skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It reduces the chance that the average user will become frustrated with the apps they are downloading.

What, like non-adult apps are all examples of mindblowingly good developer talent and design?

There are unbelievably awful apps on the store that got past the review process (can you even call that a review process anymore? riddled with issues and reviewers actually not opening apps...) that are crash happy, ugly as sin, useless and more. Where's the problem with adult content that makes that more likely to happen?

> Apple intends the iPhone/iPod/iPad to be something that everyone on the planet owns.

It's called ratings and parental controls. It's called Apple can redesign the app store. It's called requiring an Apple ID with credit card and birth date to see adult-rated apps in their own hidden category.

Apple already sells softcore porn/erotica in the form of many TV shows and movies, and already sells explicit songs. People can still use browsers and other apps to gain access to adult content. If people are happy enough with parental controls/ratings for that, what's the deal with apps? Apple can fix this on their end instead of removing all these apps.

> Like every decision Apple makes, this has everything to do with business

The business behind the top 10/25/50 list in any category is tantamount to a lot of money.

> It's the same reason they review every app.

Too bad Apple suffers from indecisiveness and a lack of consistency. That's the problem here. As I've mentioned many times on HN before, the bigger issue is that Apple was okay enough with these to review and approve them and to come up with ratings and controls for apps, but then on a whim decided to pull them - and wasn't even consistent there. What's next? It's definitely their marketplace and their device, but a growing number of developers will become discontent, and Apple will suffer without them.
Think this thread has gotten way out of hand.

A lot of the comments in here seem like more of a personal attack than anything else. You might as well change the title of this post to "Jason Calacanis ruined the Internet" or something to that effect..

Can we stop the drama already? I think we're going to need a hose to control this mob.
If your profile isn't freely visible to the public, you can make a pretty educated guess based on city.
One wonders, but I hope it would still be a stretch from Anti-Social Behaviour ("in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as himself" (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/ukpga_19980037_en_2#pt1... )) and cameras in public to a state required camera taking pictures of your disrobed daughter in her bedroom.
Battle of the Status Updates: Facebook Still Has the Edge, But Barely
Depends what you consider a startup, I guess.

I support around 40,000 users and half a million a year in revenue from my web apps and ecommerce sites. You could say I've been OPP since I was 15, when I was making enough from websites I'd built to pay hosting costs, cable modem service, and buy my own computers. I'm 25 now, have never been cash flow negative in my life, no debt. I have no cofounder or employees, I own 100% of my LLC.

http://www.dangrossman.info/folio/

My goal is simply to build useful services for as many people as I can reach. I don't think I'm alone. Anyone who has the right mix of technical, design and business skills can run the whole shop for themselves if they prefer that to consulting.
I'm not fluent in Ruby whatsoever, but I think we need more content like this on HN. Incredibly informative and in depth. I probably won't ever learn Ruby in depth, but I love reading about this type of stuff, learned a lot.

Thanks for the link.
I don't know if a list exists. Pinboard is profitable and I'm the only 'founder'. I believe Tarsnap (cperciva) is a one-man show. And the bingo card guy who posts here a lot runs things alone.
I really like the idea of premium content. In many interviews, you can tell there is a lot more information the interviewee has on the subject, but won't fit into the 1-hour time constraint.

I'm picturing something like Seth Godin's alternative MBA course. VC's and entrepreneurs constantly complain that MBA programs aren't useful, partly because they are taught by non-entrepreneurs. You have an opportunity to create some incredible content from people with the most relevant experiences.

Feel free to be really creative with premium content.
Zuckerberg probably could have reached profitability solo before hooking up with Sean Parker. Facebook's success might have taken a little bit longer, but maybe this would have helped him avoid the missteps that now are a blemish on the company's history.
Thanks for what you've done thus far.

You've obviously put a lot of thought into this change. Go for it, I wish you success.
I'm just going to say directly what I've implied previously: if you think $25 is a lot of money, you may be a wonderful snowflake but you're not a wonderful customer to a business which hopes to provide strategic intelligence to other businesses. Accordingly, your opinion on the pricing is less than relevant. If anything, $100 a month is too low because it invites comparisons to thinks like the NYT instead of comparisons to things like research reports produced by the big intelligence firms. (e.g. if you want to download ten pages of executive summary on the current state of credit card usage in the Japanese consumer market is, I think that will run you about a thousand bucks.)

