skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is interesting that the discussion is focused two partner-competitor relationships and not (as far as what has leaked) mostly-competitor relationships such as Microsoft, Palm/Elevation, Nokia or Sony. I wonder if the discussion was broader and the leaker has some reason to poison the cooperation that exists between these companies?

It is ironic that Jobs voices frustration with Adobe for not putting more effort in optimizing Flash for MacOS, in that Adobe's conservation of resources comes from their lack of a strong competitor (and MacOS's weak share of their user base). It is ironic because without Google's potential competition in handheld devices Apple would undoubtably be just as lazy/conservative as Adobe.

It is shocking that Google is more of a handset discussion topic instead of Palm, Nokia and Microsoft. I think this speaks to how orthogonal Google's business model is compared to Apple's. Apple's mindset is one of fee for service, like HBO. Google's mindset is one of free for ads, like broadcast TV. This not only gives Google a consumer-cost advantage in handsets but also in areas such as online services.
Rural America’s most important TV network
It's a Macbook turned into a Tablet PC. It would be rather funky if it didn't run OSX.
Full article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31corner.html?pag...
And the majority of your userbase wouldn't understand that it's satire because they would love to be set free from the contradictory, confusing, often-harmful experience on other platforms.
Capacity for harm != actual harm done.

To play Devil's advocate: The United States controls over five thousand thermonuclear missiles. Sudan controls none. So what country has been more evil in the last decade?

It's important to acknowledge, too, that Google likely has more blackmail-able information on us than the FBI.
I feel we've just been introduced to the realities of the new world of warfare.

Getting inside information on Google, Adobe, etc, would be of immense value for cyberwar. I don't think the information is as nearly useful for economic purposes as it is for making new software weapons. Every bit of source code or critical system you access gets you more information your teams can analyze for "0-day exploits" and more backdoors/trojans you can place to get more access to more networks whenever you need.

Imagine you've amassed a lot of brilliant computer scientists and security experts. Getting access to source code and installing trojans would be of immense value to you because you'd be sitting on a huge stockpile of weapons just waiting for you to analyze them in parallel long after you've infiltrated (and even if you were detected/shut-off). If we're seeing exploits streaming out of small security firms and off-shore spammers--- imagine the wealth of exploits a well-funded military division would be able to come up with. Now imagine you wanted to stay competitive with other such militaries... To them the means to get new weapons is more important (in a meta-sense) than pretty much anything else.

From my arm chair, I'd say for weapons of mass cyber influence the most prized possessions would be:

(1) control over the pipes (presumably the U.S. has this for a lot of key stuff, but these backdoors, too, might be exploitable)

(2) unknown exploits in common software

(3) control of highly/specially trafficked systems/services

(4) unknown exploits in specialized software

I'm not trying to make anyone paranoid, but it does seem to me that this sort of infiltration into corporations and government software/systems would be just as valuable to any country anywhere that had a powerful high-tech army. A weapon is a weapon and would be just as valuable to anyone.

There are only a few places that could coordinate attacks like these. We'd have to assume military-- the only other real option being organized crime (with their growth in this economy).

As such, I put it at, maybe, 80% chance that the attacks from China were from Chinese military sources, but (given motive, skill, and funding) there's at least 10-15% chance these are actually coordinated by the U.S. military or intelligence agencies themselves and pinned solidly on China. The remaining 5-10% or so falls on other militaries or maybe brilliant criminals.

If I was thinking like a cybergeneral, I would want someone else to be scrutinized other than myself. I might even specifically seek out companies important to me that also did business with my opponents so that it was easier to pass the blame. I feel the U.S. intelligence/military probably has the cleverness to make that all happen if they wanted. I very much doubt they did so, but I think we're silly to ignore the possibility.

