Hackermeter (YC S13) Wants To Kill Your Résumé And Replace It With A High Score - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/12/hackermeter-wants-to-kill-your-resume-and-replace-it-with-a-high-score/ <comment><USER2> It seems like all "code exercise" sites like this have the same annoying problems which I'll generally describe as lack of attention to detail in the exercise descriptions.

Take their Fibonacci exercise as an example. In the first section they say, "The first line of the input will be an integer N (1 <= N <= 100)" which specifies how many test cases follow. Then in the next section they say, "The first line of the input will be an integer N (1 <= N <= 10000), specifying the number of test cases"

So besides the fact that they aren't even consistent in specifying the expected range of N it isn't even clear why you would need to specify the number of test cases in the first place vs just reading one from each line until EOF. That makes you think maybe they want you to put in some basic error checking which again since they aren't consistent with N turns into a trial and error exercise if it even matters at all.

There is also no indication about the version of interpreters or compilers being used to check the submissions. If I choose to write my solution in python is that python 2 or 3?

Combine all that with an implied scoring system based on speed or number of tries and you have to wonder if this is really measuring anything relevant or if it is just filtering for people who's default assumptions happen to be the same as the person who wrote the lame exercise description.

<comment><USER3> I had to seriously do a double-take, I thought this was straight trolling, not a real company.

I doubt any serious developers would consider doing this, there's already a way to demonstrate your programming capabilities in the real world, either by contributing to an existing open source project or maintaining your own projects on github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A number of start-ups have either already failed with a very similar business model or failed to go exponential growth. There was a good "Lessons Learned" post by one of them recently here on hacker news that got comments by both hiring managers and hackers. Why the rehash, again? What is this start-up really doing differently?

I personally wouldn't be motivated to use it either to find work or to hire. I think, when hiring, you really need to do a face to face interview. I've found resumes work well enough for pre-screening that it's not a pain point for me. And, it's not like there are so many candidates out there looking for work that it's impractical to do face to face, or at least telephone/skype, interviews with all the good candidates. I learned the lesson that face to face hiring is needed by hiring someone based on a co-worker's recommendation (even though he did badly in an interview, I looked passed it based on the recommendation). It's so costly and painful to make a hiring mistake that there's no way I would deviate from the current model and try a new method or service.

<comment><USER5> _> it's not like there are so many candidates out there looking for work that it's impractical to do face to face_

That really depends on your target market. For the most popular technologies (.Net, Java etc) in the most popular areas (London, Glasgow etc) for low-to- medium positions, you'll get tons of decent candidates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish this company well, and perhaps they'll be successful, but I don't think they've nailed down some ultimate formula for ranking and hiring programmers. This system sounds very easy for low-quality programmers with lots of time on their hands to manipulate - you sign up with a throwaway account with some fake name, get the list of questions, take your time searching for the answers online, and then sign up with your real information and have a carefully prepared way of typing out answers that get you high scores. If this achieves any measure of traction, you can bet that this will happen a lot.

This isn't an easy problem to solve and is something that companies have been struggling with for a long time, so no disrespect intended. But based on my understanding of how this works I don't think it will be very likely to yield great results.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the critiques, and yes, it's not an easy problem.

There are countermeasures. For instance, who said we'll let you see the whole question bank? And if you type a close enough approximation, out come the plagiarism checkers.

But when somebody's gone to the trouble to make a database online of every problem, I'm happy, because if that's so we must be successful enough that we have plenty more resources to game their gaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some direct competitors:

\- [https://www.hackerrank.com/](https://www.hackerrank.com/) (aka [https://www.interviewstreet.com](https://www.interviewstreet.com) a YC company)

\- [https://codeeval.com/](https://codeeval.com/)

\- [https://coderwall.com/](https://coderwall.com/)

\- [https://www.employiq.com/](https://www.employiq.com/)

\- [https://www.mindsumo.com/](https://www.mindsumo.com/) (college student only)

\- [http://www.codewars.com/](http://www.codewars.com/) (in beta)

<comment><USER9> Isn't topcoder still the king of this kind of thing. I don't think they particularly market it as being geared at hiring but companies definitely hire from there (I know UBS likes to) and your score does reflect on your ability, at least as far as being able to code competitively.

Edit: hyborg beat me to it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The best way to find good people is not by passing people as a value but by passing them through reference.

<comment><USER7> I'm one of the co-founders and I'm _still_ saving that quote.

As for the answer to the implicit question...the best people are passed by reference when they're already recognized. We're aiming to help people show that their skills have value when they don't have a reference.

The number is just, well, a pointer to a broader portfolio - and we'll only be making that portfolio more expressive over time.

<comment><USER11> Depending on your industry and location, recognition doesn't always come easy. Considering that a majority of employers will have a non-technical HR employee only makes things worse. I think that there is definitely a spot in the market for a company that can successfully break this barrier and improve the marketability and recognition of job seekers. The key is that a service like this isn't the be-all and end-all, but instead should serve as a supplemental indicator of a candidate's ability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a younger developer, I struggle to imagine our senior developers - who have been doing complicated things for 5-10+ years - ever stoop to a number to quantify their experience. I suppose that senior developers are probably not the target audience, but I would never want a company to expect this, or a score to define my experiences as a developer.

A technical screening can be handled in a ten-minute phone call for free - with the dignity of the applicant intact.

<comment><USER13> As an experienced developer, I struggle to imagine any of the talented younger developers I've worked with being well-represented by a number that quantifies their experience.

I take issue with any hiring system that attempts to narrow the field of view of candidates. This includes any single-number "scoring" system, as well as hiring cultures that focus on single methods (e.g. "puzzle questions") to the near exclusion of other hiring criteria. If your organization is doing any of the above, it's shooting itself in the collective foot.

<comment><USER10> The problem is not the talented younger developers. It's the not-so-talented ones. At least they keep us old guys in business to clean up the mess afterwards but this is quite a problem in some fields. The talented younger developers are doing quite well by themselves. I get to meet them in small groups every now and then and some of what I find blows me away.

<comment><USER14> I can't really see this being any use at all for finding a really talented, experienced developer. Any half-assed developer should be able to do these little puzzles with a little research.

The really hackerish stuff can't be tested for in a format like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Best of luck, I recently received an email that WorkforPie.com was shutting down ([http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/08/02/developer-hiring- st...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/08/02/developer-hiring-startup-work- for-pie-to-shut-down-on-august-31-points-users-to-coderwall-and-pitchbox/)) and they had the same sort of model.

I get we always complain about the developer interview process, but are these business models actually solving the problem?

</comment><comment><USER16> "...Lack of coder personality" That's more that just a mere gripe.

Many a job has been won or lost based on the character of a prospect. In fact, I've lost count of how many times I've seen otherwise very technically skilled people lose out to basic inter-personal communication. Above all else, a seeming lack of tact.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Perhaps an option to include a video and explain an interesting problem? Definitely something we're considering.

<comment><USER16> I like that. An "in your own words" monolog can go a long way to help recruiters understand the type of person they will be dealing with.

That also means the recruiter(s) need to understand the questions they're asking. Technical merit is all well and good, but how well can a recruiter process the answers they're getting? This can't be a bullet point questionnaire with blind matching of answer "C" to question "1". Sometimes solutions aren't so black and white.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Coding is a small part of a developer's job. Given a simple task, a programmer can code to it. A software engineer can create a proper design that expands out to solving a wide range of problems, a design that is easy to maintain and flexible enough to deal with problems.

I don't want to see someone's first solution to a problem. I want to know the solution they came up with after 5 mental iterations and a few hallway discussions with peers.

<comment><USER18> I wonder if the better approach (for a company like this one) would be to hire 4-5 good programmers, and 4-5 _bad_ programmers, and let candidates write the tests; assign the candidates that most successfully identify the on-staff good coders from the bad ones the highest score?

It sounds about as silly as this scoring does in the first place anyway...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This feels more like a candidate for acquisition and integration in some HR platform, rather than a standalone effort with a real future.

</comment><comment><USER19> Only people like software engineers would stoop so low to subject themselves to measures like these.

Aren't technical interviews (which are just politically correct way to test IQ) enough of a humiliation one has to go through?

<comment><USER20> Let me rephrase what you said in a better perspective. I don't think _anybody_ would subject themselves to unnecessary testing, regardless of the profession or industry. If this becomes an industry norm, then tough cookie for us engineers.