I used to pay $100 a month for another service which has roughly the same value proposition (not naming it to avoid shilling), and paid for it in perpetuity by five words of microcopy it caused me to add to my purchasing page. Everything after that was gravy. I don't want to imply that five words doubled my conversions -- nothing close. It is just that a move-the-needle effect anywhere in a business where all factors are multiplicative achieves $100 so fast your head will spin. For those of you whose firms could lose my business in the petty cash drawer, changes so small I'm unable to even construct tests with sufficient precision to detect them will generate more than $100 a month.
The Single Founder Myth
Online recipe ratings are broken
He's right about one thing: Multitasking on Android is something of a disaster from a UX perspective. There's no intuitive and obvious way to see what's running, and 'quitting' an application is often inconsistent and non-obvious. Most people just push 'home', and treat it just like an iPhone. Of course, performance and battery suffer.

This leads to weird contortions in user behavior. For example, my father-in-law's favorite application on his Droid is 'Advanced Task Killer'. From my perspective, the fact that the application even exists is horrifying. A phone should not require sysadmin tools.

In stark contrast, look at how WebOS handles multitasking. You know exactly what's running at any given point, because you have a visible card up. To close an application, flick the card up and off the screen. It's intuitive and obvious, even to non-technical people. It's really an amazing design.

My suspicion is that Apple will never allow multitasking on the iPhone unless they can make it Palm-like in it's simplicity. However, that would probably require a major UI refactor, which is not going to happen any time soon.

EDIT: This contains some bad info. See thread below.
I didn't realize it merited an acronym. Like I posted in another reply, Pinboard has been 'mămăligă profitable' for a while.
"... Here's a great article about the "single founder myth" that also references pg ..."

Good ref. If you see articles like this, add them to the stack ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144353
continuing from this thread, "One Person Profitable" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144038 and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=arieljraz
An alternative would be to charge for the new stuff and release the old stuff for free. This carries a different set of incentives with it. I think people would be more likely to pay for new stuff, and this would leave a greater body of links to be rediscovered on social news sites and blogs.
I don't understand how this works.
It's Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford - Some Talks Free & Open To Public
No doubt Android is more open but I do think if someone really wants to advocate open platforms there are better choices. Not just due to the Android Market but also closed source drivers & middle-ware. Slow developer updates due to delayed source/SDK releases, etc. I own an Android phone and quite like it but if Apple is a 1 out of 5 for openness & transparency then Android is probably a 3. I'm all about the 1 or the 5. Anything in the middle just gets the worst of both worlds and none of the benefits.
If you read all the way through you'll note that he sees money as a form of validation. Hence money is not his primary motivation, but rather a method for substantiating his value.
Bingo. I'm surprised nobody else has questioned whether the purported fact in the article is even true. I can't relate at all to not understanding the first few words someone says.

(Although I doubt it's an intentional troll.)
In case anybody missed it, the bolded words in middle of his sentences are sometimes, but not always, links. A questionable style choice.
They could argue that Google has a monopoly on online search, and that excluding people from their search results is an illegal restraint of trade. I don't think that such a case would be a cut-and-dry victory for Google if the spammer (as in this case) has the money to fight them.
The move to software control of things puts Toyota and other Japanese manufactures on a level playing field with everyone else -- no one can seem to produce bug free software.

Of course, it becomes a much more acute problems when lives are on the line.
The Sopranos Complete Seasons 1-6 Dvd Boxset
Those slides are incomprehensible without the accompanying video.

Not a critique -- just an FYI for anyone who goes to read the slides rather than watch the video.
After a long hard day at a job I dislike and a pile of my own hopelessly incomplete projects staring me in the face, I couldn't agree more.

I think it's about time to quit.
Do you really think that once someone is in power that they couldn't just ignore that limitation?

As I said, they have that power now.

I think you're being unfair. You presume - rightly, I believe - that the military would likely not obey an order to take over congress today. But why would they suddenly break all the rules once my proposed system was put in place? There would be very clear rules in place as to how long this super-presidency would be allowed to last. The military then would presumably be just as inclined to follow them then as now.

Congress doesn't have any power other than that ascribed it in the law, otherwise they're just a bunch of old men. The president has no power in law to take away that power now and would have no power to expand his own tenancy in my proposed system. The military, courts, etc, would presumably obey the law in either respect.

Anyway, I admit what I said was a bit extreme. How about a compromise - today's system, but with the congress relegated to "advisor" status? In other words, today's system, but with the president able to force through any bill he really wanted? Wouldn't that be interesting?

Maybe we should take the more Libertarian route and give power back to the state governments with a severely neutered federal government

I have a lot of sympathy for this idea too. I would like to see meaningful competition between the states with the federal govt just providing a kind of basic national infrastructure. I feel this benefit of the state system has been lost with creeping purview of the fed.