What we really need to stop ignoring is that our software and systems are actually turning into weapons. I think the days of idle worry over spambot exploits is behind us--- now we have to imagine that your favorite websites, your business servers, and your home PCs are pawns in a very big game of chess.
True, true.

edit: I really just have a nitpick with the tossing around of the term "evil". It's almost as if Godwin's Law should adapt to cover not only Nazi comparisons, but also absolutes of morality.
I'm a CS/Economics student in Romania. I'll be graduating this summer and looking for an internship (remote would be great, but relocating is also an option). I have experience with python and various web frameworks (mainly Django and TurboGears, but I've enjoyed fooling around with Rails, Sinatra and web.py). I'm familiar with HTML/CSS and the HTTP. I'm completely self-taught in these technologies, but have also picked up some C and C++ from school.

I'm an opensource community guy, being a contributing member of various local FLOSS communities. I'm also a member of the Fedora Project, having contributed as a packager, web developer and participated in GSOC2009.
When I read this title, the first thing I thought was, "Oh no, another poser telling the rest of us what to do based on what they think".

Boy was I wrong about that. This is an excellent post that could have only been written by someone who has suffered in the trenches and knows what he's talking about.

Many of his points:

2. Get in bed with the business people
3. Ease their pain
5. No one gives a rip what the artist thinks
6. You get to control those lovely details
7. Write it down, write it down, write it down
8. Get in bed with the QA team
9. You have to have a middle man
10. Proximity breeds understanding
11. Learn to articulate well

emphasize that the people part of the process is just as important as the technical part. This is easy to overlook and we need to be reminded every once in a while. The main reason we do what we do is not because it's cool (it is), we do it for and with other people.

The only point I challenge is "4. Force business to iterate in design, not in development." This is perplexing because it runs counter to most of his other points. The reason people tend to iterate in development instead of design is because it's much easier. They're not sure what they want, but once they see something, they know what they like and don't like about it. I'd alter #4 to something like, "Learn to prototype well, so everyone is equally comfortable iterating toward the most desirable outcome."
Well, most families didn't have computers for a long time, but they did have televisions. Buying a console was much cheaper (and easier to understand). I think that sort of became the SOP as opposed to computers during the rise of gaming.

Oh and let's not forget Shigeru Miyamoto's awesomeness helping out :)
there's http://themoviedb.org/ for movies.
AFAIR they reversed rejections when influential enough blogosphere gave them bad PR. Cases that didn't make it into known bloggers' posts didn't matter (and we probably didn't hear about most of them). Just look at apprejections.com to see how silly the situation still is.

Comparing iPhone apps to Android and PalmOS? Sure - just like Flash can be compared to Java embedded/webstart and avi embedding through `<object ...>`. There's almost the same amount of real-world competition in those areas... If you want some app, it's probably already in Flash/AppStore - even if some people push it via other means (avi players/other app markets).

I'm not arguing they have monopoly on (smart)phones - just on real-world smartphone apps. And that allows them to be lazy - it's just strange that they call Adobe lazy for doing exactly the same. Apple: "just port it the way we want, or go away", Adobe: "just let us use what we have, or go away", both: "no" :(
Maybe they don't want you to go into a shop and look at the Amazon reviews, then buy the book in the shop.
You're on Windows, aren't you?
Steve Jobs giving an in-house speech at Apple, circa 1997
No need to prove that Apple is evil or not, that's Google claim not Apple one. Apple claim to be original and sophisticated not that they are the next mother Theresa, they fully embrace the fact that they are a business and don't pretend otherwise.
Oracle buying Sun will change the IT industry
If you want to know what's in the world's libraries, including probably your own, and your mom's:

http://www.worldcat.org/

At the top is a search for:

[Everything] [Books] [CDs] [DVDs] [Articles]

Under that is a link to "Put WorldCat on your mobile phone."

There's a collection of tools, including an API.

