skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously? There are tons of situations where comfortably reading an offline magazine is much more convenient than depending on your 3G modem to trickle-feed you each successive page. The app content may make the most sense as mostly HTML inside, but up-front all at once download is preferable in my mind.
I'm fuzzy on where he draws the line between consumptive services and productivity tools.

Which is dropbox? flickr? instapaper?

I also can't say I've yet enjoyed the pleasure being part of an organization that views business-services costs as anything but costs. MSDN subscription? cost. Server lease? cost. Conference? cost. Support contract? cost.

They aren't considered investments any more than the electric bill; which itself could be arguably interpreted as an investment under the logic of this article.
I don't think that most canceled shows have many unproduced scripts (The Critic is one exception). Even if the writers know where the story was going
a) getting an explanation that's just a few paragraphs isn't as satisfying as actually seeing the conclusion.
b) some writers may not want to let people know what they had in store (Joss Whedon with Firefly for instance) and the ones that are willing to reveal what was planned are already doing that for their canceled shows.
They indicate what people liked enough to, say, link on their website and get other people to watch. An inexact method, but then, so is like/dislike panels.

They can also measure things such as: what percentage of people decided to stop watching halfway through.
I gave my 1st gen Kindle to my sister about 2 months ago and have been reading on an iPad ever since. I still preordered this Kindle because:

1) The active area on the iPad screen is a giant pain. Any touch ends up triggering... something, and when I'm reading I tend to shift around quite a bit. It's amazing how often I unintentionally bring up menus, change pages, etc.

2) Lighter is better. The weight of the iPad makes it a little ungainly for reading. The Kindle is easily held in one hand.

3) Better page changes: I can read the Kindle with my one hand and click the next page button without having to move around. On the iPad, I have to hold with one hand and change pages with the other.

4) e-ink. I prefer reading on it. Even in the dark I'd rather use a booklight and e-ink thank the iPad screen.

5) Portability: my kindle is always in my laptop bag. The Amazon case for it makes it almost a no brainer to toss in and go. I'm much less likely to drag my iPad somewhere. I'm afraid to break it. :)

6) "Free" 3g is ridiculously useful to when I want to get new books.

When it comes down to it, I really just want the best reading experience I can possibly get. The Kindle is designed specifically for that and they've done a pretty good job with it. I've read a ridiculous amount of books since I first got one and slowed down when I switched to reading on the iPad full time. It's just ungainly.
Researcher Demonstrates ATM ‘Jackpotting’ at Black Hat Conference
Great post, I've just found my new favorite blog :)
I've seen similar results in my own tests, with the right mix of trust logos adding 5-10% to conversion rate.

It's amazing how much the little trust boosting tidbits can improve conversions. I once boosted conversions for an email submit over 20% just by adding a little picture of a lock(completely meaningless and arbitrary!) next to the email field.
froyo (finally) has an automatic update feature, so most apps update on their own. i have noticed a few that say they require manual updating, but i didn't know if it was due to a download failure or if it was for a changed set of permissions. it does show you the full permission list again before updating manually.

How would you fix it? Ask the developer to simply say what the access will be used for? In an malicious app, they'd obviously just lie. Short of actually displaying what data an app is sending, I don't see an easy answer.

maybe show a list of domains it's allowed to resolve/contact? i guess that wouldn't make it any easier for most users to decipher though. i think a lot of free apps require network access just to download ads; maybe there is a better way (in the android api) of handling that to segment it away from full-blown network access?

maybe have a set of permissions common to each category? it's expected that a web browser app has access to do a lot of things, but if you have an app in a wallpaper category that requires those same set of permissions, it should be raising a red flag somewhere.

perhaps apple's app review process wasn't so crazy after all...
huh. so it does have a reasonable lead on sun and apple. Still, according to that graph, IIS has something less than half the market share apache does. (I know you /can/ run apache on windows, I just don't know anyone who does.)
http://channel101.com/ has been doing this for years, resulting in some incredibly creative, if short lived, shows.
Ugh, yes, the smudges drive me nuts.
Honestly, they probably don't care about them. That doesn't mean they'll just run their servers for free, though.
maybe on-demand permission requests would be better for many of those things, like apple ios does when an app requests your location.

if i did something in google maps and it popped up a dialog asking for access to my call logs, i would certainly deny it, but i just did that update this morning and didn't even notice anything about it accessing my call logs.
Did you include https://twitter.com?
Jotpress = Twitter + Posterous
And it DID request more than that. The thing is, that these wannabes like to paint themselves as "security experts", so they conceal facts and tell the story to the masses of non-techie users and scare them. Then, they sell a bogus security app.
And here are the links to essays in Best Software Writing I: http://brevity.org/misc/bestswi.html
The iPad is better for technical books, with giant flaw. The screen shuts itself off pretty quickly. It's annoying to have it turn itself off while you have a page up you want to reference. It does this even in its dock. It's not enough to drive me back to a real book + book stand yet, but it's definitely annoying.
The main point is that advice from 37signals is pushed too hard. It's not all bad, but it isn't a business model or company philosophy that can work in every situation.

