skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here comes Cringely again, giving truly cringe-worthy predictions. His main prediction seems to be that there will be no more future Mac Pro releases because the iMac now has four cores and can run anything including Final Cut Pro.

He is totally wrong. There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market? They've had a lot of success breaking into the movie business and taking over from expensive Avid video editing workstations; there is no way they would lose this market.

The high-end market definitely needs features like PCI-express slots to connect real hardware to, 8 cores or as many as you can throw at it, and lots of internal and external storage options. Hell, a lot of those Mac Pros are connected to Fiber channel storage arrays that store terabytes of media. And he is seriously predicting that we replace all of this with a USB 3.0 connection on our iMac? Get real.
Perhaps complains sponsored by the competition?
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Content Browser, Sidebar Tabs in New Chromium OS Screenshots
Not true. It would be nice to see some citation that Apple is dropping this market. Just because they don't advertise Mac Pros on the front page of Apple.com doesn't mean they are dropping support for the product.
Truly. Making that amount of money is non-trivial. The web is a chaotic, crowded place filled with free stuff. For most of us, it takes a clever idea and persistence to make anything over small change.
You mean software not running on a server? Well, if you've got a Java enterprise programmer's love for design patterns, you could do A/B tests using a Strategy pattern. And if you wanted to decouple that from your code, you could have the Strategies created by a Factory. And if you configured your StrategyFactory in XML then you would never have any A/B testing code in your code at all... and this topic is giving me flashbacks so I'm going to stop now.

The nuts and bolts of doing this in downloadable software are not extraordinarily difficult. Pick a unique random identifier at install time, report random identifier with reports of conversion to the central server. (Passing it as a query parameter when folks open your website from within the app is so easy it is almost cheating. You can also ask for folks for a "hardware ID" to generate their license key, or something similar.)

See the presentation Paras linked to if you need implementation advice.
Not implementing features is hard
It's because if you find something that works and that can give you the money and freedom that I assume entrepreneurs want, then why take the move into a 'closed community'? What he's doing is not entrepreneurship as I imagine it - what he is doing feels more like trying to insert himself into a social group of pseudo-entreprenuers.

These are the people who are more interested in their standing within a certain community, than in actually starting multiple businesses.

I could mention names that fit this template, because there are quite a lot. What they are doing is not about the money, it's about the fame and the social ranking they hope to acquire. That's why it disappoints me to see this - because in my opinion, businessmen should be aggressive money chasers and should not care what their peers think about them.
Why is this story #3 on Hacker News? The guy is probably wrong about the Mac Pro. Of course Apple is going to lead the way with USB3. The HN story where Steve says Apple will continue to make the best computers in the world is more interesting.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1457680
I wouldn't venture a guess about the actual failure rate, but I'd bet that there's way more profitable web apps (and correspondingly, lots of failed attempts) out there than you think. As a single or small team, $1-2k profit/month is pretty doable when your primary costs are just server hosting.

If you can find a way to leverage SEO or inherent viralness in your product, you can rely on a reasonable amount of consistency, but it maybe be averaged over months as opposed to month to month.

Some people can work on things on the side of their day job until they reach a good level. For us, we knew we wouldn't get anywhere with such non-committal focus (my co-founder was also in a different city which made it harder). We just made sure we had enough cash runway and quit. Reached profitability about 1.5 years after quitting and have been doing it for 4+ years now. It's amazing how much "business" you learn along the way when you're fighting to stay alive. It's not easy, and definitely more work than a normal job, but it's a fantastic experience.
If you're not looking for a homerun, I suggest you look at niche markets.

I'm making about 15k/yr w/ my niche product: http://createyourproglang.com/. Where I live it's not enought to replace my job, but it's a nice complementary income.

There was a nice thread recently on HN about ways to find & test a niche market: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454221
What a misleading headline.

"Internet Explorer 9 beats Chrome in hardware-accelerated canvas rendering, fails to beat several other browsers (video)".

Much better. But hey, gets less clicks right?
If Apple truly insists that they know better than the publishers, why not have an option for "Apple's font choice" vs "Standards" in the app? If they still want to impose their font choice on users, they could even have it enabled by default. This is ridiculous that they can just ignore standards, and people will write it off because it's Apple. Design matters, but so do standards. Don't impose design over standards. If you must put design first, don't completely ignore standards like Apple did.
I'm trying to think of an Apple IPS display that hasn't had this issue to some extent. The iPhone4. The 27-inch iMac. The 24-inch LED display. My 2005-era 23" HD Cinema Display.

