believed I'd have to make achievements first, including to ensure the resources to work on my health. That didn't turn out so well.
Never underestimate the power of cultural inertia.

This affects Europe too with payments. I was just in Germany again recently. I was staying in a short-term apartment and instead of being able to pay at the reception by credit card, I had to go to the local bank, get cash from the ATM, then fill out a giro transfer form and hand it to the bank employee, who processed it by hand. Then I had to go back over to the reception at the apartment and hand them the receipt so they'd know they had been paid before I left. Although Germany has greatly increased its acceptance of credit cards, etc, this kind of thing is incredible frustrating when you run into it.
“I made the first animated ‘under construction’ icon”
With this comes opportunity.

I hope he goes on to create a new motorcycle brand.
Captcha is futile as a way to prevent people spamming, but a great way to push funding for emerging areas in Computer Science. I recommend we go with image edge detection next.
Merely calling Mercurial does not mean we have to license our whole product under the GPL. Modifications we make to Mercurial will of course be shipped.
You must mean, between lisp and lisp, I presume.
The best unknown activist investment of 2009
I hate to be the one to say it, I know I'm not supposed to, but...

How is this Hacker News? I didn't even know what "Buell" was until I clicked on the link. Are most american hackers motorcycle afficionados? Is Buell a super-important brand in the US, like Michael Jackson? Does this have an impact on start-ups? Was this Buell company a haven for hacker minds? Is this intellectually gratifying? I can't quite fathom why this got posted here.

Edit: instead of downvoting, please do explain. I'm clearly missing some essential bit of hacker culture here.
even though it certainly looks like he has taken a hard hit.
It'll be fixed the first time he tries to log in and receives the same message.
This works well when you're a Github, so YMMV. For me, since I don't run a popular revenue generating app (yet), it's difficult to woo the superstars - the people who, by definition, are at their peak (ie, most expensive).

People like me need to find the future superstars - the Lebron Jameses before they become "The King". It's easy to acquire realized talent, just throw money and equity at them. But it's much harder, and perhaps more rewarding, to discover the budding talents that flourish in the right environment. And I mean rewarding mostly in the sense of rewarding your bottom line, and sometimes in the sense of personal fulfillment.
Damn. You're on to my master plan. :-)

No really maybe I've just forgotten, but I just don't remember starting my company to be very hard. Just lots of little “taking care of business” things in a row, that were all pretty interesting.
Seattle Transit Applications Data Workshop
The only people I have seen in the US who still use pagers are hospital employees and that seems to be based on dubious reasoning at best (besides it possibly cheaper for the hospital).

What is the advantage of the chip+pin system versus magnetic strip + pin?

A friend of mine was visiting the US from Europe and had one of those cards with the magnetic strip on one side and a smart chip on the other and he tried to use it to buy something in a store here. The first time he swiped it it didn't work and then the people at the store looked at his card and refused to let him use it because they thought it was some kind of "hacking device" or something!
This is especially surprising given the new high production value ads they've been rotating on TV and online. Sad to see them go as well, I hope Erik continues to innovate.
I think the bit where he said "we proved that a small team of determined passionate engineers could take on industry titans" probably resonated with most startups.

Startups aren't limited to the web. Buell was a startup at one stage, then they got acquired, now they're dead.
I'm with you on this one. It doesn't even seem to have even passing interest to the general HN audience as I understand it.
A rare bright spot on what is all too often a dreary legal terrain, and all because a judge had the guts to cut past legal technicalities to do some rough justice (ordering a global assignment of all cyber-squatted names held by this fellow even though only one was at issue in the case).
http://www.komodomedia.com/blog/2009/06/social-network-icon-...
Well, I think it's more related to HN from an engineering/innovation standpoint than the Tiger Woods earns $1B article that circulated here last week. I was downvoted and told to see the "rules" to a site I've been visiting for ~2 years.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862601

I think it's just a matter of growth and therefore dilution.
Disclaimer: I'm a jsHub.org founder

One of the key reasons for using a microformat (hPage) is the principle to "design for humans first and machines second".

We provide an Inspector tool on our Demo store to meet this principle and hope that, with the microformat's community's help, we can make the data visible in many other tools.

We would like to make website publishers and users more aware of the data being declared and collected so it can be more accurate and therefore more beneficial to all involved.