I read and enjoyed Rework. It's refreshing to hear from a source that is trying to take on the business world by pulling a George Cosntanza and doing the opposite, or at the very least, an alternate.

The best use of their advice is to become a disciple of simple. Don't create huge goals, stick to small ones. Don't include every feature you think of, just the best/necessary ones. Don't have lots of meetings, only the ones that are vital (and good communication can fill in for formal meetings entirely). And don't be afraid to show your flaws. It's the advice we've gotten from parents and teachers and friends for years: be yourself. None of these things guarantee success, but they shouldn't lead to failure either.
I don't think that's true. Bureaucrats are mostly well-intentioned. They're not working toward 1984, they're working toward what they see as a well-run government. When it comes to government people easily fail to see the forest for the trees, and view it as a living, breathing, single organism hell-bent on power. It's not though, it's a collection of people who are for the most part competent and well-meaning and who are simply facing a monumental task.

The entire first world routinely asks our politicians to provide us more services and more securities for less money, and then gets upset when they fail to deliver the impossible. They're not working toward 1984, they're just trying to stay in office and leave their offices a little better than when they found it.
Preliminary statement from the government, without giving detailed independently verifiable information that could be used to confirm the safety claims; I guess we'll have to wait on a leak to know whether this was a real concern or part of an anti-wikileaks strategy.
It seems like Android has three choices

1. The current approach (which made it possible for the wallpaper app to steal user data from millions of users)

2. Prevent apps from accessing data such as voicemail-password, web-browsing history etc. (but it is possible that some apps may have a legitimate reason to do this and blocking these apps may not be fully consistent with the open platform goals)

3. Throw a big warning message EVERY time an app tries to access sensitive data (or perhaps for the first 10 times and the first 10 days...). It is a compromise solution, but users may find this annoying.

Either way, this is a somewhat tough problem.
It's quite clearly stated, when you install an app from the market, what permissions is it requesting. If your wallpaper app wants to know your location, SMS content etc etc, and you still install it, more fool you.
It has not been my experience that B2C customers are unwilling to pay for web services.
Ask HN: Startup Monetization Consulting
Just wanted to get people's opinions on an idea I have.

I seem to be very good at understanding a business and being able to figure out how it can make money. I'm not just talking about the traditional ways to make money online (advertising, subscriptions, referral or transactional revenue sharing). The first idea that comes to my mind is something that no one has ever mentioned to that company.

Can i turn this into a consulting business? If so, what is the best way to approach starting it?

Thanks in advance,
Eric
Sure, but it doesn't seem intractable to be able to design native languages to be able to interop. Lisp has been around since the late 50s, C since the 70s. The fact that they interop at all is kinda awesome.
Linkedin, Mint, and Yelp are somewhat different. Email is part of their communication with users. Groupon and the other email companies use email as their primary service. They curate information and deliver it to their readers.

I have been thinking about doing something in this space, but after some initial customer development decided to give up on it.
It collects ... your voice mail password

Do the security dialogs reflect the differing levels of importance of the data you're providing access to? If an app is requesting access to my voice mail password, I'd expect a pretty big red strobe light stuck on the dialog; something to really catch your attention, especially if you're trying to 'yes' your way through 9 (number stated by jsz0 for Google Maps) of the things
The google apps are an outlier in my experience so far. They tend to ask for many indepth permissions. Most apps just want full network access (for ad's) and sometimes phone call state/sdcard access etc.
For a couple years, I've worked for a company founded by an MD ~20 years ago, doing PACS (Radiology IT system; basically how X-Rays and CTs and MRIs get distributed within a hospital, viewed by doctors, archived, and sent between sites; my particular client is the US military in Iraq/Afghanistan/Kuwait/etc.). The founder is an MD (Ortho), but I don't think he's ever practiced medicine. I would probably say he's a better businessman than 99% of the MDs I've met, but probably would have been a worse doctor.

Generally, the perception of MDs in business, especially outside medical startups, is that they're horrible. First, they're usually convinced they're the smartest in the room, and even if they may be, that they're also the most knowledgeable about any given domain -- even if they have no idea about it. They often end up involved in mediocre small businesses, taken advantage of in scams, etc., due to being rich and bad at business.

They're also super-expensive; education and debt. The best are probably military doctors who leave after their first tour, but even then, they're mid/late 30s.