You can use a bookmarklet to go from "product on page you're on now" to "details of product in the library."

http://www.oclc.org/news/announcements/announcement333.htm
Why You Shouldn’t Freelance
Why tech companies never pay out their earnings as dividends
Since it's not loading... (Wordpress blog, I suspect without caching)

It's a reaction to this: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/27/did-calacanis-spill-t...

Last two paragraphs:

If you want to be influential, lead by doing, not by talking, and certainly not by duping. If what you create is really good, other people will talk about it for you.

It’s perfectly ok to talk about your own product and do some promotion when appropriate, but what it’s never ok to do is dupe your readers. Don’t make the same mistake yourself. If you want respect, be respectful first.
Yes! It's extraordinary to me how much people forget this. Flash would be nice on the iPhone OS devices for movies, but a huge percentage of the games would be unplayable. No wonder Apple isn't interested.
But Amazon pretty much, right now, has a monopoly on online bookselling. They’re huge. As a result, this becomes nearly a form of de facto price fixing.

This is not a reason to prefer Macmillan over Amazon. Amazon might arguably have something that is almost a monopoly on online bookselling, allowing them to de facto dictate the price of books purchased online (though not offline, except to the extent that price wars dictate that competitors charge less).

Macmillan has an actual monopoly, guaranteed by Congress, on producing Macmillan books. Macmillan is telling Amazon to engage in actual price fixing. Macmillan has told Amazon that if Amazon does not set their prices to exactly what Macmillan says they should be, when Macmillan says this should be, Macmillan will use its actual monopoly to forbid Amazon from distributing their books.

Macmillan is doing this to avoid channel conflict -- i.e. establish actual price fixing backed up by the power of law to forbid there to be price-based competition among the various outlets who sell their books.

It turns reality on its head to portray Macmillan as the pro-consumer champion of a vibrant, competitive market here.
This is a really good point actually. Hulu actually uses the encrypted variant of RTMP to deliver content, and decodes the stream in their flash player. If they were to deliver just raw h.264 through html5, they wouldn't be able to do this anymore.

Vevo (the music video people on youtube) are actually doing the same thing. You can't watch the videos without using the special flash player.
Four Open Letters To The Book Industry
Mark Suster: The Yo-Yo Life of a Tech Entrepreneur – A Cautionary Tale
Nope, that's an older version of it: http://github.com/timdorr/asoworx
Well, if you use APC then that's all irrelevant. It's the equivalent of creating .pyc files. I never got the impression it was slower in actual execution, though.
Actually it looks like you got it. Apple isn't trying to be the publisher too, whereas Amazon is. The publisher is objecting to what Amazon is trying to do.
Like Steve jobs, I'd love to ditch Flash too, because frankly I can't really ever bring myself to like using products from the company that brings us delights such as Adobe Reader, Adobe's updaters, etc.

However. Unlike Steve, I don't have an army of developers to build and test Javascript and CSS to make sure it works across all browsers (as you know... it won't). I use Flash/Flex because it means I spend more time creating value and less time chasing browser incompatibility bugs.

I think Flash will be here for quite some time yet.
Re comments that this has been going on a long time, and that the West does it too.

It probably has been happening a long time. Many may have assumed it. If Western governments have been papering it over, it's good that it comes out so that citizens and businesses can know how widespread the problem is, and how likely or unlikely anyone will be affected directly. I suspect that if we knew exactly what was happening, most would be surprised at the extent.

The West probably does do it too. I strongly suspect that there are a set of "niceties" that Western governments observe (or sometimes not, but there is that restraining tendency). I doubt that any similar niceties exist within the Chinese government at all; the very concept is probably amusing to them.

When China starts selling cars in the US, how much espionage do you think will be brought to bear on their US operations and employees? I'm guessing little more than an entry in a catalog at the CIA.

How much espionage is potentially brought to bear on Western companies operating within China? If I brought my business to China I would assume it was targeted. If I brought my business to Canada I wouldn't give it a thought.

