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H-P to Buy Palm for $1.2 Billion
HP's not the sort of company that can enter a new market like this and turn it on its ear

This isn't a new market for HP. They've been a leader in the PocketPC space for years, with their Axim line, and Compaq's Ipaq link (no, Apple didn't invent the "i" thing).

I wonder now what's to become of the Ipaqs. I assume that the Windows Mobile based devices will simply be phased out.
I am sure for many this is a welcomed event. Imagine if you had options, stock? This would be a nice payday in addition to having a job with a company with deep pockets (and some agenda).
Which adult/child sexual contact is ok, then?

The problem with sexual contact between an adult and a child is that one can never be sure that the child wasn't coerced in some way. However, that does not make the inverse true, that every instance of sexual contact between an adult and a child is subject to (implicit) abuse of power.

It seems to me that Moeller was making a subtle point that I have also made in discussions about the subject: that it is perfectly possible to imagine a situation where sexual contact between an child and an adult takes place with mutual consent and without coercion. One can imagine a 12 year old seducing a 30 year old neighbor, without either of them being harmed by the experience. In many discussions, this can be a relevant point, that defuse blanket statements. This does not change a thing about the fact that you want the law to forbid such things.

And then: "A 16-year-old girl from Oregon, a beautiful, intelligent young
woman" ...
When one uses such language to talk about kids.. sheesh.

These 'kids' are old enough to bear children and have done so during the majority of human history. They have all secondary sexual characteristics that are intended to arouse the males of the species and they are fertile. If you don't find some of them attractive, something is unusual with your hormones.
"If something can't go on forever, it won't" (some famous economist I'm too lazy to look up).

Of course that says nothing about the timing....

The fiscal policies of Greece are unsustainable. Ditto for some of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain). A bailout without an austerity program will only delay the end ... that the latter looks somewhere between unsustainable to a non-starter.

A bailout would be very bad for the Eurozone, since it will increase the moral hazard for the rest of the PIIGS (well, maybe not Ireland). A failure to bailout Greece (now or later) will likely put the rest of the PIIGS in dire straits as their sovereign debt is put into question.

Greece can't make its creditors take an implicit haircut by devaluation as long as it uses the Euro. In the long run it's hard to see it both keep the Euro and not give the creditors an explicit haircut, i.e. they won't get all their money back ... which will make the continued borrowing they need harder to impossible.

I don't see any prospect for a soft landing.

However as d2viant implies, there's a good change that any of the above problems can be managed. The world is a rather open place ... things you have to worry about more than an inflation (which will only happen, at least any time soon, if Greece goes of the Euro, and then only for Greece) are problems like currency export controls.

E.g. if you're in Greece, you might find it impossible to pay e.g. Amazon for AWS services, they might impose controls on your ability to remove money from the country. On the other hand, if you keep enough of a presence outside of Greece including payments going into your company and then out to AWS you might be able to pull it off.

It's all very iffy, we just don't know how the various governments in question will handle these problems. Be flexible, try to keep reserves for problem, avoid single points of failure WRT to individual countries. Also don't obsess on inflation, there's enough deleveraging going on or the potential of that continued deflation is very possible.
What makes you think that hundreds of people are working in the SDK? I suspect the core frameworks are really only being worked on by small groups.

If one targeted a specific kind of application, let's say 2D gaming, then the amount of functionality is well within the size of what one or two talented hackers can do. After all, they wouldn't have to write an SDK. All they have to do is to write an Objective-C parser and target another 2D game SDK on another platform.
Wow, that just came out of no where. Did anyone really think of HP as a serious contender? great move!

Elevation Partners must be trilled!
HP To Buy Palm for $1.2 Billion
> the anonymous smear letter ... quoted three sentences out of context: “What is my position on pedophilia, then? It’s really simple. If the child doesn’t want it [sexual contact], is neutral or ambigious [sic], it’s inappropriate.”

If the only time that pedophilia is wrong is when the child does not want it, or is neutral about it, this makes it pretty clear that the writer thinks that sexual contact with children is acceptable if the child "wants" it (or claims to want it).

It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch at all to conclude that the writer does defend some pedophilia.
Actually, you can tell it's awesome when your business is sustained by people buying a $34 wrapper over a few perl scripts.
Although it is a bit goddy for my tastes, I've always liked the Ritual Calling of the Engineer and the Iron Ring that goes with it, which is unusual because I'm certainly not one for ceremony. But I appreciate the serious tone and quiet underlining of the importance of the discipline.