Interviews are a necessary and evolutionary process of finding good employees, and we know that so that's why we subject ourselves to them. It's not a form of humiliation because it's the norm. How else would a manager figure out if you got the skills and character to do the job? It's not a perfect process by any means, but it definitely helps.

Here's where this startup tries to take things to a different level. I get the idea behind it, but I cannot fathom why anybody would want to subject themselves to unnecessary testing. What's the ROI? Why give out personal information and have it stored on some database for some undetermined, possibly indefinite amount of time (forever? 1 year? 5 years?)? Am I going to be paid to do this? Can I no longer get a job if I don't do this? If this is purely voluntary, I have absolutely no incentive of taking the test.

Perhaps these questions should be something the founders should consider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In South Australia (and potentially elsewhere) university admissions for medicine have started to involve something of a personality test rather than purely academic aptitude. The workplace, and especially dealing with patients (colleagues or clients in this case?), is more than a calculated diagnosis.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was disappointed to see that they limit the password length to 30 characters. Perhaps one of the exercises should be to hash passwords that are longer than 30 characters.

Bcrypt will support up to 72 characters. If you are going to limit the password length I'd expect it to be something closer to 72 than to 30.

</comment><comment><USER23> It seems like as time goes on YC is funding far more startups that are direct competitors with each other. Hackermeter's pitch looks almost identical to that of InterviewStreet (YC S11).

<comment><USER24> Makes sense from an investment perspective. For the verticals that they care about this allows them to cut down on their exposure to execution risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds fun, but everyone solves the same problems (ok, ideally not: "sets of custom-built, rapid fire coding challenges built by each employer. You can use Hackermeter's pre-provided challenges, or build your own")? How long until copied solutions corrupt the scores? Better check performance on a held-out set before interviewing/hiring.

Let's not get into plagiarism-detection arms race; consider automatic refactorings / pretty printers with variations, and human input to vary variable names.

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh Yay, another useless measurement of a programmer's abilities, very much as useless as the puzzle interview made popular by Microsoft and then Google. So you can measure somebody in an artificial sprint environment that has nothing to do with actually delivering a product. The real measurement is how somebody does delivering actual products to market.

<comment><USER27> Not going to help you with problems like when your boss says oh we have brought a mega expensive bit of kit 4 to 5 times my annual salary.

Just hook it up to the spare PDP we have and go and see Bob and work out how to use it to analyze the data from his experiment tracking high speed droplets droplets in 3dspace.

BTW I had to write a driver to network with a rtos (RT11) just to talk to the device. I was 22 at the time and joined the company straight from high school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Please make your pages load faster. A 1.1MB header image which blocks other assets from loading doesn't do well for you.

<comment><USER7> ><

Thanks. Will be fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hey xianshou, I've been trying to figure out how to privately message you guys about this, but your email@example.com email doesn't seem to be working. Your online code editor is leaking environment variables pretty severely; stuff like API keys.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. info@ is fixed, so you can send messages there now. Please send the leaks and we'll plug them.

<comment><USER29> Sent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't know if this is common knowledge or something, but how are all these companies implementing a secure way to execute arbitrary code? Sounds like a non-trivial thing to get right.

<comment><USER9> Usually there is some kind of sandboxing in place. That way you can limit what the code is allowed to execute. For e.g. in PHP you would probably use Runkit[1] for this.

1\. [http://php.net/manual/en/book.runkit.php](http://php.net/manual/en/book.runkit.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Check out [http://codewars.com](http://codewars.com) (only supports JS, and Ruby). They offer problems with a voting system for solutions.

</comment><comment><USER32> Perfect opportunity to let me Auth with GitHub _wink wink_

</comment><comment><USER24> Will they be normalizing high scores against Fabrice Bellard?

</comment><comment><USER33> Have you considered adding Scala? You're already running jvms for Java, and you could do incremental compilation with SBT to keep everything responsive.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is this mainly for hiring people overseas? Otherwise couldn't you just pull the candidate in for an interview and look over their shoulder?

</comment><comment><USER35> "I am not a number, I am a free man!"

<comment><USER36> I am NaN!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to look for non-profit jobs? - <AUTHOR>

Which resources do you think are most helpful to find work at non-profit organizations? <comment><USER2> nearly all of the start-ups in Y Contaminator aren't profitable (yet).

....yes this is a joke

</comment><comment><USER3> Networking with whatever non-profit you are interested in, they would know others in their field looking for people.

[http://techsoup.org](http://techsoup.org) in the forums there's a career opportunities section. Pay is no where near the rate of private sector, but there is a better chance for longevity and doing something you like.

</comment><comment><USER4> In addition to these sites, start volunteering for local/nearby charities. You'll find that it's a good way to build up your network (why do you think so many execs are on nonprofit boards?) and your credibility within the nonprofit space.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why not use the usual job searching sites with the keyword of "non-profit" \- most job descriptions include at least a blurb of the company and non-profits will likely mention their status.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.nonprofitjobs.org](http://www.nonprofitjobs.org)

Or try searching in Google with this query: site:.org careers non profit -wikipedia

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.idealist.org/](http://www.idealist.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Mozilla is a great option.

</comment><comment><USER9> idealist.org</comment>


Ask HN: Do people build websites in Awk? - <AUTHOR>

I've been reading through Classic Shell Scripting by Arnold Robbins and Nelson H. F. Beebe, it's a great book!
Seeing how full-featured the classic Unix/BSD/GNU/Linux etc. toolkit is has left me wondering why Perl, Python, and Ruby are so successful.
If there are absolutely no server-side applications that are made out of these classic software tools, it seems like there must be a reason why.
Are there web applications that are made out of Bash, SED, AWK and all that? Or for reasons of security, complexity or something else has putting all of these tools under one roof (first in the form of Perl, later Python and Ruby) won the day? <comment><USER2> I actually wrote a static site generator written with Make and m4. Never used it in production, just as a proof-of-concept: [http://old.storytotell.org/blog/2009/07/13/how-to-manage- a-w...](http://old.storytotell.org/blog/2009/07/13/how-to-manage-a-website- destructively.html)

If the question is "why didn't Unix win?" the answers are basically historical. The original way to create pages dynamically was CGI. The idea was that you'd have some Unix crap on the server you wanted to expose over the web, so you'd write up your form and the form target would be a CGI script. The way CGI is specified, the arguments show up in argv and a bunch of incidental stuff winds up in the environment. This is one reason why PHP's global situation is so strange. Anyway, the request would come in, the server would parse it, fork and exec your CGI binary passing in the data and whatever came out got sent back to the client.

CGI is a great piece of classic Unix engineering, because it's completely language agnostic. Your CGI scripts could be shell, Perl, C, anything. The cost is also classic Unix: it's expensive, due to a lot of forking and re- doing the same work, and it's a bit of a security problem since it raises a lot of questions about which permissions are relevant and who should be running what. These questions led to a couple interesting solutions (suexec and fastCGI) that were apparently too much like epicycles and not enough like ellipses, or we'd all know about them.

mod_php and mod_perl basically killed CGI themselves by solving the performance problem and paring the security problem back down to just the web server itself. I suspect there's heavy inspiration from server-side includes but I wasn't there for that part so I don't know if that's true or just sounds reasonable. The other side of the tree, the Ruby/Python/Java side, wound up deciding that HTTP wasn't so complex it warranted doing a lot of backflips just to go through Apache, so they wound up creating their own servers so they could manage state (both application and interpreter/VM) more appropriately for their platform. This school of thought seems to have won the day, except for PHP and Perl which still tow the hard line for integration.

I have wondered for a while if CGI's performance penalties would really be all that noticeable today, for lightly loaded sites. It would be interesting to take a look into. If so, the problem is really just that one request shouldn't map onto one command. FastCGI was an attempt to create CGIs that endured longer than a single request. My impression is that it didn't become a big deal because by the time it was invented CGI was already on the way out and it's somewhat more brittle.

If there were a reasonable alternate way to represent the request that maps well onto Unix it might be possible to revive the dream.

<comment><USER3> The state of the art in Perl web deployment these days is PSGI, which shows the direct influence of Rack and WSGI. A static front-end proxy works nicely with a backend app server. See <http://plackperl.org/> for more information.