This is a manufacturing issue in which the multiple laminates which make up the display weren't perfectly sealed together. So it's possible for the display to pass initial quality control checks, but the reality is they're in the process of separating a bit. Odds are it'll slowly continue to separate over time, making the spot grow larger.

Apple has been hit or miss over replacing devices over the issue. On my Cinema Display - which was $1800 at the time - I received multiple (refurbished) replacements at the time, all of which exhibited the same issue. Eventually they gave up. Now the spot is about 2 square inches in size after 5 1/2 years. However there have been cases where replacement has been flatly denied and the customer was told there wasn't a problem.
If you do it all the time, though, people will get used to it. You'll just be the guy who wears button down shirts.
Good Noows: A well designed news reader
My point is; the model is wrong. An expensive, outdated method is being used because distribution of these movies is controlled by a small established group with deep pockets. I don't imagine the producers like the situation, nor the stars of the movie. They would probably make more if they could just release their film online instead of paying a middle man to package it up and ship it around.

If the government is going to step in and try to stop piracy, fine. I want to live in a world where I can write an application and become financially independent from it (and without having to give it away and get paid for support, yuck!). But they also have to address this issue that these old, but rich companies are hurting the economy by insisting on being inefficient middle men that customers don't care about and probably not creators of the content either.
Sencha is ExtJS merged with jQTouch and Raphael. ExtJS was already a well established company and their core product (the ExtJS library) was worth paying for. I've paid $3000+ for corporate licenses for that library. It really is worth the money if you want a solid JS UI without having to hack jQuery plugins yourself.

Now they're extending their core product to work well with mobile devices. I think they'll be able to keep previous customers like me and get some new ones. If you only need a few UI widgets (grid, comboxes, calendar) on your site, you can make do with free plugins and copy-paste code. If you want a solid UI with tons of customizability out of the box, ExtJS is a great option. Now Sencha will provide that and hopefully the ability to write apps for more than one device.
Google hasn't saturated the search market. They're doing something like 50 ~ 100% YOY growth in number of searches in Japan and the United States. This is partly due to getting their toolbars installed as the default in more places and part in moving the entire userbase towards search as an activity.

We're very quirky in our usage of computers. I live on the Internet, and Google reports that I've done in excess of 20,000 searches. That works out to about 25 a day. I'm going to guess many of us have roughly similar numbers. The average user, on the other hand, does something like 30 a month if you can believe Comscore et al. Move them a little from where they are to where we are and Google gets to make another round of money hats.
It allows the same as the e-pub standard does, aka, font families (the face attribute in the font tag takes a valid like "serif").

http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?e...

Are all the kindle supported html tags.

Basically, Apple is doing exactly what Microsoft did with their early versions of IE6, where they rendered web pages differently than the others out there. They're ignoring a tag that's part of a standard because they think it looks better.

It isn't like you can say font=comic sans in an ePub book and expect it to take effect. What they're doing though is disallowing the setting of font families for certain types of tags.
>Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue.

Then make their own format, separate it from ePub. ePub is a ebook standard that pre-exists Apple's foray into book publishing. Make their own standard and don't call their reader ePub compliant.

They're making the IE5 of eBook readers....
Somehow, I don't see this happening; there's too much of implied control for this to be a realistic scenario.
The standard doesn't do anything about specific fonts. The standard DOES have facilities to set a font family, i.e. serif, sans-serif, fixed-width, etc.

It throws off formatting for a lot of books if you screw with that sort of thing. Which is what Apple is doing.
You don't even include your email in your hn bio.

The guy must have done a lot of work to find you.

Odd that someone who would put in that much research still doesn't understand that all-caps is a clear tipoff.
Booting CP/M 3 from an SD card
Am I the only one who's actually excited that Microsoft is actually making some very tangible improvements to the IE platform?
Google hasn't saturated the search market

I didn't mean to say that they had. Google awareness however, has saturated the market.

I'm dividing startup growth into two phases: First, an exponential "people become aware of your product" phase, and second a much slower "convince people that your product is useful / better than the competition / etc." phase.

How much growth you get in that second phase will depend on the market and your competitors, but it will never come close to the first phase -- and that first phase generally takes about 5 years.