I'm not an engineer, but one of my top software dev industry pet peeves: "Software Engineers" who aren't actually engineers. It drives me nuts.
Mostly because it usually works. A huge proportion of all people would get quite scared from that letter and comply, simply because it looks so threatening.
Pretty good oath for being a good human being all around ... not just for engineers.
In my opinion, the way dropbox did it was not good. My bank gives both you and referrer some gadget when you are referred. Makes sense because I know what a gadget is.

Dropbox gives you 250 extra mb. Yeah, but I (the person being referred) never heard of dropbox and would not have known if there was less or more MB.

I believe dropbox worked because the person who was referring made more mb. I believe that though intended as a double-sided incentive, it was actually a single sided incentive that worked.
Oh, absolutely, but switching languages every weekend isn't going to get you deep perspective either. It's probably best to focus on just a couple languages, but languages that are sufficiently different from each other that they expose you a wide variety of techniques.
> One can imagine a 12 year old seducing a 30 year old neighbor, without harming either of them.

"One" can imagine that?

I, for one, CAN NOT imagine that sexual contact between a 12 year old and a 30 year old can ever be anything other than a grave problem.
You are simultaneously complaining that they don't disclose the patent numbers AND that the patents are worthless or invalid. How can you know the latter without knowing the former?

Your theory that they don't tell the patent numbers because then it would be easy to work around them makes no sense. If the patents were that easy to work around them, why would Amazon, Samsung, and LG have all licensed them? They all have the resources to put the workarounds in Linux and contribute them back upstream, thus solving the problem once and for all for everyone.
Let's say on average, 2D games only use 20% of the APIs.

Problem: Every 2D game uses a different 20%.
It's funny, even though Apple has resisted messing up the hardware, there is still that "Sent from my iPhone" message which always struck me as having no taste at all. It is different because you can remove it, but still.
Hopefully this won't mess with the webOS mojo. Palms seems to be doing some pretty interesting stuff these days.
Good for him. In other news, Steve Jobs is often full of shit.

There are some customers which we chose not to serve.
We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a
piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.
- 2008

We didn't think we'd do well in the cellphone business...
We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA. - 2003

There are no plans to make a tablet...It turns out people
want keyboards. - 2003

I'm not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny
little screen. - 2003
Wonderful hand-drawn maps
It seems about once every 20 years or so there's a new wave of this small is beautiful, re-localization, grow your own food or die idea. Maybe every generation has to go through that phase before realizing that we're never going to go back to anything resembling our countryside village past. And I'm glad we won't.

It's all based on the idea that we're running out of traditional sources of energy so quickly that we won't be able to innovate ourselves out of it. I don't believe that for a second. It's wishful thinking by people who will latch on to any difficulty to make that same argument over and over again.

There are huge amounts of natural gas left and we have nuclear. I don't see why that wouldn't be sufficient for a smooth transition to more wind and solar to save us from the horrible prospect of the stifling, oppressive horror that was the village.
By awhile, I hope you mean less than a month, since they've been in a downward spiral and a month ago were above the $5.70 asking price. 2 months ago they were at $8 and 6 months ago they were at $16 per share.
It was a good thing you didn't buy it (unless you purchased December 2008).
I didn't mean to imply this was a new market for HP. I meant that they haven't historically torn up a new market the way say Sony has in the past.

Bringing webOS to a Slate device actually makes a lot of sense; I hadn't considered that and honestly that might be the real reason they pulled the trigger.
You can get it replaced.
Facebook Open Graph Explorer - OGRe
Found this on the W3C mailing lists. I think if this were connected to other Linked Data sources some very interesting data sets/visualizations could be extracted.
Yeah some good points in there. But it reads like Tolkien.
"Palm’s unparalleled webOS platform"

Question: is Palm's web os platform really unparalleled? Or is it quickly falling behind the race that is now dominated by iPhone and android?
Anti-Piracy Group: 'Child Porn Is Great' It Gets Politicians To Block Sites
In before "I yawned during the article!"

That aside, I now have an excellent rejoinder to anyone who might accuse me of rudeness due to me yawning while they are talking. "On the contrary," Zachary countered. "What you said is so interesting that I am recruiting extra resources to process it, and the yawning introduces a cooling effect, contributing to optimal efficiency."
I wonder how many of us complainers about how we're all disconnected actually try to a) go out an make friends, b) do something for others in the neighborhood, c) basically get off our asses (and the internets) and go interact and be a part of the community.
Hi guys. We did a rough estimate just for fun the other day (we decided to actually look at analitycs for 5 minutes) and right now we get about $1 for each website visitor, or in other words 1 in 80 buys the tool. We're happy with that rate, and if we had more customers right now, it would probably kill us. As we scale support and the product matures, we'll be looking at optimizing for sure!