<comment><USER2> I take it you just search for the word Perl and reply whether or not you actually have anything relevant to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I worked on a project which was indecently large/successful that ran on awk. No details (NDA) but there, you now have confirmation that there exists a production system on AWK. Obligatory disclaimer, quoting Chris Rock: "You can drive a car with your feet if you have to, but that don't make it a good idea."

There are SUBSTANTIAL advantages to switching to e.g. ruby, which gives you all the fun of scripting languages and also a community which has already poured thousands of man-years of effort into making stuff you can use for web applications, rather than you spending time implementing e.g. the world's first (and worst) oAuth/Twitter wrapper for gawk.

<comment><AUTHOR> >and also a community which has already poured thousands of man-years of effort into making stuff you can use for web applications

I would wager a goodly amount that you've hit the nail on the head here.

It seemed at first as though bundling all of the unix environment together and abandoning "The Unix Way" was a triumph of advertising and people's laziness. Thinking further, it's pretty clear that mobilizing a community around a varied basket of tools would have been nigh impossible.

It's pretty interesting how important this developer/social aspect has been to the development of the web. Larry Wall has certainly been in on the joke all along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Back in the early days of the web (I'm talking 1993-1995), perl had a bunch of huge advantages:

1) It derived a lot of syntax from the classic unix tools. So if you knew sh, sed, awk, troff, grep, you were halfway to knowing perl.

2) The performance of fork() on many unixes was bad. Or at least, bad enough to make you avoid starting a lot of processes. With perl, you could usually do everything in-process.

3) Bash existed, but did not have the wide acceptance that it has today. Remember, Linux was brand spankin' new, and we were mostly using proprietary SunOS/Solaris/HPUX/AIX systems at the time. Those systems which shipped with /bin/sh, not /bin/bash. Heck, most sysadmins did not bother to install bash, because what as the point of installing some non-standard buggy and redundant shell? (Whether or not if this was true at the time is more up for debate, but that was the attitude.)

4) Bash didn't have associative arrays until much later, I believe.

5) There were things awk just had trouble doing, or at least doing quickly. Perl had a lot of the sysadmin-y system calls available as pure perl functions.

6) Perl's regular expressions were second-to-none

7) The comp.lang.perl community was probably the best, or at least busiest, of the applicable newsgroups at the time.

8) The perl community was very quick to provide example CGI code, so if you wanted to write a CGI script, you could bootstrap yourself very quickly with perl.

If you can ever find a copy of the 1991 edition of Programming Perl, you should pick it up--it was an amazing introduction to the language, and explains a lot of the advantages over other scriptish languages at the time.

And of course when Perl 5 came out, the language gained another huge advantage with the module system and pseudo-OO features.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here you go: <http://werc.cat-v.org/>

I personally think the standard unix tools are best used for static site generation - I wouldn't want to try handling arbitrary input with programs that tend to have semantics incompatible in the edge cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I didn't click through far enough through. I saw this Werc page yesterday and thought that it was an April Fool's post!

Thanks for helping me give the page a second look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been known to use "fly" (a script-ish wrapper to libgd) within a shell script running as a CGI to do super quick prototyping of dynamic graphics for web pages. It's nothing I'd keep around for real work, though. It was just too heavy.

One time, I had the problem of taking a huge data dump and reformatting it, so I wrote a shell script in the traditional way: grep, cut, and things like that. It was terribly slow. It was so slow that I managed to write, test, and run a C program which did the same thing before the shell script could finish. That's how slow it can be.

</comment><comment><USER8> The USACO site was originally a bash script (dunno what Kolstad uses now)</comment>


Django admin now ships JQuery - <AUTHOR> http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/12297

<comment><USER2> Thank god they finally went for the sensible option. It would have been highly irritating if it was rejected as an unnecessary dependency (which some people were arguing).

</comment><comment><USER3> I know it is not the case but this will reflect to most that JQuery is the toolkit of choice for Django.

<comment><USER4> It's certainly convenient.

But the Django admin is only an optional application. Your apps may use whatever makes sense for them

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The arm finally got bent I guess. This has been brought up quite a few times in the last few years on the Django dev list as I recall. Argument was always around the fact that some commiters didn't want to commit the Django components to any specific JavaScript framework.

<comment><USER6> That's an interesting point. So what's the counterargument?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rolling your own is silly and counter productive. Something needed to be chosen, and JQuery is the obvious choice.

Totally pragmatic.

<comment><USER7> I agree. I think it was good decision as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For anyone getting started with Django, what release will this ship with?

<comment><USER9> 1.2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not a django dev -- what library was used before this?

<comment><USER11> Just plain old JavaScript - no framework. Most of the JavaScript in Django's admin predates JavaScript frameworks entirely (in fact, Simon Willison wrote getElementsBySelector for the admin, which at least partially inspired jQuery and the rest of the selector-based JavaScript APIs).</comment></comment>


Why I kept my startup in Australia and why it was crazy - <AUTHOR> http://www.tillett.info/2015/06/24/why-i-kept-my-startup-in-australia-and-why-it-was-crazy/

<comment><AUTHOR> After the recent discussion here on this topic I thought I should write a longer post about why I think it is crazy to try and run a startup in Australia despite doing this myself. Hopefully this post will at least generate some good discussion like Alan's did as it is an important topic.</comment>


Learn X in Y Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://learnxinyminutes.com <comment><USER2> This isn't a site you should rely on to truly understand a language, but I have successfully used it to learn enough syntax to follow along with Ruby code in a book I was reading.

I imagine if I needed to learn enough Go or Kotlin, or some other language that's not totally a different paradigm to C/Java(script)/etc, to get a superficial understanding (enough to following along a blog post or some simple snippet of code) it would be sufficient and convenient.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like this site! I've referred to it many times while designing my programming language.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love Learn X in Y minutes! It is a great reference (how do I do basic thing x in language y) or useful for teaching yourself the basics of a language if you know one that rhymes e.g. C# and Java.

I used it recently to get my barings in Bash and then used the terminology I learned from the examples to finish my glue code.

Was this code good and super idiomatic? I don't think so but I also don't care. That job is done and I am on to bigger and better things.

Much like Wikipedia with regards to research, it's an overview and gives you the tools to dig deep but it doesn't really "teach" you any given language.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Lua one is pretty neat. [https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/lua/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/lua/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Obligatory counter: "Teach yourself programming in 10 years"

[http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html](http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> pretty good as a reference

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't feel you are really learning anything from this site. It's more like a collection of cheat sheets.

<comment><USER9> Learning syntax and convention is something.

I've been programming for 15+ years, everything from assembly to the latest JS. I don't need a $50 book for, say, C# that is targeted at everyone and so spends time explaining basic programming concepts. I need a 10,000 foot view and then I can drill down into the things that are unique or otherwise unclear.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I price a limited, inferior product? - <AUTHOR> You can see my original question from a week ago here.  I am a hardware guy who has an "app idea", so I went and got my learn on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18903013
I entered into this project because I wanted to learn some software skills, and by several strokes of good luck and help from the hn community I have a rough prototype actually working.  I am so excited by the progress that I want to try and market this.
I did some market research (I'd rather still be vague, so as not to embarrass myself yet).  I have discovered there are basically 3-4 products that compete in this space and they are so niche that they each charge between $500 and $5000 a month for a license per user or by site.  Pricey stuff.
I basically have no cost in this yet other than whatever AWS is going to bill me and some of my own time.  I am considering something like charging $5 a month per user just to get a bunch of users onboard and traction established.  I don't want to get in the habit of other freemium companies because I don't ever want to cross that chasm.
To be fair I think I am looking at a segment of the market that has far more users of what I am making that these other groups are not addressing.  They are going after some huge "cookies", while I am looking at going after all the "crumbs" that are left over.
My goal is to get this to the point that it provides a nice side income that can maybe someday take over my main source of wages.  I'm a contractor and consultant by nature so it's just another piece of the pie chart overall I guess.
What do you think, HN?  I value your opinion. <comment><USER2> Look at the value you create, not the cost. In SaaS margins of 90% are possible if remove your time in the calculations. In B2B the decision maker has the same work with getting approval, adding you to their supplier list, dealing with their accounting department or filling out forms for $5 or $50. I'd even argue per-seat price model has disadvantages because the invoice amount might change month-to-month and requires additional re-confirmations of the customer's accounting department. Start with a higher price (be confident), you can always lower later or offer (time limited) discounts. $5/month is zero when you have to deal with 1-2 support emails, the first 12 months is zero when you have to do one Skype sales call.

