nancyhua

We wanted to have a free tier for smaller apps/ independent projects, so Apptimize is free for under 10k users. If you have a lot of apps, please contact us to discuss custom options bc we want to figure out something that can work and be accessible.

Hm, I hadn't thought it would be misleading and asked for feedback on the heading. I guess the people I asked for feedback already know how it works... Thanks for telling me this because we consider ourselves super straight-shooting and want to be clear. We'll improve.

Our users call it a hotfix so that's what we're calling it. Often the fix is something they do on the server side while they disable the frontend. Does that make sense? It's not meant to be misleading but succinct headlines are hard to write.

An example is hiding Facebook login. You can unhide it later (also without resubmitting) when you're ready to put it back.

I've thought and blogged about this question a lot. http://nancyhua.com/2013/12/23/waste-life/

awesome idea!

That's clearly something designers need.

Congrats, Sam!!! Your blog shows a ton of thought leadership and meshes really well with this.

FINALLY!!

good point, will improve word choice

Apptimize / San Francisco Bay area / H1B welcome / iOS, Android, Frontend, Backend engineers

Apptimize dramatically tightens the innovation cycle for native Android and iOS apps and aims to become a framework vital to every app. Developers love Apptimize because feature flagging and phased rollouts give control and flexibility. Our framework also cuts down on programmer requirements by letting people edit and control app elements and features without programming or redeploying. Our goal is to accelerate app innovation by making it shockingly easy to improve apps.

Our team has experience building complex systems, and can do it in one third the time most would consider possible. We are well-funded, selective, and believe smaller teams are better. You will be an essential part of our team.

Specific positions/requirements:

iOS and Android library developers: Extreme attention to detail is critical because you’re working on code deployed to billions of app installs. We’re often working on the less documented, adventurous parts of iOS, so you need to be a master of Objective C. For Android, be ready to explore the Android source code.

Backend/frontend developers: A full stack developer, you can work on a feature from requirements and design to programming and testing. Most work is in AngularJS, Java (the good parts), and PostgreSQL.

We pay very competitively and offer awesome benefits. Email jobs@apptimize.com.

omg the t shirt! Sorry I forgot bc I decided to wait to get one after we got a logo. You'll get one soon.

They're really tiring bc they absorb all your energy! I tried to buy the trampoline shoes but they only shipped to England or something :P

On hacker news patio11 is an expert and thought leader on AB testing.

thanks for posting our article

You're right the app store is a barrier but people still do it. That's one of the advantages of our product, that you can start and stop experiments so you can put in as many variations as you want. Currently people just suffer through the really slow time frame.

Ok you guys are right. We're adding this to our site right now.

We haven't announced our pricing yet because we're constantly adding new features our users request. Email me at nancy at apptimize dot com and we'll give you a special deal we've been giving to early adopters.

Part of apptimize team here. We want to do that! We will add more to our site; currently it looks deceptively slick bc our designer is awesome but it's really a first iteration.

Right now if you sign in, you can see an example experiment. How does it look to you?

Part of apptimize team here! We let you track whatever goals you want, so people measure stuff like "user returned within a week" and "user used app." What goals do you want to track?

What are some of the biggest ideas solved by small startups? Maybe large organizations or established industries are needed to develop some of the biggest ideas and startups are not solving big ideas because that's not their purpose.

I tend to work on stuff I want for myself after failing to convince less lazy, more capable people to do it for me. If I still want it enough to do it myself, then I do it. My impatience/random ideas and desires/tendency-to-criticize-everything must overcome my laziness to create a perfect storm to convince me I should actually fix some problem, that it's not just some random thing I'm being a perfectionist about, before I do anything.

Mark Cuban is a master of sales.

Nicely put!

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. I don't know if women are dominant in art. I meant many art classes these days have a lot of girls so people are probably less likely to claim women don't like art.

The illegal activity you're referring to are the bluffs? I'm under the impression most people have not successfully automated bluffs although I have heard of people manually doing it and using algorithms to exit or hedge. In my experience, most HFT does not intend to manipulate markets, maybe solely because this is difficult to automate and there's a lot of lower hanging fruit (not because they are altruistically abstaining from such behavior). It's difficult to automate bluffs because most HFT relies on backtesting and it's very hard to backtest high market impact strategies. In contrast, it is my impression manual traders can get very good at market manipulation.

There is a lot of shady stuff that goes on in trading due to conflicts of interest. Anyone intelligent or informed enough to know what's going on is financially incentivized to be secretive about it. I haven't gotten the impression the SEC is intentionally being incompetent- they really ARE just incompetent because anyone smart enough to realize what's happening does not join or remain in the SEC. Incompetence is the simplest explanation for the crazy rules and fines they have enforced, and the rules obvious to actual traders that they have ignored.

This Oatmeal guy is a genius when it comes to internet psychology and going viral. He has also figured out how to translate his talent directly into dollars. I'm very, very impressed.

You typically get throttled by the exchange when you send too many messages. When your messages are rejected, you monotonically lose money until you can message again. For this reason, I highly doubt anyone is sending an uncontrolled amount of messages to any exchange on purpose because surpassing messaging constraints is unprofitable, which would violate everyone's primary motive.

The orders not meant to be hit is a separate issue from the messaging. These orders are there because of

1) quoting requirements designed to mitigate volatility,

2) to give traders the feeling of depth (illusory or not) because market participants tend to interact with exchanges that look like they have thicker books,

3) to gain queue spot due to any FIFO component of the exchange's matching algorithm in case the price moves to the level where these orders could get executed,

4) to gain order allocation due to any pro rata component of the exchange's matching algorithm.

All of these reasons are controlled by the exchange and to some extent the SEC. The first 2 reasons are the result of the exchange trying to make money by attracting participants. The last 2 reasons are the result of participants rationally reacting to their incentives as dictated by the matching algorithms designed by the exchange.

High frequency traders talk about this and I heard about one being developed. Regulators and basically everyone you listed don't know what's in their best interest so it's up to the traders who decide they want to stop the arms race. It's hard to switch over bc traders go where the liquidity is so we'll have to see if they can overcome the chicken and egg problem.

Why do you think it's just for famous people or that it's a monopoly? Are you really going to track down a prisoner and ask them what they feel about getting a life sentence?

I don't know why you don't like Quora (or maybe you do and thought I was saying it's a monopoly for famous people? In which case I'd clarify that's not what I believe, nor what I believe I wrote). Do you dislike Quora because you think other people wrongly think it's a monopoly? I don't think anyone thinks that. If you browse the site I think its value will make more sense to you because it has a lot of interesting content, as evidenced by random news sites scraping content from Quora.

I don't have a stake in Quora but I was trying to understand your perspective. It's cool if information/debate is not your goal in this thread. Maybe you want to be erroneously critical because you find it funny or enjoyable- that's fine and doesn't affect me. My perspective is that Quora is fun, well done, and a valuable source of fascinating information despite not being a monopoly.

Quora organizes the information on the internet pretty well too. Even if you can get the same information via googling, you often wouldn't google the information. I've found myself learning a lot about topics I'm interested in that I don't tend to set up Google alerts for. For example, you can find a lot of interesting information about India when you read answers to "What are the most surprising facts Westerners could learn about India?" that would not typically show up if I just googled "India," which I would probably not randomly do anyway.