I guess what I was saying is that IMHO until you have a good product, doing usability testing is more valuable than thinking about conversions. I see a lot of people overly obsessing over conversions, that's all. :)

Thanks again for the interview Andrew, looking forward to hearing myself tomorrow (boy that will be embarrassing). :)
True!

I hate that bleepin' message. (I didn't know you could delete it.)
No, that would have merely been an ill-informed opinion and a non-sequitor. One can feel however one wants about a subject and for any reason and still not commit a logical fallacy because feelings are a-logical. For an actual fallacy, we need actual premises: "Ruby is good," "Rails is bad," etc.

An ad-hominem is even more specific. The premise must be disputed because of the arguer. So, if DHH makes statements about Ruby or Rails, and one argues that those statements are false because of DHH's hairdo, then that would be an ad-hominem.
It still curb stomps iPhone OS and Android in a number of ways. The card based interface and notifications are unparalleled (IMO).
It's a tricky problem as a participant and it depends on the individual who's dragging the topic on.

I find this problem to be more the fault of the facilitator than the participant. There's always an opportunity to say "I understand your concerns, lets take this offline so we can continue with our discussion."

As a participant, depending on who is hosting, you may step all over sensitive toes if you try to correct the individual in question.

When I host I have a few rules. I always start on time and avoid repeating myself for people who arrive late. I define the purpose of the meeting up-front. I never schedule more than 30 minutes. I stop people who bloviate or go off topic by suggesting a possible follow-up (often unnecessary).

And the most useful opening line is "Though I booked 30 minutes, I want to value everyone's time, so I think we can [insert purpose for meeting here] and have plenty of time to spare." Any variation of that seems to get people to pay attention and contribute because there's an expectation that we'll get somewhere, and be done quickly.

As a participant: If I know the meeting organizer well enough, it's a conference call and the organizer is not sharing their desktop, a simple IM to them host saying "Land the plane." or "Find a way to shut him/her down.", perhaps with more carefully chosen words depending my relationship with the meeting host helps.

If you feel comfortable enough with the host, content and meeting arrangement you may find that you take over for the host as a participant. Be careful, though, some peoples' egos bruise easily.
Where by "the doom of the Golden Cage as we know it", we actually mean "a thriving AppStore market"? As far as we can tell, Apple just wants apps to run well on the iPhone and iPad. If you want to machine translate your CocoaTouch app into something else, then Apple has in a way won: the conversation is about how you can port your awesome CocoaTouch app on to some other, lesser platform. That's all Steve really wants anyway - look at iTunes/Safari for Windows. As an added bonus, such a translation framework would finally fill the gap that GNUstep [http://gnustep.org/] never did. You might start with Cocotron [http://cocotron.org/], which is a small subset of what the author describes.
I view 'Sent from my BlackBerry / iPhone' as a way of explaining why the email is so short.
What's a great relationship book/guide
I have been very pleased with HN community in book recommendations. I got some great tips on personal finance, time management etc. Can HN suggest an incredible book for relationships? (specifically for marriage and such).
Why Space (Distance) Is an Illusion
Yes, but once the economy was humming again he expressed worries about government spending, debt financing, and inflation too, but lots of libertarians told him to stop being such an old lady: we were spending because there was a war on, China buying US debt was proof that market economics the key to growth, and inflation of property prices didn't matter because they're not building more land.

I appreciate that Austrian economists dislike the idea of stimulating demand through looser monetary or fiscal policy, but they're not exactly famous for demanding greater restraint during good times, are they? I don't recall any of them screaming in horror when the Dow was at 14k.
Good to know, thanks!

Edit: I feel like I tried that, and a couple other variations, and this was the fastest. But it's worth revisiting, and I'll definitely try it again.
Absolutely unreadable dark grey on black. Are you nuts?
PALM's been looking for a buyer for a few weeks now, but I didn't expect HP.
Mike, I just checked your site! Would you be interested in sharing carecloud's story? Please ping me at raheemm1 at yahoo.
webOS was definitely the most promising of the platforms imo. It never saw much adoption because the political approval/development process at Palm was horrible even if you tried really hard to get your apps on it (see jwz) and it was only available on the one not-very-popular phone.

I'm happy to see someone who might do something decent with webOS take over.
This reminded me of something my friend sent me:
cooking salmon in a dishwasher.

http://www.salon.com/nov96/salmon961118.html
Pet peeve for me too, specially at Silicon Valley startups, where a political science grad student who codes some Ruby on Rails on the side, joins the company as a "Senior Software Engineer".
Man, that is a big pile of cash. It hardly seems worth it, but if HP wanted to be a player in the mobile space now they are.