IANASpook (but then, I would say that)
That's actually bookmarked as the first item in my Firefox toolbar. Use it regularly, though also using the Better Privacy FF add-on. .
RTMPE is a joke:

http://lkcl.net/rtmp/RTMPE.txt

"Overall, then, the Adobe RTMPE algorithm tries to provide end-to-end secrecy in exactly the same way that SSL provides end-to-end secrecy, but the algorithm is subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, provides no security, relies on publicly obtainable information and the algorithm itself to obfuscate the content, and uses no authentication of any kind"

The Adobe response to this shoddy engineering being revealed? DMCA takedown requests to sourceforge:

http://ossguy.com/?p=398
This is why Google is king
In case you don't get it right away, they are sorted by top rated/most ranked through that link. See something in common?
"I'm not trying to make anyone paranoid[...]"

You're doing a good job at it, however! Your scenario reminds me of Issac Asimov's Foundation series, particularly where the Foundation had the ability to disable its enemies' technological, nuclear in this case, infrastructure, as their enemies little understood it themselves.

Coming back to reality, it's not the case that Adobe, et al, poorly understand their own software, simply that only they could see its potential problems, being as it's closed-source. I'm somewhat biased, but in your scenario it would be much better to give the souce code a larger audience, via open sourcing it, to negate, albeit not entirely, the prevalence of such government-researched 0-day exploits.
Flash has issues with Windows 7. Big enough to be recognized in the support forums and given a dirty fix that only works half the time.
And I don't know how anyone can sit in a desk chair all day long.

Here's how it works: wireless mouse on a table next to me. Keyboard on my lap (with the wire plugged into a front-side USB port). Feet up on the matching Poang footstool. Monitors about six feet away from me on a regular desk. Appropriate text sizes in Emacs and terminal, and appropriate zoom levels in Chromium. (Chromium remembers per-site zoom levels automatically.)
I guess I just object to paying Wilson $5k to run search-and-replace for me. And I certainly wouldn't trust LegalZoom to actually have documents written by people who understand startups.

And the other sources don't seem to provide offer letters, NDA/invention rights docs, board motions, option grants and all the other boiler plate stuff that's needed.

That all said, I suppose making it too turn-key risks entrepreneurs not really understanding the legal issues involved and getting nasty surprises later on.
"practically brag" is a bit of a colloquialism. It doesn't mean that they were proud of it, just emphatically suggesting that something is true.
They can't access Amazon from any mobile devices directly, but they could make the app query their servers and call the Amazon API from there (and even caching the results). Am I wrong?
That's the best summation of this whole thing I've seen so far today. Thanks.
At the same time, it also turns reality on its head to portray Amazon as being pro-consumer in this case (where's the good old Amazon that helped force Apple out of music DRM by launching Amazon MP3?). In this struggle, it seems that both sides are trying to price-fix, but to different prices, and without much concern for either the consumers or the authors that are so directly affected by their falling-out.

Other good perspectives:

* http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/the_amazon_kerfuf...

* http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/30/a-quick-note-on-ebook-...

* http://malkingrey.livejournal.com/577241.html
I'm pretty sure Wilson's $5K includes all those other docs you list. At least that was my understanding when I spoke to Yokum a while ago.

I did request that Wilson make a full list of what you get as part of an incorporation "package" and post the list and plain vanilla price publicly on their site. The non-transparency of legal fees is only matched by the non-transparency of health care prices.
I haven't really been following this situation, and I'm far from an economics expert, so I have a few questions for anyone who understands this stuff better than I do:

First off, I'm not quite sure about what the issue is. I seem to remember that Amazon said they wanted a hard ceiling, no books selling for >$10. The article claims that what the publisher wants is the ability o change book prices based on demand. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that all Amazon was saying was "You know the $10-15 range you wanted to price eBooks at? You can't do that."