Lots is written about SaaS pricing, it's complex. [https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/](https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/) has a decent blog on that topic (and free ebook I seems).

</comment><comment><USER3> My experience with professional products is that price does not matter too much. If your customer needs a solution, in many cases they are willing to pay whatever you ask if the price is within a reasonable range. We did some experiments with changing prices and to our surprise there was almost no effect on the quantity we sold.

I would rather recommend to work on a special feature that your competitors do not have. Your product may be inferior, but maybe there is a feature that some potential customers are looking for, but cannot find in other products. This may be more attractive than a really cheap price, which also may raise suspicion if the price is that much lower than the price of competing products.</comment>


Algorithms to enhance or transform images - <AUTHOR> http://www.scriptol.com/programming/graphic-algorithms.php

<comment><USER2> Some of these (esp beautify) would make great 99c iphone apps

</comment><comment><USER3> I was about to call BS on a few of these, but then clicked through to the detailed explanations and I'm pretty damn impressed. Colorization technique and UI is pretty slick.

<comment><USER4> I remember reading the original paper years ago. <http://www.recolored.com/> is based off that research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised content aware image resizing didn't make the list. It is a few years old but still pretty neat:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk>

<comment><AUTHOR> That deserves an update, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "remove an object" image transformation reminds me of the Photoshop new feature "content-aware fill" featured here: <http://youtu.be/NH0aEp1oDOI?t=3m33s>

<comment><USER7> If I recall correctly, they both use the same inpainting algorithm.

<comment><USER8> That's right AFAIK, it's PatchMatch <http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/index.php>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A discussion on the pixel art scaling algorithms was going on here, if you're interested in them: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034690>

<comment><USER10> Any actual implementations of the pixel art scaling algorithm available?

<comment><USER11> <http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/download.html>

_edited to remove snarky comment_

<comment><USER12> scale2x ≠ the one featured in the submitted URL's roundup.

<comment><USER11> Strange, he was asking about the wiki article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even though I've interned in the field of image processing (and actually understood the math after a while!), the emerging results never cease to amaze me.

</comment><comment><USER14> The 'beautify a face' transformation should be renamed 'normalize a face' or something slightly less subjective then beauty. Although, I suppose 'normalize' isn't any less subjective. Suggestions? Perhaps 'standardize' or 'anglicize' or 'fashionize'?

<comment><USER15> Human opinion of what's "beautiful" in other human faces is not entirely subjective. It has been know for a while that if you start averaging faces you end up with a "pretty" face. This is because we genetically like symmetry, and averaging out faces makes them very symmetrical.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps, but the use of a term like "we genetically like symmetry" bugs me. Has it actually been scientifically proven that humans have a genetic predisposition toward preferring symmetry? My google-fu turned up nothing. Isn't opinion naturally subjective, albeit informed by societal influences one way or the other?

<comment><USER16> This isn't symmetry per se, but the study referred to here does suggest that beauty is mostly innate:

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6355-babies-prefer- to-...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6355-babies-prefer-to-gaze-upon- beautiful-faces.html)

(They didn't do any averaging.)

This article says that symmetry specifically has also be found to be attractive to babies:

<http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume6/issue6/features/feng.html>

Not sure if that was separate from the averaging mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A software service with an API that performs these transformations would be amazing.

</comment><comment><USER18> ...or, a disorganized regurgitation of papers that have been posted to HN several times in the past.

I know it's tiresome to complain about reposts, but can we at least not link to cut-and-paste content farms?

</comment><comment><USER19> The face beautification looks like two entirely different faces.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some of these are quite cool, particularly the beautification algorithm. But where can these algorithms be found...?

</comment><comment><USER21> this appears to be blogspam.</comment>


Ask HN: Statistics of mobile web use anyone? - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to decide whether and how to support mobile browsers at http://maxping.org Does anyone have statistics to share how much people use their mobile devices to read news? <comment><USER2> Start with the 2009 Mobile Web usage report from <http://metrics.admob.com></comment>


One Stop Shop Episode #7 – FiXT - <AUTHOR> https://receiptful.com/academy/podcast/7-fixt/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=podcast7 <comment><USER2> Cool episode! I really liked how they admitted that not all of the music they release are hits and that they make a lot of mistakes.

I was also surprised to hear that music streaming was their #1 revenue channel.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No Clear Path Ahead? Sometimes you just need to dig in! Learn how FiXT has grown their business through the evolution of the music industry. One clear tip: don't drink too much of your own Kool-Aid.</comment>


Ruby engineer wanted for fast-growing UK payments startup - <AUTHOR> https://dropletpay.com/blog/wanted-ruby-engineer-for-fast-growing-payments-startup

<comment><USER2> Had to hop around the site a bit since it wasn't mentioned on the page, but I'm assuming from the contact page that you're in London?

Ah well, good to see what you're up to at least :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're all based in Birmingham, with operations in London - the role can be remote though, so the lucky person can work wherever he or she wishes! We do have weekly team meetings, but Skype is fine with face time every couple of weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder here, happy to answer any questions about why you should come and work with us. :)</comment>


Higher education: Creative destruction - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21605906-cost-crisis-changing-labour-markets-and-new-technology-will-turn-old-institution-its?fsrc=nlw|hig|27-06-2014|5356be57899249e1cca20c83| <comment><USER2> Interesting article, even though many of the 'facts' about MOOCs are largely based conjecture. There is little hard evidence that "MOOCs [...] have so far failed to live up to their promise. _Largely because there is no formal system of accreditation_ , drop-out rates have been high."

From the research I did it comparing MOOCs to other online education offerings this is merely one of the contributing factors. IMHO the primary factor to the failure of MOOCs is that they are massive. Recent research, highlighted in the NYT, showed that the introduction style courses - the ones with 300-400 students - suffer from the same or similar problems. Once they took some of the poorest performers out of the lecture halls and put them in classes of ~30 they outperformed the students in the large classes.

<comment><AUTHOR> One way of dealing with the teaching assistance shortage during the course is community discussion forums. The best implementation of it I found are on Udacity and Coursera. Another excellent teaching aid is Community Teaching Assistants on some of the Coursera courses, e. g. Machine Learning by Andrew Ng.

<comment><USER2> In one of the highest followed and most completed course, which happens to be the first Machine Learning by Andrew Ng, the level of completion was a meager 12.5%. And in that Ng's course is an outlier as no other courses with similar sizes, with the exception of AI, have come anywhere close to that level of completion. The numbers actually show the opposite, a large course has a lower percentage of completion.

IMHO if course community were a large factor this high trafficked course with a high level of community discussion would most likely have exceeded this. As you say later ML courses have had much community discussion, yet they have had lower completion rates.

At the moment there is no substitute for real interaction with the docent or professor.</comment></comment></comment>


On the iPhone's Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/technology/13stream.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Wow, every site looks like News.YC!

</comment><comment><USER3> What's really neat is that the "div selection" you can do on the iPhone to zoom in on a portion of a page lets you strip out ads on the left/right of the screen, making the experience even better.</comment>


Music in the brain - <AUTHOR> http://scienmag.com/music-in-the-brain/ <comment><USER2> I have had several psychotic episodes, where in a few of them, my brain has produced music. I recall that I thought the music was awesome in the literal sense of the word.

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes me wonder. Does the part of the brain responsible for recognizing music have its own pleasure center?

<comment><USER4> Very anecdotal idea: I relate music to rhythm and rhythm to balance, I'm strongly thinking the sense of music is an abstract extrapolation of our kinematic sense, which was a very strong indicator of survival and so 'pleasure' (the more abstract and sophisticated movement and patterns you can mentally swallow and generate the more fit you are in wildlife).