But Palm has a (very long and storied) software problem, not a hardware problem. HP doesn't have much of a reputation in consumer-grade OS software development so I'm not sure how they will be able succeed where Palm failed.
Did BlackBerry start putting those messages in first, before Apple did the iPhone?
Ask HN: what tools do you use to find available/cheap domains?
Ask HN: what tools do you use to find available/cheap domains?
Weren't they the last major Windows Mobile player? This sounds like the last nail in WM's coffin.
afaik webos has the best multi-tasking system out there and the easiest entry point (since it's just js, css & html)
What to do with my iphone app DayTracker
Any ideas of what todo with my iphone app DayTracker (www.thedaytracker.com) I want to make it better but I dont have the (code) skills to really make the app awesome myself. With the 4.0 OS coming out it could really be great.<p>Not sure if I should continue development on it or not. Anyone have any ideas as to what I should do. Is there any devs that want to work with me on it. Would be great to work with someone in the SF Bay Area.<p>At a crossroads of what I should do with the app. It sells everyday but needs some work to be great.<p>Ideas or suggestions welcomed. Thanks.
> I think this would be similar to the logo store on 99designs right?

99designs for banners was the first thing I thought when I read your post. I thought that was the direction you are headed to (I think the idea is fine), but like you said, you tried to launch a minimal viable product, which is the right think to do, because now you have a clientele to answer for.
Actually it's a wrapper around a library they licensed for like $500. 15 licenses later and they've made their money back!
I did a presentation on this topic a week and change ago in Osaka, actually: Google Analytics makes my eyes glaze over, too, and I get very little valuable out of it. I'll never write customer accessible software again without instrumenting it to within an inch of its life.

For example, the line Peldi said about having to make the hard decisions about which cases are the 80% cases (and should be accommodated by the software) and which are the 20% cases (which add complexity in excess of their value and so should probably not be in the software unless you can handle them invisibly) spoke to me.

However, the more I instrument features I develop, the more I find that I frequently misprioritize, even when listening to customers.

Here's that presentation: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/04/22/data-driven-software-des...

See slides 15 and 16. 15 is the big, ungodly customization dialog from heck. 16 is how much those options actually get used. See way at the bottom where you can change the colors? That was my second most requested feature for three years. I thought it was an eighty percenter -- after all, if customers didn't want it, they'd be asking for something else. Empirically, only about 8 ~ 10% of customers actually touch it.

That isn't classical conversion optimization, but I think even someone whose software is as awesome as Mockups can achieve meaningful results for the business and users by figuring out some goal for their first experience, and then measuring what is getting in the way of customers achieving that goal. (Mockups has a kick-butt first five minutes, by the way. It is probably the best I've ever seen outside of WoW. I think it could be even better, though, by taking the attention to detail they bring to the rest of the business and figuring out to the mouseclick where some people stop believing that Mockups is the most amazing thing they've touched this month.)

Great interview by the way, Andrew. I've read everything Peldi has written in the last couple of years, twice, and I still picked up a trick or three from it. (If there is anybody running an early stage startup here who hasn't read Peldi's technique for contacting bloggers, drop what you're doing and go to his "Startup Marketing Advice" blog post.)
But turn the reasoning around and it seems just as bad... the police chief gets annoyed by a local paper or wants to know something about their informants. So the police act on an anonymous hot tip that the paper is hiding some money laundering and rifle through all the paper's records for anything they might want to use. The shield law wasn't made law for no reason. Lawmakers thought about it and made a trade off.
I'll jump in and head off random speculation- this was from a survey that we used Decipher Inc. for, a long time ago. Looking into whether this should be removed.
MonoTouch and Apple's Section 3.3.1: Two Theories
Well, first of all, in 2008 there _was_ no way to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk. Not with currently available technology. I'm sure if they could build iPad 5 years earlier at the same price, they would have; the technology wasn't there. Second of all, even Jobs is allowed to change his mind. Calling someone full of shit because 7 years has passed, with technology evolving correspondingly (do you remember the resolution of tiny screens in 2003? I do; cell phone screens were mostly something like 240x360 at most; he was right, at that resolution, the market wanting to see movies in that quality is worthless) is a bit harsh, no?
So would that mean Windows is failing as well? And linux? I don't quite follow on that logic.
You can use http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ or just disable the stylesheet in your browser ("View -> Page Style -> No Style" in Firefox).
HTC makes Windows Mobile/Phone devices. They just recently came out with the HD2 in the US.
It's one thing to settle with a small troll. It's a whole different game when you settle with Microsoft over their "patents that Linux infringes" secret list.

HTC is enabling FUD.
Article from Jan 2007 telling you how to remove that message from Blackberry's: http://www.bbhub.com/2007/01/02/how-to-banish-your-sent-from...

iPhone came out in June 2007 so .. looks like BB's did it first.
Think of it as a cross platform framework where the spec is controlled by your enemy.