Of course, none of this applies to you, since bingo cards don't really act like an internet startup -- you're getting traffic from google, not from your users saying "hey, there's this really cool website you should check out".
Tool For Measuring the Profanity of Code-bases
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Well I'm guessing Apple has been making said senior people very rich with the last 5-10 year stock growth, so they probably have some cognitive dissonance stopping them from speaking out there.
How does deployment usually work with these types of frameworks? Developing in HTML+JavaScript is great from a cross-platform point of view, but I imagine many developers still want to deploy via App Stores because it enables them to have a presence as an icon in the launcher (without the user having to know how to bookmark) and, more importantly, allows the developer a low-friction way to charge for the product.

Do you just build an HTML app with this, package it up on the filesystem, and then display it in a web browser widget inside native code?
I have yet to see a good browser implementation of the video tag: http://playground.html5rocks.com/#video_tag

I've tried it in Chrome 6, Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.5. All of them play the video but the controls are really bad. You can't tell how much of the video is loaded in any browser. In Chrome, you can't skip to the middle of the video even after it has fully loaded and played. In Firefox, it says the video is only 5-7 seconds long and the trackbar keeps extending the length as the video plays.

As bad as the YouTube Flash player can get sometimes at actually playing a video (I'm guessing because of bandwidth/popularity issues), it is a damn good implementation. You can skip to the middle of a video, you can jump to any section of the video that has already loaded. Play/pause work very smoothly. I'm not saying HTML5 video will never be good but all the current implementations remind me of the time before Flash video when Quicktime MOV was the only way to watch a video and it was a horrible experience.
Sure, point well taken. My only fear was that discussing statistical significance may have made the article a bit intimidating but yes, if I were to call it "ultimate guide", I should have discussed it.
Ask HN: How to outsource?
A co-worker had been working off 'n on, on a project that virtually has same foundations as WePay. I showed him their site last night and he wasn't too happy, understandably. It served as a real reminder that some of my ideas might never be realized, just for the fact that I can't work on them full-time.

So, as a full-time student who's working flex hours -- are there good, responsible ways to outsource some of my projects in order to get them to a functional status? The ability to program isn't the issue, time is.

I'm not necessarily looking for people to write code for cents on the dollar (my assumption is that I'll still have to look over all the code looking for mistakes), but are there good alternatives?

Additionally, I would love to hear any members' experiences.
>That's just the real world calling, and their refusal or inability to answer. If they were in corporate america, a co-worker or middle manager would steal their work and take credit, or capitalize on their inability to resist additional assignments.

I've worked in corporate America for a while now, and I haven't seen managers steal credit for their workers work before. Generally, if you're a manager and you have someone you manage who is doing a great job and getting lots of stuff done, that reflects well on you as a manager too.
Look, I really dislike Microsoft, but we're not allowed to discuss why on HN. :-) However, IE9 really can catapult the Internet to the next level by being highly standards compliant and having great performance. Let's give them credit on this one. Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera competing against a strong contender from Microsoft is a great thing.
It was fixed, but now it's back again...

> The problem is similar to one described last August by James Slater. That time around the issue was with the application URL, this time it appears the application name is the issue.
Ask HN: What motivates users to write Amazon reviews?
I'm in the process of developing a review-driven site, and I'm wondering how so many reviews get written on a site like Amazon when there's no incentive to do so (from what I can tell.) The incentive on a site like Yelp seems to be badges and awards given by other users to your reviews. How do you get people writing reviews on your site?
The research I've read disagrees with your statement: http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-So...
Apple has a history of skating to where they think the puck will be.

That's not likely viewed as servers and even as desktops.

Likely mobile clients and clouds and ubiquitous communications.

The section of the D8 interview that Cringley has linked specifically targets how the enterprise market operates; hardly supporting the rest of the discussion in the article. Apple hasn't and doesn't aim at the enterprise market. Duh.

In that same D8 interview, Jobs comments on how his view of a migration away from traditional desktops gives him pause; it's been a familiar computing model for many years for many folks, though the replacement clients are clearly often better options. That he sees desktops around and available for the foreseeable future, but that they're not going to be the platform for the majority of users.

There will still be folks that need a desktop.

Video editing is one of those needs-a-desktop applications, but for how long? How long until you're either rendering on the client, or rendering on hosted services? And until then, yes, there will be boxes to deal with this.