And your example of a 'democracy' isn't really a democracy, it's a republic

Actually, that's a US-only use of the word. The rest of the world would call the USA a representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy.
I give points for the excellent commentary on the search buttons and attention to detail in the UI. But I take them all back with the Apple apologetics concerning the things that the Nexus One does better than the iPhone.

It should have just read, "In conclusion, the iPhone is the best thing in the universe, and anything on the Nexus One that seems to be better actually isn't and anyone who thinks so is clearly mistaken."
But not because of that.
Sure if Mahalo was really screwing with Google, Sequoia backing wouldn't help, but to say Google + Sequoia aren't incredibly buddy-buddy would be difficult to say.
Guy makes $100K a year off a virtual island he bought for $26K
Futures and promises in Clojure (asynchronicity and concurrency, part 2)
because when they launched they were being touted as a search engine, not a content farm
Wow. Can't believe they own Cracked. Learning this made me die a little inside.
The multitasking bit stood as to me as well. From that point on I knew that I couldn't really take this criticism seriously. "Multitasking isn't important, but the iPhone could do it if mother Apple really wanted it to so Nyah."

After that I noticed that pretty much everything the Nexus One does better than the iPhone was minimized or excused away.
I can't believe this only gets 3 points in HN. Perhaps try adding some reference to Jason Calcanis in the title.
In my extensive searches, there is nothing like it anywhere, running on anything. Without exaggeration, org-mode changed the way I organize my life, both at work and at home. It has a blindingly fast development pace, is already very mature, and is much more than just todo, calendar, and outlining.
Some of those "single" founders have other support, like family and spouses - a local guy that's profitable leans heavily on his wife, who left her job for the company, so she should be counted as a "cofounder" :)
My opinion is that there's no such thing as an international healthy competition, not at this scale (with the Internet).

Competition is where the players have equal opportunities to win, being it (0.5 + 0.5) vs 1 (small players versus big players). Here it's not the case since different actions can take place (WW3, nuclear war, ...).
Google doesn't index their search results.
He is indeed a member:
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc
I haven't been keeping up on this much, but they were Mac laptops, right? Boot it holding apple+T (I think), and it acts just like a normal firewire hard drive. No physical damage required.
This is Hacker news. And, as much as I hate to say it, if you put up a pay wall, it's just going to be a matter of time before someone writes a script to download each video and put up a torrent of it as you release it onto your site.

We're entrepreneurs, and at the point where some of that information would be really useful to us, we're usually broke and in need of advice/help. Charging broke entrepreneurs to access your archive of content seems counter intuitive.

What I would be willing to pay for, however, is having access to a library of edited 4-5 minute videos. I'd really be willing to pay for those videos if I could search through or navigate those videos by specific questions and answers. That's the service that I want, and that would be worth around $10-14 a month to me.

And, as a reference point, I carried a Safari Library subscription for several years at $45 a month, which allowed me instant access to all of O'Reilly books library as well as a library of videos. I also pay to rent movies on Amazon at $2.99 a pop. I pay Rhapsody a $14 month subscription to have access to 1.5 million tracks of music on demand. I also pay Pandora $30 a year to have pretty good music recommendations streamed to me.
Why the scare quotes? Sounds pretty clear-cut.
How L1-minimization can recover highly degraded images
They went through a bunch of different iterations and stuff before they established as the site they are now. And look at the funding of Mahalo and Google. Same early people.
Social/Locational Networks in Contagious Criminality
Social Network for me, Social Network for you | Innovative Visionary
How Twitter and Facebook make us more productive
Google allows you to have three ads though. If you had a page with three ads and the best written 500 word article on it's topic, your definition of MFA sites would have it banned even though it is obviously a ton better than most sites around.
While I tried to be fair, it should come as no surprise that I believe in Apple's approach to both hardware and software

Wait, wait, wait. Isn't this sort of like a creationist reviewing evolution as a theory? What's the point of "reviewing" something when you already "believe in" the opposition?

[added quote below]

Not chintzy or cheap like the Motorola Droid or most cell phones. It feels solid and very much like the iPhone.

Ok, well, if "like the iPhone" == good to you, then maybe you should just ignore other devices?
Well, I was kind of drawn into defending monarchies in general ..

I'm not making sweeping generalisations for either! I get the impression it's others doing that. I merely say that there are examples of stability and (relative to the times) prosperity under either form.

Stability is not completely disjoint from government but I would say it is completely disjoint from the form of government. But as you point out, yes, I do believe it has more to do with the prosperity of the population than the way their leaders are elected.