/brain</comment></comment>


Ask HN: 75,000 books & an active member base - is Questia.com a "quality" site?  - <AUTHOR>

HNers:
There's been an abundance of discussion, misinformation, and general mayhem for many site owners in the preceding weeks over Google's latest algorithm update. Questia.com, one of my company's sites, was negatively affected by the change, in some surprising ways. .
Explicitly targeted at "low quality" sites, many companies feel that they were wrongly classified as low quality by this algo update, but I'm not here to make a stump speech for Questia. Accounting for my own bias, we feel like there's considerable value for users of Questia: with over 75,000 books, millions of peer-reviewed journal articles, and tools (annotation, citation generation) for students and researchers, offered at a reasonable cost.
The question, in my mind, is how closely can an algorithm model a human's experience of quality, using Questia.com as a case study? What is it about the site that might cause a person (or algorithm) to classify it as low quality? <comment><USER2> [http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog- images/hn/questia.p...](http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog- images/hn/questia.png)

Are you of the opinion that this page should rank for something? If so, what would it rank for, and why?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a completely fair analysis of that page: the experience on that page is not great, and we realize that we're not presenting the value to a user who lands on that page in a compelling way. We need to work on improving pages like that, and I'm fine with devaluing those based around a quality metric.

But what about a page like this: [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9727120](http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9727120). Would you classify this page in the same way as the category page you reference above?

<comment><USER3> (a) What value is there on that page?

(b) Knowing the person asking you the question had just selected and reviewed a sample of 12 of your content pages at random, what would you say the average Questia page looks more like: the Pabst sample you provided, or the sample Patrick provided above?

<comment><USER2> You can't review twelve of their content pages at random. After the second page of one of those public domain books, you'll be hit with an unskippable signup prompt. (One day free trial with CC.)

That's actually within the letter of the Google guidelines for First Click Free, but you could be forgiven for not enjoying the experience as a searcher.

<comment><USER3> I assumed the content was the paragraph above the listings for paid ebooks. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll walk you through my actions on your site. Normally usertesting.com charges for this :p

1) I go to questia.com

2) Having never been here, I quickly gather that it is a resource for information.

3) I decide I would like to read about law, so I click on the "Law" link.

Sidebar) Screw that pop up I just got.

4) I get to the law page, and I get to more navigation. There is SEO-ified content on the page which I'm sure your SEO company told you is great for deep linking and telling Google where stuff is. But it sucks. It is of no value to the user, and hopefully Google downranks that kind of crap... to be blunt.

5) I tab back from Hacker News and get that damn pop up AGAIN!

6) I tab back from Hacker News and get it AGAIN!?!.. Oh, I see, its whenever my mouse goes over the banner ad (doesn't have to hover, just mouseover). Annoying.

7) I click Civil Law.

8) I get to more navigation. I click Alimony.

9) I scroll down to the bottom of the page to scout out where the content is.

10) I see the definition of alimony now. It looked like an ad before because of the intrusive "Newsletter" graphic. I click read more. That's how I'd like to see the page when I first get there... with content.

11) So, that isn't a lot of information. I click to read a sample book.

12) The design isn't very appealing.

13) I want to get back to the search results? How. I don't see a link, so I hit the back button a few times. But that would be a PITA if I had just read through 20 pages.

It is very obvious that the site is designed for people to click on ads. And I don't mean that in the way that a lot of sites generate ad revenue. Your site puts ads first, and user experience and usability a very distant second. The model isn't sustainable. Despite any good information your site has, I would have left at about Step 5 and never gone back.

Cheers, hope that helps.</comment>


Foursquare plaintext cred transmission was discussed back in February 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://intrepidusgroup.com/insight/2010/02/im-in-ur-4sq-snarfin-ur-password-part-i/ Foursquare plaintext cred transmission was discussed back in February 2010, but Foursquare seemed to ignore it. <comment><USER2> Wow... not surprising but certainly informative. Another case of a software company not bothering to realize that all authentication should be secure no matter if you are "checking in" or managing your Bank Account!</comment>


Global market prices for recylables have fallen by as much as 80% - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2008-12-23-recycledrop_N.htm <comment><USER2> People oversupply recyclables because it makes them feel virtuous. Even when it's shown to be easier to separate recyclables at the facility, but only economical if people stop separating recyclables on their own... people still want to go on separating recyclables, because it makes them feel virtuous.

What on Earth would you expect if not a vast oversupply?

</comment><comment><USER3> Copper prices are still up 50% from 1998 to late 2003.

There was just a huge bubble on the LME. <http://www.lme.com/copper_graphs.asp>

<comment> daniel-cussen Not every rise and subsequent fall in the price of a commodity is a bubble. For one thing, there was not much speculation involved. You didn't have fools buying copper expecting to sell it later at a higher price to a greater fool; rather, you had people buying copper to use it to make stuff, like plumbing and wiring for houses in the first world (which _was_ a bubble). Houses, together with cars, account for the bulk of the end consumer's use of copper. Lots of people wanted copper. Chilean, Peruvian, American and Indonesian producers happily sold people what they wanted. Later, the housing bubble burst and the demand for commodities fell substantially. Another factor that contributed to the fall in price was the increase in supply that took place during the time in which high prices prevailed.

So it's just supply and demand. It's a natural cycle that holds for most commodities. Insiders considered it a supercycle in that it lasted much longer than other high-price cycles in copper's history. Good times.

<comment><USER3> I thought that basically described a bubble. It was not a speculative bubble rather an increase in demand caused a spike in prices well above the long term sustainable level. There was a lot more copper available at 4x the price in the long term, but people where not increasing production as fast as possible, because the price was not sustainable over the long term. Which kept the price unnaturally high for a long time period.

Unless I am miss using the term but a 4x increase in price over a few year is abnormal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recall James Chanos talking about the huge oversupplies of things like aluminum and copper, etc.

But I'm in still using aluminum foil around the house, my question is how long could it possibly take for excess supply to clear out?

Is the world set with commodities for the next 3 years?

<comment><USER5> Probably not. I suspect pork bellies don't stay fresh that long.</comment></comment>


The Most Unhappy of Pleasures: Your Sugar Addiction Is Killing You - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/the-most-unhappy-of-pleasures-your-sugar-addiction-is-killing-you/253341/

<comment><USER2> The Heart and Stroke foundation and other mainstream promoters of healthy eating have demonized fat, but I'm convinced that sugar is the real culprit when it comes to obesity and related diseases. It's just a data point, but I know for a fact that I got fat for having a huge sweet tooth. When it comes to regular foods, I tend to eat less than the average man. People are surprised all the time by how big I am for how little I eat. The problem is that until recently, I still ate tons of sugary things (much less so now that I'm on Weight Watchers). Having experienced it most of my life, it's not a stretch to call it an addiction to sugar.</comment>


More than 50 firefighters are tackling a blaze at a Tesla car dealership - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-47427311 <comment><USER2> Actual Title: Crawley Tesla fire: Half of site damaged in fire

Spoiler, fire was contained and out in 3 hours.

Why change the title and current tense in the post here? Dang

<comment><USER3> Presumably because the news site started with the current tense title and changed it after the fire was contained. Same URL, but updated content.

They do that nowadays. Not sure if that's good (easier to build memory holes...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A Tesla service center, not dealership.</comment>


Lessons from the Sony Hack - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/12/lessons_from_th_4.html

<comment><USER2> [http://savingtheinterview.com/](http://savingtheinterview.com/)</comment>


Haskell: mistakes I made (and how to fix them) - <AUTHOR> https://jaspervdj.be/posts/2016-04-11-haskell-mistakes-i-made.html <comment><AUTHOR> Link to slides: [https://github.com/meiersi/HaskellerZ/blob/a19f6c28cd999efda...](https://github.com/meiersi/HaskellerZ/blob/a19f6c28cd999efdae86d38b1871378cbc3c0645/meetups/20160331-Haskell_Mistakes/slides.pdf)</comment>


Gaming Apple App Store's Review System (View in iTunes - Read Reviews) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockify-your-lock-screen-hd/id451287882?mt=8 <comment><USER2> The current state of the art that I've noticed for App Store review spam is to:

1) Create accounts well ahead of time

2) Use the accounts to give nearly-always-five-star reviews to several highly- rated and frequently-reviewed free apps, such as Angry Birds Free, Instagram, etc.

3) Age the accounts for a while (weeks maybe) while continuing to repeat steps 1 and 2 to create more accounts.

4) Having collected enough seasoned accounts, use them all at once to pile on fraudulent downloads and nearly-all-five-star reviews to maximize chart impact.

The result is many fraudulent positive reviews for not just appspam but popular legitimate apps as well. Many popular free apps end up with many more reviews that are overwhelmingly positive (a rich-get-richer effect) and have the trademark brief and too-weird proto-English that characterize fake app reviews.