Within medicine, having an MD as the medical interface of your company (could be CEO, could be bizdev, could just be a chief medical officer) is essential. One of the factors limiting medical IT startups is that they're really just IT startups with some additional hassle, but the pool of suitable MDs willing to work in a startup is low.

I think there are a lot of great opportunities in medicine: the PACS/Telemedicine field is open (especially for consumer-facing systems, or for SaaS); various forms of automation (pharmacy, EHR/EMR, lab, etc.) exist, but generally have been developed by large companies and aren't as well engineered as one would like, or as innovative -- the long product cycle, conservative buyers, and FDA regulations slow this, but the effect is greater than this can explain. Probably the best opportunity for disruptive innovation is direct, consumer-facing health, especially in less or unregulated areas. Scott Adams (Dilbert)'s idea of passively monitoring one's daily life, then when you get sick, go back and look at the previous N months of data archive and identify causes or lifestyle issues; then do statistical analysis across people, is one idea. Providing better realtime advice and decision support about things with health impact (diet, exercise, various drugs, ...).

I guess the most relevant question is about you -- aside from liking HN/TechCrunch, and being an MD, are you someone who wants to code? Work on hardware? Business? Do you like quick/simple projects, well-funded low risk big projects, or true startups? Are you location-specific at all?

If it were me, if I didn't have 100% answers, I would probably try to intern or contract/consult with a variety of companies or projects, just to get a feel for how they work. Founding a startup is a 5-10 year project, so spending a year figuring out exactly what kind of startup, or if you want to do a startup at all, is probably worthwhile.

My next project is actually an IT infrastructure thing, which has healthcare and defense as primary markets.
out of curiosity, do you leave the oom-killer enabled? or do you set your boxes to panic in out of memory situations? Do you adjust your memory overcommit levels?
I'm pretty sure the article is not entirely accurate. There are several apps from "Jackeey Wallpaper" in the Android Market, all of which seem to be apps to download wallpapers of various themes. The dozen or so I've checked have these permissions:
- "modify/delete SD card contents"
- "coarse (network based) location"
- "full Internet access"
- "read phone state and identity"

As far as I know none of those allow reading your browser history or text messages, and certainly not your voicemail password. We need to see a network capture of what was sent to their site.
No, if I meant that, I would have written that. I know much about .net, and not a great deal about java.
You can turn anything into a consulting business if you're good at sales and have an in with the people you are selling to. Are you good at sales? Do you have an in with the people you are selling to?

The single best source of consulting leads I have is my blog and related participation on the Internet. Folks email me and say "I like the cut of your jib. Do it again, except with less bingo this time, and more of our particular problem domain." Start solving the problems of people like your prospective customers in a public fashion, and the ones who want solutions quietly will beat a path to your door.

As an aside: There is one major problem with consulting for people who have not figured out how to make money yet.
It looks very similar, albeit a bit tidier than .net's implementation.
This wasn't at all surprising to me. HN has a great community of tech enthusiasts who have a insatiable appetite for tech content. I'm sure the people who ask for critiques on their web apps get a nice traffic boost.
It's not far from the reasons you might choose to do internal betas and focus tests instead of test marketing every revision and variant you come up with from concept to product.

If pilots were all released on HULU, then a season filled with middling to poor pilots would be reviewed as such. And then no matter how much a studio might try to improve the best of the lot, they'd have those negative reviews dragging down performance of the ultimate product.

If pilot feedback is reasonably controlled, the studios have the option of polishing an almost-there concept (or more cynically: the best turd of the bunch) and not having reviews of its dodgy pilot dragging down performance of the final show.
Get really drunk and smoke something like 3 packs of cigs in one night. Even the smell of a cigarette will make you want to vomit for most of the initial withdrawal period.
Cool, but "will never be the same" is a bit much when descibing a relatively minor increment of a basically useless feature.
users either don't read, don't care, or don't understand what is being asked of them and they just click whatever is needed to continue.

True. That's sort of ok as long as advanced users can tell when something fishy is going on and flag the app.

even an advanced user can't tell the difference between a free app requesting network access to download advertisements and a malicious one using it to upload private information.

Also true. The Internet and SD card permissions are all-or-nothing, and therefore essentially useless. Apps should be able to declare that they only contact specific hosts or access specific directories, and there should be a standardized directory for per-app storage, like "Application Support" on OS X.
Ugh. Here's some unpacking, then:

I never said Google should write something on a Microsoft platform. I implied that Google should implement this Street Slide method in Google Maps and mused as to whether the Google brass would allow them to copy a Microsoft innovation.