Currently many users are unaware data is being collected at all.
Buell is dead
In reality, most employees are paid more than they produce, and a large part of the surplus generated by a productive minority inside a company goes to an unproductive majority rather than being skimmed by the controllers of capital. Therefore Marx' argument can only hold true in the aggregate.
I really don't think this should be killed. Buell took on a huge industry titan, and won. Buell made fantastic motorbikes.

And then they got acquired, just watch the video, look how emotional the founder is.

The quote of "a small team of passionate dedicated engineers can make a difference" how is that not what a startup aims for?
Even if we had unlimited computation, there are human factors that are tough to determine beforehand.

For example, some originators encouraged their borrowers to lie more, and now post-meltdown some servicers are less willing to agree to loan modifications / short-sales.

At first traders didn't place much emphasis on the originator, servicer, or bank, because they focused on the loan stats (FICO score, loan type, interest rate, etc).

Post-meltdown, the smart players see obvious systematic patterns between originators and servicers, even given the same paper stats. But again, to see it before it happened, it's less a computer problem and more an unscalable human due diligence problem.
> How is this Hacker News?

He is a hacker who accomplished what most of us would love to accomplish. Yes, it's a different field, but it's still a story of entrepreneurship and hacking at its finest.
Disclaimer: I'm a jsHub.org founder

You'll probably find that most of the requests you saw in Firebug are for the Inspector tool (built using YUI2).

The jshub.js file is the only 'tag' needed on a website (+ jquery if not already in use) and is designed to provide a 'hub' API for each vendors plug-in to query the data collected and send it on its way to a receiving server so only one file need be maintained as vendors come and go.
I wish the issue was explained a bit more in the article. In my opinion if the blocking was due to host-names then it had nothing to do with EC2. If the blocking was due to re-use of IP addresses then maybe it had something to do with EC2 (but the article didn't explicitly claim that). As far as I can tell the effect was due to using a outsider server at all (instead of carrying one into the client's own private data center), which I think has nothing to do with having used EC2.
The Ultimate Wordpress SEO Resource Guide
Google not so keen on net neutrality in its own backyard
True, but with Google Docs the uploading step is extra; you can open files and save them right inside the file open/save dialogs in Word and Excel if Sharepoint's setup properly.

If something could map say a "My Google Docs" folder under My Documents it would be the same; so you can just go into Word and open a file up for editing.

Personally I'd rather just open my browser, but hey I've used several word processors as well :P
Your first sentence sums it up nicely. Speaking as someone whose family has been kept fed by the "agile" gravy train, let me say first that I think all that stuff is valuable. However, many of the industry gurus make these broad, sweeping generalizations based on their own experiences, and most of their experiences come from consulting work for huge, broken corporations. Applying these lessons to startups, or to small, fast companies in general, is just nonsense.
We use Heroku a lot. It takes very little time to get a complete environment up for an application, and we're able to get production products out to test in the market faster than ever. We ported a Fortune 500 code base onto Heroku as an experiment, and it basically just ran, dependencies and all.

It's one of those products where until you actually use it, you question why it even exists. Once I used Heroku, I quickly realized the pain it was saving me from.
I'm sad that i don't see any references to first class functions and closures. But that may be because they're not implemented yet.

Also, any thoughts about all that "immutability by default" rumble ? Is ooc too close to c to give that a thought ? Simplify the use of immutable data structures would be very cool, and very possible since ooc has a gc.

Actually, i was thinking about a "competitor" for this nice language, and the closest thing to it that i found was BOO : http://boo.codehaus.org/. Boo has a syntax that is just as nice, comparable set of features + closures, very nice type inference, and very good interaction with native code. It runs on .Net, but i think the interop with c is really very flawless for once. You can even manipulate pointer data. And it has the nicest macros i've seen yet in a non lisp language (i've not seen a lot except lisps tho).
I don't see how it's expensive at all.

We have 10k/month coming in from our iPhone app and use Heroku + S3 for everything. It lets us focus on getting our product up to speed instead of system administration, period. If's only expensive if your time is worthless, or you really, really want to pay a sysadmin to take care of your server stuff.