It's a strange phenomenon -- try reading a few pages of Angry Birds Free reviews sometime (preferably morning hours in North America) and you'll see what I mean. The developers of top free apps are receiving (and benefitting from) spam reviews they never solicited.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those not willing to launch iTunes, the review breakdown is as follows:

      ★★★★★ [</comment><comment></comment><comment>= ] 354
        ★★★★ [==            ] 26
          ★★★ [=             ] 12
           ★★ [=             ] 10
            ★ [</comment><comment></comment><comment>==] 384

And the "most helpful" review (15 of 17 people said it was helpful) looks like this:

      Great App ★★★★★
      by Bondfan200
      Great App!! Let's you be more creative with your iPhone.

You are probably capable of imagining what the rest of the first-page reviews are.

\----

Now would probably be a good time to complain about how _horrible_ the App Store is. There are good things _on_ it, but it's horrendous - finding good ones is hard, there's no way to demo paid apps (why not?! they control the whole system, they could enforce rules!), no way to review without paying, and no way to view _or_ rate "+/- helpful" from the iPod/Phone (don't know about ipad). That last one in particular seems the greatest oversight for preventing this kind of thing.

It's almost an _ideal_ system for exploitation. I simply can't comprehend why it has stood this way for this long. Has Jobs even looked at this thing? I would think he'd be livid, it's total crap.

<comment><USER4> The app store has changed in many ways since its inception.

Originally people were putting non-letter characters in the beginning of the apps name so they appeared at the top if alphabetical lists. They would also release updates all the time because that would put them at the top of the "new" list. It's evolving and I hope they find a solution.

And I'm sure it will change more in the future. But it's not nearly as bad and you're implying.

Now tell me about your favourite app store and how it has solved your discovered problems...

<comment><USER3> Oh, it's simple: I haven't found a single one. Amazon, however, does a much better job with their store. Even Ebay does alright, with seller ratings (no developer ratings in the app store? wtf, just keep scamming!).

That non-letter characters would put things at the beginning of alphabetical lists should have been forseen and accounted for (or ignored) from the very earliest planning stages, the _instant_ they decided to have an alphabetical listing somewhere. That constantly releasing updates would keep them at the top of the "new" list should have been seen the _instant_ they decided to have a "new" list in the first place, and an app's position weighed against the frequency of its release. That borderline-shady developers would continue to produce borderline-shady applications should have been seen the _instant_ they decided to allow a developer / company to submit more than one application, and steps taken to help either Apple or consumers identify potential problems.

Meanwhile, we have _this_.

They have left _gaping_ holes to exploit the system, and they've existed for _three years_ in the largest app store out there by a massive margin. There's no way to get around that being shameful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately, scams like this aren't new on the App Store. Ever since the App Store has been around there's been seedy apps perpetrating to do things that just aren't possible. You just have to do a search for apps like "location trackers" to see how widespread it is.

I saw this particular app in the Top 100 around 2 months ago, and noticed it had an average rating of 1 star, how this has evaded being on Apple's radar for this long is beyond me.

Apple has taken a lot of flak for being too stringent and strict with the App Store review process, but this is one area the whole process was designed to fix. This is literally a case of a single guy falsely advertising his app and, by all accounts, having hundreds of thousands people fall for it and pay $1.99 for the privilege of being screwed.

<comment><USER6> My email just now to the App Store review team:

Dear Apple, As an Apple developer and longtime user, I'm proud to recommend Apple products to my friends and family. There is simplicity, thoughtful constraint, and craftsmanship in everything Apple does.

That's why I was stunned to see this app--and numerous others from the same developer--in the App Store: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockify-your- lock-screen-hd/i...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockify-your-lock-screen- hd/id451287882?mt=8)

I'm surprised this app was approved in the first place. By many accounts, it does absolutely nothing. I cannot count on two hands how many App Store rules this developer is violating.

And the App Store review system is obviously being gamed. This developer is earning thousands of hard-earned dollars from Apple customers who trust you to keep garbage out of the App Store.

I love Apple. Please don't let the App Store resemble the cheap, neglected morass of the Android Market.

Sincerely, Joshua Merrill

<comment><USER7> Your e-mail is probably destined for the bitbucket. If you really want to affect change, I'd suggest spreading a link to this to everyone you can. Generally, with problems like this, they only go away after reaching a sufficient level of media exposure.

On the other hand, if you're really lucky, someone from Apple is reading this right now and taking care of it :)

<comment><USER6> I've found Apple to be surprisingly responsive in the past. But here's hoping.

<comment><USER8> I've just gone on the App Store and there is just one review saying it's rubbish...

Wonder if they've cleaned it up...

<comment><USER6> Apple responded to my email. It appears they have pulled this developer's apps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can buy and rate an app through iTunes without actually having a iPhone synced, right? 400 scammy 5-star reviews don't represent 400 iPhones out there, they represent 400 PayPal accounts — shoot, it might even be the same PayPal account — and a bill for $800 less $560 earnings.

I just confirmed this by creating a new Apple ID, linking it to my real PayPal which has been linked to a different account in the past, and buying and reviewing a (different, non-scammy) app. (Sorry Apple!)

Seems like the quick fix here is to require you to rate apps on the device itself. It would raise the barrier to entry significantly, at least.

<comment><USER10> Or a bill of $400...

Aug 07 '11 $1.99 -> $2.99 Aug 06 '11 $.99 -> $1.99 Aug 04 '11 New App: $.99 (release)

This scam isn't limited to paid apps.

There are "marketing" services that promise tens of thousands of downloads of your app on the day of your choosing (obviously, to game the iTunes free rankings).

Apparently, another developer is claiming the assets/screenshots used are also stolen by this stand up guy:

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockitize-your-lock- screen/id...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockitize-your-lock- screen/id445198370?mt=8)

<comment><USER9> Which has 34 5-star reviews, _546_ 1-star reviews, and none in between.

This is pretty ludicrous :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Click on "View in iTunes" and read through the reviews. The app is currently number one under the paid utilities section. I really don't know how they managed to get there. Fake accounts writing reviews? Mechanical Turk?

FYI: All the app does is change your wallpaper.

<comment><USER11> I'm very interested in how these are being gamed as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see the $99 developer fee and the closed ecosystem is keeping out the riff raff like it's supposed to...

<comment><USER13> The app store is brimming with crap. The only advantage I can see of Apple's gatekeeping at this point is that Apple seems to be doing a _much_ better job of keeping out malware than Google. That alone might be enough to justify their approach if the growth rate of Android malware doesn't change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The plot thickens: [http://itunes.apple.com/app/lockitize-your-lock- screen/id445...](http://itunes.apple.com/app/lockitize-your-lock- screen/id445198370?mt=8)

This is the exact same app from a different developer, who claims that the other one is a copy-cat and a scam. (leaving out the small detail that his own app is a scam as well)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man, a scam app being copied! This is pretty hilarious..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is getting insane. The app is now sitting at number 4 in the Top 100 paid apps, and he also just jacked the price up from $1.99 to $2.99.

Surely staying off Apple's radar was his best bet? Instead he's decided to make a relatively quick buck selling 50,000 copies per day. I seriously hope Apple withholds his pay check when it is inevitably taken down.

</comment><comment><USER15> This one, by the same developer(s?) is far worse <http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/id452096746?mt=8>

It's called Flash网页浏览器 and the entire description (in the AU store) is in (chinese?) except for a few words like "Adobe Flash","100%" and "SOUTHPARKSTUDIOS.COM FTW!!!!!" The screenshots appear to depict an iPad viewing a number of flash based sites and playing flash games. Oh, and it's $10.49

Edit: Their description contains a link to a "trial version" at <http://hdmediaplus.biz/flash>. This redirects to <http://www.dailymotion.com/html5> which demos a movie playing using html5

<comment><USER16> The Chinese description looks like machine translation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ha notice the name of the company, too... © Midwest Blizzard Entertainment Inc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately this seems to be a pretty common occurrence. I have seen it quite often in the Entertainment section with apps like X-Ray Scan or Phone Tracker. Not sure why nothing is ever done about it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Apple recently tried to curb this by preventing reviews from promo codes. Looks like they just Bought the apps outright.

These review scam aren't the worst of it. A lot of good reviews won't necessarily mean good sales for your app. I've seen tons of apps with five star reviews languish in the app store. The bigger worry to me is companies like appmagenta which promise a certain ranking using bot downlods.