Stability and prosperity are a function of quality of government, not form of government. I am trying to point out that the form of government, ie elected or not, does not necessarily decide the quality. I gave examples of rulers who, in my opinion, did not discharge their roles badly, considering the times.

Summary: having a King is a multiplier, rather than a valuer. You might multiply corruption and despotism. Or you might multiply progress and decisiveness.
They've played whack a mole plenty of times. They do it daily. This isn't some random guess or 'I think' like you're saying. This is fact.
Even if Flash video dies, SVG/canvas won't replace Flash.
Ridiculous. I don't know how the law works but I do know that if Google was to somehow lose a case like that, their entire search engine would be worthless incredibly quickly with grey hat/black hat people going crazy.
Neville Brody did similar work for the Austrian broadcaster ORF in the 90s - it's profiled in The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 2 - but for their actual onscreen identity. Very similar in scope though.

The book is great but I couldn't find much good about it online except this before/after video that shows off how much Neville Brody dragged the channel into the modern era: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWwLcCsVrmQ - the "After" section starts at about 1:30. You see TV go from the cheesy 80s to the slick 90s instantly!
I do not use the sites listed in the article, but I have found that Epicurious (http://www.epicurious.com/) has plenty of bad recipes that are rated as such. I have had good success following the ratings and checking the comments on the recipes before trying them.

Of course, with any crowd sourced system it is good to take the time to really read through who you are getting your trusted advice from. I still remember reading a review of a Korean restaurant on yelp that had two or three one star reviews because "they did not have sushi".
I'd suggest that a bell curve in this case isn't a particularly good goal. Most people who cook already know what collection of flavours they're likely to enjoy and will make more dishes that combine these flavours in interesting ways.

A good example is dishes containing coriander, a large number of people hate it with a passion while others love it. People who hate it won't make the dish and won't review it. Those who love coriander will make it and most likely enjoy it.

Applying statistical analysis with the goal of getting a bell curve isn't the correct direction to reason in.
By the way this is from the Atlantic which has a long standing practice of taking money from parties they write about in order to sponsor "discussions" about subjects that they write about.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/not_just_w...
The problem is that no one bothered to check whether the software worked when they removed the hardware. It's not a good thing that there was a bug in the first place, but proper procedures could easily have caught it before people were killed. That's why you have multiple systems to prevent catastrophic failures.

What makes the Therac-25 notable is the novelty of a software problem killing people. If it had been a second hardware safety mechanism that had been removed, it wouldn't be as notorious - but the engineering failure would be equivalent.
Mini Powerplant: two small blocks that can power an average American home
because they're so very shy about that.
(See boucher's comment for the difference in LGPL and GPL.)

The GPL also doesn't require them to "[fix] bugs or make improvements give them back to [you]".

It merely requires that if they do give the binaries to someone, including you, they have to also make available the modified source to those recipients.

I'm perfectly free to take your GPL code, modify it and run it in-house, including using it in a SaaS or web offering offering, and not give anyone access to the source modifications.
I have a hard time believing that VP8 would have any effect on HTML5 video:

- So far as I know, Apple and Nokia refused to support Theora because they were already heavily invested in H.264, and they didn't want to open themselves to more patent risk than they already had. These reasons apply equally well to VP8.
- Mozilla picked Theora because it was the most production-ready patent-free codec. Even if VP8 had zero patent risk, libtheora is already written and tested and portable.

Am I missing something?
>We are the process of NOINDEXING the pages that are below 300 words just to make Aaron happy... we actually had these noindexed before our last version and that got lost in the shuffle of the new launch (really, it did... when you do new code you might leave something out of the old code).
>
>i'm also getting a list of every page under 300 words and having the page managers build them out in 30 days or deleting them.

It's not just Aaron Wall that sees something fishy.

But for those of us who are just tired of the whole drama, just change how it's done, or don't do it at all. Adding nofollow and not submitting auto-generated content in Mahalo's sitemap does not seem like a great amount of development work if you really want to change it.
Am I missing something?

There's been huge buzz among Mozilla, FSF, and so forth about the Google purchase of On2 and VP8. They're all basically pleading for VP8 to come out in order to replace Theora. It was really sudden, just over the past few days.

Even if VP8 had zero patent risk, libtheora is already written and tested and portable.

There are things that matter more than just being tested and portable, like whether it's actually good.
I've never brought it up with family, but I have a "should I die" list of instructions for quickly winding down my business while minimizing effects on customers in a safe in my bedroom. The key to the safe is on my key chain so it'd get opened sooner or later.