Right now we're paying them $200/month and I smile every time I get the bill- it's one of my favorite expenses because of how much time it saves. When we get up to 5k, it's still a no-brainer. At 10k, it's time to start looking at Rackspace, but that's about the limit of things for us.

It works, it saves time, and it lets us focus on improving our product.
How does this compare to BrowserCam? [ http://browsercam.com ]

(disclosure: I work next to the BrowserCam team)
Now -THAT- is a hack. Bravo.

As for this quote:

He’s just ruined his corporate life forever.

I'd say he's just cemented himself as an incredible strategist that will be fairly in demand!
What about things like SMTP? Google probably shuffles around a bunch of email data.
How cloud storage can benefit your business
It was based on IP address.

You're right in that all hosting services suffer this problem to some degree, but it's a particular problem on EC2 since it's so easy to request IP for an instance that does something bad, then release back into the pool for other instances to use, a short time later.

It only costs a few dollars to that on EC2, whereas most other hosting services require at least a month's commitment and higher fee(s) before you can defile one of their IP addresses.

BTW, the reason I posted was to find out what other blacklists might be out there, so if your company is blocking access, I'd appreciate letting me know which service they're using.
You will never find your socks. Google wants you to buy new socks. From them.
When I was 27 I would have found offensive to be called "a 27-year-old". Which age range do you need to belong to to be taken seriously?

Because if he had been 67, he would also be referred to with a dismissive "a 67-year-old".
How come there are no stars visible? Nice photo anyways... Space is big and perty :)
Ever Dream of This Man?
This picture might help: http://starryskies.com/The_sky/events/mars/earth.jupiter.orb...

(Found on the reddit page linked at the end of the article.)
There are plenty of people who wrote x who don't, for the moment, want the moral weight, commitment, instability and uncertainty of starting a company. And GitHub probably doesn't need a bazillion engineers.
Is it just me or are those some pretty unimpressive products in that blog post? If you really want to see some great space saving designs look to the interiors of boats and RVs.
This sort of thing happens across industries and is a warning to entrepreneurs of all stripes.

How many tech startups have been purchased by a Yahoo, MS or Google just to see all their work scrapped at some point?

I like to believe that many people build a business not for the exit but because they believe in building something. That's the whole hacker ethos.

It's sad to see and a warning.
He clarifies what he means by spam immediately after the sentence you quote:

"So the main problems for geeks are that they’re signed up to so many services that they get inundated with notifications, monthly newsletters, automated messages, and shreds of spam that manage to get through GMail’s spam filters."

"Spam" was probably the wrong word to describe emails that are automated or informational, but requested; however, your view doesn't appear to disagree with his.

If your problem is that you have too much email from real people that must be evaluated and responded to, your problem is not with email at all, but rather with human organization. You have too many people relying on your input for too many things and that has nothing to do with technology. Offload work to an assistant, or outsource some functions, or grant increased decision making responsibility.
So much more readable too.
No, I do not work for Microsoft or do Sharepoint consulting for a living. As I wrote in my post, I have used Sharepoint Intranet at my last project and found it to be a very useful software. I have no experience in sourcing/customizing/deploying Sharepoint, I am strictly speaking as an end user.
Argh. I hate posts like this, lists of other how-to guides with very little value in the middle. Anyone else?
> I use about 15 open source tools.

You clearly don't have a reliable idea about how much open source software you use, and how many people are behind this code.

For instance you are probably using Firefox, some torrent client, Apache/Linux/Python/Ruby/PHP/MySQL and all the libs associated with this languages. Even if I stop now there are already a ton of guys involved. Even alone, the Ruby community, and just considering people "well known" inside the community, is a lot bigger than 100 individuals.

Even if you are using Windows or Mac OS X there is a lot of BSD code inside. You DSL modem is built on open source software. Your world is full of open source.
I find the picture fascinating. Not so much that both planets are in the same shot, but just how big Jupiter appears in the same frame as Earth. Jupiter is roughly 8x the distance from Mars as Earth is from Mars (I think) but Jupiter appears so much larger in the picture. It gives a great perspective on just how big that planet is.
Problems:

- Easier to defeat than OCR.

- Only 9 combinations, so random guessing works fine too.