</comment><comment><USER20> Developer's twitter page: <http://twitter.com/#!/Midw3stBlizzard>

</comment><comment><USER21> I genuinely need someone to please help me understand what the problem is. How is this developer gaming the review system?

<comment><AUTHOR> Answer this: Is it pure coincidence that an equal number of people hate the app and love it so much as to give it a 5 star rating?

Oh and EVERY five star rater also recommends the app strongly for others to give it a try.

Oh and all the app does us change your lock screen wallpaper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are some interesting comments from the 5 star raters:

"Lock screen is an amazing game I love it" - 6 out of 6 customers found this review helpful

"Use it everyday" - The app was published on August 04 and this comment was on August 06.

"Great app. Love the sync capability. Can't beat the price:-)" - Reminds of those random spam comments I used to get on a blog I maintained.

"This is the way it's supposed to be! This is an essentially perfect app. The developers are GREAT too!"

"I use this program more than any single other on my iPhone, and IPad. The devs are really responsive and they are totally dedicated to making this the best, most useful app in your arsenal"

"The application is wonderful, very nice design, stores all of the information you could possibly want. I really love it and would 100% recommend it." - It's a wallpaper changing app!

"This is a great example of what an iPhone app should be! Great work! Definitely work the price. Check out this great app today and you'll love it!" - What a genuine review. Most helpful so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This app (by yet another developer than listed below), called Locketize your iPhone, has 32 five star reviews and only 4 one star reviews. [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockitize-your- iphone/id45266...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockitize-your- iphone/id452663210?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can you still review an app you "purchased" with a promo code?

Seems like a flaw to allow people who didn't pay for the app to rate it. This would also allow giving away codes in exchange for a certain amount of stars.

<comment><USER23> As far as I know, no, you can not longer write reviews from apps downloaded with promo codes. It seems that the change was recent (couple of months ago). A google search showed lots of articles about but I couldn't find an official Apple statement about it.

<comment><USER24> You still can. I've had friends review my apps even though I gave them all promo codes. And for the record, I don't think it's unethical to ask a few friends for a favor.

It'd actually recommend as a marketing strategy to hand out as many promo codes as possible. To bloggers, friends, anybody who asks or complains about your app on twitter. The goodwill you gain is worth far more than the potential lost sales. Even at $20, I think giving out promo codes has made me much more in good business than the thousand bucks in "lost sales."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: The app is currently number 12 in the top grossing list. Most recent reviews are crying foul and insist on getting their money back and Apple is yet to do anything about this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I first saw it, the app was $1.99. It is now $2.99.

</comment><comment><USER25> guys this is botnet. reviewing/buying from the bots - do what you want. and no proofs. i think this guy will receive his money. sorry for pure engl

</comment><comment><USER26> To be honest, there is no proof that the developer made up false reviews. In fact, the description in the middle of the page states pretty clearly that this App provides perceived notion of security and it's just a decoy.

So what to take away from this? For one, 99% of AppStore users don't fucking read the description. In fact I would have bet that the only two things that made them bought the app what the icon and name.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should read some of the reviews for the app: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855656></comment></comment>


Xerox PARC's Tool for Dealing with Twitter's "Information Overload" - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/palo_alto_researchers_create_tool_for_dealing_with_twitter_information_overload.php <comment><AUTHOR> Really excited to see this. Do you think it has legs?

I'm currently working on the same exact problem: <http://slipstre.am/>

<comment><USER2> If a large % of users have the problem you're trying to solve, they might rather abandon twitter altogether than going to yet another tool to try to fix it. And if not, you're building a product for a (by definition) niche audience. Is going for a niche audience indeed the plan?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point. I think Twitter can be overwhelming in the way that the internet can be. People didn't abandon the internet just because it was hard to navigate. They turned to Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This might be cool, I guess we have to wait and see. I have been experimenting with the free "garden hose" twitter stream (you get about 40 tweets per second). Google and other companies get the full "fire hose" - amazing to see something you tweeted show up in search results almost immediately.

</comment><comment> w-ll sons of the seedless watermelon scientist</comment>


New android marketplace with books and movies on my phone - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/philippberner/status/101106452659310593 <comment><USER2> 4 times more expensive than Redbox, comparable to Comcast/Fios VOD prices. Pass for now</comment>


The last armed conflict in Latin America is finally ending - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/26/americas/colombia-farc-peace-deal/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a Colombian citizen, a rather young one, 27, and I did not expect to see this happen during my lifetime. I think this is so important and unlocks so many things for everyone inside and outside of Colombia.

<comment><USER2> Sounds great. Have they released all the hostages yet?

<comment><USER3> Yes, all the hostages have long been released and it has now been several years since the peace talks began, that there has been very little violence. The next step is getting them to disarm and enter a process of returning to civilian life.</comment></comment></comment>


4 Major Benefits of Walking as a Software Developer - <AUTHOR> https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/4-major-benefits-of-walking-as-a-software-developer <comment><USER2> While I'm not a huge walker, I find that there are definite benefits to learning when to walk away from the keyboard and just plain think out problematic code. As a young developer, its hard to realize sometimes that the best thing you can do is just _stop coding_ and think hard.</comment>


Psycholinguists Are Foolish to Dismiss GPT-2 and Bert - <AUTHOR> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZFtesgbY9XwtqqyZ5/human-psycholinguists-a-critical-appraisal <comment><USER2> It can "write" like Nabokov but it can't read.

Symbolic A.I. Did not fail at text generation but it did not have a real market. Today the web is full of "mad-lib" text generated by SEO spammers. Practically many software users don't seem to care if forms in an application use the right articles (e.g. 'a', 'an'). For that matter you can get superhuman performance at grammar by squashing it's to its 100% compared to ordinary people who do not punctuate correctly.

The language embedding business has traded percentages of accuracy on benchmarks for percentages of possible commercial accuracy because of information that is provably lost in the front end.

The dialog between linguists and the embedding industry has been slow to develop because when you look for linguistic or semantic concepts in the embedding (say by training a classifier) they are hard to find.

For instance you might try a set of 10 color/non-color words, predict the result for another 10 words based on the WordNet embedding and superficially think it is promising. With every word you add to the training and test sets it will perform worse. It passes superficially because it knows many biases like 'anyone named Tyrone is a thug.'

That kind of machine may be able to write fiction, but you need a different level of understanding to act justly, do hard things correctly, etc.</comment>


Sepp Blatter to quit as president amid corruption scandal - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/32982449 <comment><USER2> It's convenient that he steps down now, mere days after the election that swore him into power once again. If he stepped down during the election Prince Ali would have won. This way, Blatter can call his own election and personally vouch for a new candidate to take over.

To me, Blatter was just the face of corruption. I simply cannot see someone from inside FIFA being able to resolve the corruption problems, mostly because these people are the problem. This isn't a new thing, and this isn't something that arrived with Blatter. Some journalists have been investigating corruption in FIFA for decades. Hell, most countries have been a part of it. It's only surfacing now because the bribery is so blatant, and our bribes simply weren't enough.

People will cheer and say that "we finally did it", but I cannot see anything truly changing. The only way FIFA will change is through the authorities.

<comment><USER3> The "FIFA is corrupt to the core" argument misunderstands the nature of FIFA's corruption.

It's only the few _decision makers_ that are relevant, it isn't like a government where there is something to be gained by bribery on each level, even the lowest civil servant. Unlike corruption in a nation, we are not talking about a culture of corruption that involves millions. There's no point in bribing just a lowly FIFA official or bureaucrat, most you can buy that way is easier access to the big boys.

That small group of corrupt decision makers is now rapidly diminishing, and there is not a long line of eager replacements, especially now that the feds are looking over their shoulders.

<comment><USER4> > That small group of corrupt decision makers is now rapidly diminishing, and > there is not a long line of eager replacements, especially now that the feds > are looking over their shoulders.

And not just the (US) Feds -- the Swiss are conducting a separate corruption investigation relating to the 2018 and 2022 world cups, and other governments are interested as well. Essentially, the fact that the World Cup is a big national prestige event _and_ that past corruption has been brought into the light means there is likely going to be intense scrutiny from all sides going forward -- sure, for every beneficiary of corruption there are _lots_ of losers, and when those losers are major nation states, they have a pretty impressive ability, if they turn their will to it, to address any problems, especially if given the convenient excuse provided by actual corruption to prosecute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this translates as, "Sepp Blatter can't make travel commitments required of his position without facing extradition."