Second is more of an economics question. The article mentions Price Fixing in relation to gas prices, and how fixing the prices caused gas prices to go up due to hoarding. How does that work in a Monopoly, where the publisher not only controls the only source of the books, but can also make more of a single work at a negligible cost? (Yes, I understand that there is an outlay at the beginning, but after that the cost of producing additional copies of the eBook is nearly non-existent. You don't have to keep a stock of the eBooks that you can potentially lose money on, you don't have to pay in advance to have each copy produced. This changes things, but I don't know how.)
I know that people always have a mental model of how something works. But it's rare that somebody actually stops to consider whether their mental model is accurate or logically consistent, and unless they do, it is neither. If your mental model of a piece of software is self-contradicting, then it obviously can't reliably tell you how to use the software.

There's a lot you can do in designing a user interface to try to make sure that the user develops an accurate mental model, but it gets harder as the software gets more complex and more powerful. A car's controls are a pretty good abstraction of it's drivetrain, but most of the complexity of a car exists for the sake of efficiency and increased power, and it's a physical, observable system anyways.

I think that once a piece of software becomes Turing-complete, it is impossible for user interface affordances to lead a lazy user toward an accurate mental model. After all, to program, you have to be developing a mental model of what you're creating, within the context of the programming environment. That's two mental models that both have to be accurate, and one of those can't be anticipated at all by the user interface designer.

Programming is inherently harder than almost any other thing we do with computers. If a piece of software is Turing complete (and thus subject to tinkering), then the mindlessly-easy-to-use subset of it's capabilities can't be Turing complete.
fairly content free and vapid post. Don't bother reading.
This is already covered in the article. You are wrong.
I'm sorry, but who gets to rate the apps?
I always imagined that it might break an agreement between publishers and Amazon, if people could price compare easily in bookstores.
Obviously, B&N and Borders would likely be toast if you had an 'Amazon in Your Pocket' app that really worked.
If publishers pulled their books, then Amazon might have some problems!

As it is, Borders may already be toast, in which case, maybe Amazon will be in a better position.
It would be interesting to see what the Flash stats for news.ycombinator.com are.
Yep, you are wrong. Delicious Monster didn't query directly from the iPhone, but it still violated the TOS because it used the data gathered by the desktop version on the iPhone. So the TOS states "No using data from Amazon on a mobile device".
You'll note that he provided no support for that claim; he just said it in an authoritative tone.
Bing cache (Google didn't have cache):

http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=why+my+books+are+no+longer+...
its probably on a tangent, but the the theory is used in the OpenGL implementation of OS X [ http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/00649... ].
How can one do a whole article on RFD-TV and not mention Big Joe Polka Show even once?
What for? If your idea is to have an app that they can't "pin" on anyone in particular, you're missing the fact that you need an API key for access, and that can certainly be disabled.
I think it's fairly accurate. Google's APIs is the standard library of the web, imo.
Conversation snippet between publisher and author: "Hey, we haven't gotten the updates from you yet. Everything OK? Need some help? We really need to get this published, while you're still fresh in readers' minds from your last book."

Conversation snippet between Amazon and author: "Oh, you wrote a book? We'll let you know if anyone buys it."

There are a set of relationships and business practices in old publishing, and there are another set in new publishing. No one piece of either is enough to validate or invalidate the entirety of either set.

I would like publishers and editors to continue. I think we would not have had a lot of excellent books published by excellent authors who needed coddling; not all excellent authors are excellent self-starters and business people.

I like cheap books, but that doesn't mean I want to see a publishing world where Amazon can and does lay siege to publishers or anyone else.

Again, I like cheap books. But if Amazon wins the larger aspects of this conflict, the book business is going to be as free and open as the Apple device and media ecosystem.

[Edit: added "Apple" in last sentence. I wish I had an editor.]
Why Startups Need Capital Discipline
The difference is that Amazon is trying to price-fix a ceiling, whereas Macmillan is trying to price-fix a floor.
Apple never blocked calls to a Tribal community college or a nunnery, but Google did.