- Visually impaired fail.
But if lactic acid isn't responsible for soreness...?
I've heard your story (on Venture Voice, I think) and your timing to market sounded just right. It sounds similar to the story of the Plenty of Fish founder as well. Not a ton of work, just a good idea of what to do in the market at the right time.
I agree with you entirely. But from the person looking for (or getting) a mortgage, they likely didn't know the lender was going to chop up their mortgage and mix it with bits of hundreds or thousands of others' and sell it to another party. It's obvious, like you say, that the system wasn't incentive compatible and that the people writing and selling the mortgages had no reason to ensure the borrowers paid.

Sadly there are still no regulations preventing this from happening again.
Run many Marathons?
This looks great. Let's all hope bloat and feature creep don't turn it into C++ in a few years.
Wow, I read all of these when I was 10, and now I've got a handful of Seth's more recent books laying around here.

I would have never made the connection. So strange.
I have no experience with Atlassian products but I would like to note that for Atlassian install version, you need to have J2EE application server which could be a deal breaker for an MS shop.

Second, what about extensibility? Does Atlassian provide a way to customize the installation?
No. Delicious exited too early to be a great exit for USV.
IntelliJ IDEA goes open source
You have to love a comic that stars Kurt Godel as the villain...
The Aggregate: MOG (MIMD On GPU)
I think this really touches on something that Marco had mentioned in his blog as well about the dichotomy of the app store. We all know people who have Iphones and literally refuse to buy any apps that cost money, even ones that are a dollar. Usually they are less savy users with far different expectations. Pick any app in the top 25 that is under a dollar and you'll surely see a bunch of oddly worded reviews, mostly hyper-critical and complaining about what a waste of money it is.

Raising your app price will undoubtedly weed out these users and, while sales will be lower, it will be a more quality, educated user. JMO
One critical tipping point that I've observed (as a developer) is the difference between $.99 and Free.

Early in the app store Apple decided they you could only leave feedback for apps that you actually installed. From that point on, you had to download the app to rate/review it and if it was a paid app, you had to pay for the privilege.

This seemed to filter out allot of the off-the-cuff negative comments for paid apps; maybe because it raised the "bozo threshold" or maybe because when you pay for something, you try harder to get something out of it. Either way, negative reviews for paid apps dropped for me (and seemed to across the board).

I'm experimenting with this again by making one of my paid apps free for a week, we'll see what the score looks like after that.
List of mathematics-related blogs by academics
Agreed. Flagged. Here's some better SEO advice:

http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/status/4819621542
"It's not every gamer, it's a specific sort of gamer, but it's a prevalent sort of gamer. The kind that argues that Bioshock is as valuable a contribution to society as the works of Joyce or the movies of Hitchcock."

Oh, I know you! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304895

You're still wrong about Bioshock, though I've changed my tune about Portal since that thread. Still, thanks for painting me (and I suspect barrkel) with a broad and inaccurate brush stroke.

The funny thing is, we probably agree on more than we disagree. I think the drive for longer games is ridiculous. I roll my eyes when people are upset at the idea of paying $20 for a 6 hour game on the principle that the game should be longer. Also, I got a college degree basically studying the aesthetics of games and have worked in the industry since then, so you could say that making good, interesting, beautiful games is important to me in that I've put my money (and life) where my mouth is.

I probably think a game you like is crap, and I know I like a game you think is crap, but the big difference is, I don't think that makes you "obnoxious and tasteless," I just think it means we have different tastes, or at worst, I think you're wrong.
Amazon.com launches same day delivery.
Do you find it offensive when someone points out that you have hair as well? There isn't anything dismissive about the headline, by my reading, but I've never really understood why people find things like this insulting.

[Edit: I mean, if you read the article, he clearly was being taken quite seriously. He nearly took over the bloody thing. Interpreting the mention of his age as "dismissive" is silly - it's just context, in much the same way that his nationality, sex, and name are just context.]

Unless you happen to be referring to the media quotes in the article itself (e.g. "meddling kid", "ultimate poster boy for the much-maligned Generation Y", etc.), in which case you have a point. [2nd edit: Although, that still isn't really "not taking him seriously". It's just insulting him, though I will concede the possibility that part of the cause of the insults is his relative youth.]

On another note, the man the article is about is clearly either a genius or insane. Either way, it's an excellent story.
Ask HN: Review our startup - EventGel