</comment><comment><USER6> McDonalds paired with Lime-Rita's for John Oliver. The most powerful or prescient talking head on TV? Quite possibly.

<comment><USER7> His show is awesome and really hit the ground running! Really makes the Colbert Report replacement (The Nightly Show) look terrible by comparison (started around the same time but to be fair LWT is once a week while TNS is 4 days/week). Looking forward to other things that John will bring into the light, I've learned quite a bit from his show (or rather his show has wetted my appetite to do more research on topics he covers).

<comment><USER8> The thing I like so much about LWT is that some of the segments are a good 12-15 minutes long, which is an eternity in TV land. With that time, he can actually dig into topics with more depth to give viewers a better understanding of the background and what is happening (and still manage to be hilarious). I think back to his bit on the supplements industry as a good example of this.

I NEVER see this type of analysis on any news shows besides Frontline.

<comment><USER9> > I NEVER see this type of analysis on any news shows besides Frontline.

The two things those have in common is the lack of commercials. It gives much more time (10 more minutes in a 30 minute show!) and lets you not have to recap after a break. It will be interesting to see how Vice's new nightly news show on HBO will work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess John Oliver will be drinking Budlight Lime live.

<comment><USER11> Did Budweiser have anything to do with this?

<comment><USER12> Not sure but he touched on something that might have struck a nerve. The ONLY people who could do something about FIFA were the sponsors. Threaten to cut down the money tree and change will come faster than you think.

<comment><USER13> Offhand, the only other agency that might have sufficient weight to move things behind the scenes was UEFA. They have the teams, the money and most of the relevant fans. If they move in sync with Brazil and Argentina, FIFA runs out of relevant matches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of Taleb's tweets stated:

"From Mafia history: Feds close progressively the circle around the big fish via associates. They get him last to avoid plea bargaining."

The circle was being closed, and hopefully Blatter will still face some consequence while he attempts to run away from this mess.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.

<comment><USER16> what else did they try?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just wondering - has anyone heared any other side of the story? Whenever a story appears to be such clear cut black and white with one evil villain, my septics radar goes up.

<comment><USER18> Sometimes evil villains simply are evil villains. Septics? ;)

<comment><USER19> skeptics?

<comment><USER18> One would hope. Though within the context of corruption septics might be applicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hopefully he'll be indicted on corruption/racketeering charges anyway.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks like they planned this before the election. There was no suitable candidate who would be able to do the job that has to be done now. Now its time to find one.

And i would be surprised if they can connect him with bribery etc. He strikes me as that kind of person who likes power over a bag of money.

<comment><USER22> The problem with corruption is that, in the absence of careful enforcement, you don't have to choose. Blatter has had both power and, I'd wager, a great deal of money for quite some time now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For an interesting take on the FIFA charges, YC's Casetext had several articles published by Heather Lowe - Legal Counsel and Director of Government Affairs at Global Financial Integrity:

FIFA: The Bribery Case with No Bribery Charge [https://casetext.com/posts/xyrwas9p8swf80k9-fifa-the- bribery...](https://casetext.com/posts/xyrwas9p8swf80k9-fifa-the-bribery-case- with-no-bribery-charge)

Can Victims Sue for Damages? [https://casetext.com/posts/pz8uyoy048izr529-can- fifa-victims...](https://casetext.com/posts/pz8uyoy048izr529-can-fifa-victims- sue-for-damages)

</comment><comment><USER24> Good riddance.

Hopefully the next president won't be another corrupt liar (Platini, Warner etc).

</comment><comment><USER25> Too bad he didnt go out with a 'bang' like former FIA prez Max Mosley

[http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1728032,00...](http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1728032,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems a lot like he's stepping down now to avoid being dragged down later.

</comment><comment><USER27> Will Putin come to his aid?

<comment><USER4> > Will Putin come to his aid?

Putin already tried to do so [0] by painting the corruption investigation as unjust US persecution.

[0] Well, more likely tried to pre-empt any effect the investigation of FIFA corruption would have on Russia's 2018 World Cup, but it amounts to the same thing in effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Now FIFA needs to disband itself entirely.

</comment><comment><USER29> Goodbye, you slithering snake. Here is to a new generation of reform in the FIFA organization.

</comment><comment><USER30> Thank you USA.

</comment><comment><USER31> In the infamous words from the handbook of Hydra:

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>===

 _Cut off 1 head and 2 more will appear_

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>===

Hail FIFA!</comment>


NSA chief: Snowden 'betrayed the trust and confidence' of the US - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/307225-nsa-chief-snowden-betrayed-the-trust-and-confidence-of-the-us

<comment><USER2> He certainly betrayed the trust and confidence of certain people and entities in the executive branch of the US government, that's not in dispute.

But it is morally obligatory to betray trust when you are trusted to do a thing which is itself morally indefensible. Whether Snowden betrayed a trust is not at issue, the moral (and, subordinate to that, legal) character of the subject matter of that trust is at issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, US did that to itself. Snowden just let everyone know what the US government was doing in their name.</comment>


Influencer Nation: 86% of Young Americans Want to Become One - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-05/becoming-an-influencer-embraced-by-86-of-young-americans <comment><USER2> If consumers engage with these influencer/brand combos we'll certainly see a new wave of younger influencers enter the social media game. With how young folks are getting on the internet too definitely shapes their consumer habits. I am a millenial and have felt similar "connections" to content creators back when podcasting hit off (Diggnation comes to mind). I used to consume everything Kevin Rose/Alex Albrecht because I thought their lives and ideas were so cool. Now nearing my 30s I realize I was imagining my own startup pipe dreams. Can't help but think this is amplified with younger folks consuming daily vlogs, instagram stories and more. Interesting thing to study in the future, for sure.

</comment><comment><USER3> OK zoomer</comment>


Number Cruncher – Brewing vs. Buying Coffee - <AUTHOR> http://mymillionairemap.com/number-cruncher-brewing-vs-buying-coffee/

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you find it easier to buy your coffee or brew it at home?</comment>


White-Hats Go Rogue, Attack Financial Institutions - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/white-hats-go-rogue-attack-financial-institutions/ <comment><USER2> I'm always stunned by the confidence with which forensic analysts state their conclusions (or is it just the journalists portraying them?). For other professions (doctors, archaeologists, even mathematics if you think of the crisis in the early 20th century) time has showed us that such confidence is not appropriate and the interpretation of the facts can change considerably.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "Russian hacker" thing has become some sort of a meme, or even a joke. It seems to me there would be incentive for a non-Russian to impersonate one in order to throw out a red herring.

<comment><USER4> Because attacking Russian banks, siphoning funds through Russian ATMs, using commands in Russian, with (presumably sourceless) assembly modified APT128 exploits is a red herring?

Sometimes a (white) hat is just a (black) hat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just because you can reverse engineer a binary that doesn't mean you work in cyber-sec. Just saying.</comment>


Samsung begins teasing Galaxy S III  - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/04/22/samsung-begins-teasing-galaxy-s-iii-launch-with-countdown-on-cryptic-teaser-site/

<comment><USER2> Seriously, does anyone need a new Galaxy S? I don't want to believe that any smartphone user needs something more powerful than the current Galaxy S II.

You want to drop another 600 bucks on a new smartphone? That's fine then, but you probably don't need it.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, innovation is stupid.

<comment><USER2> Under my opinion, what is stupid is people who buys a new smartphone each year because the older one seems no longer useful with the more megapixels and megahertzs of the new one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's this need for such a constant turnover of new phones? They only get marginally better or more useful with each generation, no matter the manufacturer.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm impressed with the amount of hype Samsung is creating with this device, even if it is mostly inside of the tech crowd. Great job, Samsung.

<comment><USER6> In the European tech press there's also a fair amount of rumble and hype about the next version. The Galaxy S II sold a fair number of devices (at the expense of HTC which didn't have a matching killer device), so we'll have to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have the Galaxy S 2. That is already a great device. I am looking forward to the Galaxy S 3.

</comment><comment><USER8> When did the S2 come out?

<comment><USER9> Varies, I know most of Asia and Europe got it before USA. But the official release was in April 2011.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Samsung GS3 specs are contantly getting "leaked". [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3Ei61wWOr4w)

</comment><comment><USER11> And it will be much better and cheaper than the iPhone

Take that fanboys</comment>