You see, within Big Companies there is a common problem where engineers aren't allowed to use competitors' technologies because it hurts the corporate image. No one wants to see "Google copies Microsoft with new Maps feature" headlines, just like no one wants to see "Not even Microsoft engineers are stupid enough to develop for Windows Phone 7" headlines. Some people call this Not Invented Here Syndrome. This is a problem because it's counterproductive. Street Slide should be implemented on the iPhone first. Google Maps should add Street Slide. Hopefully their corporate overlords will have the vision to allow the engineers to do so.
As an entrenched-developer in a project, you likely have emotional baggage about your project. You're more likely to unjustly-defend your own project. I probably should've included the used-by-80% portion as well, as it's part of the claim that it's not god-awful.

As I've said, I am not qualified to comment about Squid, nor was I. I was commenting about some / other developers and projects, not pointing a finger in any particular direction, and pretty clearly referring to extreme cases.
That demonstrates a sense of entitlement. I'm looking for some evidence that flying business class improves performance on arrival compared to economy. Totally different things.
I'm not sure I get the point. OK, so you figured out who bought the copy that was leaked. Then what? Sue them?
It's a spoof alrticle -a joke - and "private" and "protected" were never about the legality of letting other parties access things - they were just conveniences for the developers and the tools to make it clear what could be optimized how, and what should and should talk to what.
I don't think that was the point suggested by the article. I think the point is that B2C customers are unwilling to pay for web services that function as long-term investments, but they are willing to pay for web services that function with immediate gratification.
Cloudkick (YC W09) now supports multi-factor authentication
Good point with #4. The last time I was involved in a Microsoft project the SQL Server licensing costs were more than $30k per box. $30k was not a big deal on that project but it would have worked a lot better if the data had been spread across a bunch of little servers instead of two big ones. $30k * 2 is not so much; $30k * 50 starts to add up.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx
the poor showing of apple and lenovo may be partly due to the higher retained value of their products. I expect IBM/lenovo or a apple macbook are probably the only laptops worth fixing once they are out of warranty. cheap laptops, once they are out of warranty, often have an ebay value less than what you'd pay to get it repaired.
#define true false
#define false true

Did you know that if you do both of those, they cancel each other out? True story.
In Brazil (and probably elsewhere in South America), real estate values go down (and thus crime goes up) the higher you go on the hills. Basically, this is because walking up and down the hills is arduous and sucks, and thus people try to avoid living on the hills if they possibly can. Thus you end up with favelas.

If everyone had cars, or public transit, you would probably see better property values on hills, like you do in SF.
Somewhat similar bill in Finland failed recently, because they couldn't reasonably define "a startup".
> "whether the Google brass would allow them to copy a Microsoft innovation."

Have you seen Google's search results lately?

The web results and the image search updates have no lack of Bing-ish-ness.
How Influential Are You. Win Fast Company Influence Project
To be fair it's an additional layer. Sharing a stolen PDF is just as illegal whether it's tagged with its purchaser or not.
I agree, this is a worrying possibility. Luckily, with a good reflection library, you can have other obfuscated parts of the code that check for such malicious tampering and abort.
I could diff a dump of all the kerning values too.
Now that DVCS has made branching and merging so much easier, maybe a middle ground approach to portability becomes reasonable: the trunk can support only Linux and people who want to run on other OSes can maintain appropriate branches. Like OpenSSH and OpenSSH-portable. (This also prevents minority platforms from externalizing their costs.)
New Kindle Wifi: $139 3g: $189
Their blog and their book is the SEO, product placements and self-promotion in the first place. Do not confuse it with something like selfless and sincere help to the community. ^_^

Update: Dear anonymous coward-down-voters! Face the reality - 37signals is a successful business, and it looks a lot like that of MySQL - lot of hype and really good, well-written texts, which means big and active community.

Do not assume that they know only programming. Those guys looks like well-read and more or less familiar with Eastern, philosophy. Most of their advises are just adaptations of some well-known Zen (and from other branches) principles. ^_^
I wish that this explanation could be expanded upon a little. Perhaps with some annotations of selected sections of the source code.
A better short summary: because 37signals is B2B, and because they sell productivity tools, companies are more likely to view their 37signals product purchase as an investment. What this means is that people believe the purchase will help their company's productivity (and therefore increase revenue). This is the real reason behind the high 'willingness to pay' that we see in 37signals's business model.
That was a very good article, both interesting and emotionally satisfying. I didn't know it was possible for people to acquire language as late as their 20's.
Cool! You could improve the contrast by preparing two at once (so a total of four colours), and then crossing them. Perhaps have one colour the same, to act as a "background".
It would be nice if the article actually named the app rather than just the developer.

Does anyone know the app name?
Some points that Thinglink private beta taught me about social objects
I've been using it for a few weeks and found it refreshing not having to maintain a blog to post my crap. And I do it all from my phone.
Jasonz: I have a startup in the medical field I'd like to talk to you about. How do I contact you directly?

EDIT: I should add, I was the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com, amongst other things -- this isn't some mickey mouse thing.