The center of computing moved from IBM and UNIVAC mainframes in glass-walled raised-floor computing centers, to VAX superminis, to Unix workstations, to PCs running various operating systems to PCs running Windows, to bigger and denser data centers and more capable and more mobile clients and now-massively improved communications...

Welcome to computing.

Where's the puck headed?

Boxes for video editing?

I don't think so.
New Job Board Dedicated to All Things Mobile
> $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded.

You can make it entirely realistic by saying the company that made the CRM now has a version that supports Firefox and IE7-8 but it costs $5M to upgrade the license. I've had so many of those cases at my current job.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/06/24/4-way-html5-speed-te...

It beat hardware accelerated chrome as well.

Firefox 3.7 actually came out on type by a bit in the end at a 1000 fish.
OK, so I could also install FRF83 directly without going through the updates?
I saw Full Metal Jacket when I was 4 years old and I loved it. I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I laughed.

This scared the shit out of me.
We do it without storing a user's time zone via jQuery and a custom script that converts all UTC time stamps on a page to the local time setting of their computer. This works well for us because we have travelers who use the service through a variety of time zones.

The second touch point is our iPhone app, and the SDK has built-in support for converting UTC to the client time.
Learn You Some Erlang: More On Multiprocessing
"There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market? "

Are we talking about the same company? Apple is known for focusing on a few things and ignoring others that many believe would be "profitable".

I think Cringley is making a significant point, apple may lose focus on what we think of as computers.
The 28 Bytes of Ruby Joy
I think Amazon reviewers are people with opinions, who relish the idea of sharing their opinion with the world. I don't think these people need any more motivation than that-- no badges or flair required.

However: I think that the reviewer-to-reader ratio is tiny, and this is masked a bit by Amazon's absurd popularity.

And, to make matters worse, this absurd popularity is one of the driving motivators (cf above, "share one's opinion with the world", not "share one's opinion with the 200 people who happen to follow my micro-site.")

If anyone knows any way out of this besides increasing the number of users by several orders of magnitude, I'd love to hear it-- I, too, have a site that allows reviews, and only a tiny handful of reviewers (so far.)
You might want to reread the article you linked to. That is Helvetica in the screenshot -- note in particular the horizontal end on the "e" and the vertical end on the "r". The beauty and superiority are more apparent if you click on the image and go to the bigger version on Flickr. ;)
Hm, it's rather hard to find citations for predictions of the future.
My initial reaction is that this is a bad idea. I would rather fail quickly than pass the nil along.

But I'm curious what others think.
The Sound of the Sun
Yep... over here the awards for layoffs mount over time... a new employee can be fired with relatively low severance expenses, but someone with 2 years or more (like myself) is looking at 5 months' salary plus bonuses if he's fired.

Besides de-incentivizing hires, it also means that switching jobs has a huge penalty (not having the "parachute") and in a small market it's tough to take the jump. (my current situation)
Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Delayed Execution
WSJ: The Family Business Revenue Act
Hmm. I feel the exact opposite. The fact we are even debating net neutrality is scary.
I just want to reinforce cperciva's last point. My observation of 100+ startups that I have worked with or known well is that the growth of a single product often peaks at year 4 or 5. After that, it tails off. Good companies are the ones that keep the innovation going so that there is a new product that continues to drive value for the company around that time.
Apple is probably the most obvious and clear example of this (iPod - 2001, iPhone - 2006, iPad - 2010), but the pattern holds true in many software companies I know.
This is why we're all totally screwed
Judge Feldman's Deepwater Drilling Moratorium
(For subscribers: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870462980457532...)

The Congress is "rewriting a half century of partnership tax law with no hearings, no analysis and little debate."

Since for tax purposes a LLC is a partnership, this sounds like another strike at organizing your startup as one (or just starting out as a simple pure partnership). From the limited details in the editorial it doesn't sounds like HN type startups will be affected, although that could change at any moment, but the principles being established are dangerous. As the Federal government gets more and more desperate for revenue, i.e. whenever interest rates spike due to the world having a finite appetite for US Federal debt, the situation will get ugly.

As of yet the whole HN type financial ecosystem has just been experiencing (often just potential, I grant) collateral damage as less popular classes of businesses are targeted ("it's nothing personal"), but eventually the Federal government will run out of those and deliberately cast its net much more widely.
Yeah, looking in retrospect, binding the this keyword to the function already exposes the jQuery object inside the function, so the first argument in my version was redundant.