skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess would be:

- People understand or think they understand Amazons business

- Amazon has a history of few failures

- Amazon is establishing a physical and technological infrastructure that a lot of other companies will build up on. It's like an operating system in a way, and this will be converted into huge money in the future
Ummm, sorry but that's not correct; it is Hue, Saturation and Lightness. You are confusing luminosity with lightness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminosity
Yes, there are advantages to native apps, and Apple has made sure to make them sexy and attractive.

But I don't want them to be sexy. I want the web to be sexy. And it can happen. The disadvantages of web development are shrinking quickly as javascript is getting incredible attention and browsers are converging on standards. And the web has the greatest benefit of all: no proprietary-ness, no walled gardens. I know that's overused, but it's very true.
From my own experience with it:

- .class files compiled on Apple's JVM work fine on other JVMs

- Source code written for Apple's version of javac will compile fine on other Java compilers.

To my knowledge, Microsoft's JVM violated both of these requirements, which was Sun's bone of contention. (Android's Dalvik is in similar violation, but doesn't pretend to be "Java" - they're being sued based on patents IIRC)
Everyone hated the Wii name before it came out. After it came out, nobody cared.
But how big can it be? Almost by definition dedicated servers are always going to be cheaper. Any business that needs a dedicated server is going to get one, with lower/flexing demands sure, they'll go with cloud. I love AWS as much as anyone, but there's plenty of competition out there and I now use Linode.
It's in very heavy use internally at Apple.
Based on my reading of the Mac App Store approval guidelines, I don't see how Java or Flash (in their current forms) could possibly be distributed via the App Store. The terms explicitly forbid apps from installing any shared frameworks, or modifying existing apps in any way.

I also assume that every Mac is going to have to be assigned a UDID now, unless Apple is completely reinventing their DRM scheme. Regardless, the piracy options for Mac apps are almost certainly going to be similar to their iOS cousins, if not a little easier because every Mac is effectively "rooted" out of the box.
Check out WireIt, there is a lot of good stuff there for visual peogramming in a graph interface: http://neyric.github.com/wireit/

I used it here to make a web version of PigPen: http://github.com/rjurney/Cloud-Stenography http://vimeo.com/6032078 http://wiki.apache.org/pig/PigPen http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134...
http://planetrubyonrails.com/

check it once in two days to keep up to date.
Why bother breaking the DRM on their media? There's plenty of other sources for almost everything (save the rare iTunes exclusives) on there, so there's virtually no reason to bother. If the app store is the only place to get these apps, you can be sure pirates will work on cracking that DRM.
MacBook Air 11" Teardown
Considering the fact that the asking price is $200,000 per person. Shouldn't be a problem for most of its customers.
"[T]here are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees."

Not clear what "professional" degrees they're referring to here, so doesn't sound like it's just Ph.D.'s. (MBAs, JDs, MFAs, MPHs?)
But why should Apple need to create Java on OSX? If Oracle wants Java used on OSX they can produce it just like on Windows; if they don't something else will fill the gap.

He isn't banning anything. Nobody is saying that Java won't be allowed on OSX, just that there is no longer a need for Apple to maintain the development.
Start with "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams
http://amzn.com/0321534042

You can devour that book in an afternoon.

And since Typography is such an important part of design. You should read this blog post here:
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/the-web-is-all-about-...

and:

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
http://webtypography.net/
To clarify your first point, do you have a separate process that runs per customer so that if the process fails and has to be restarted (auth failure with merchant etc) only that one customer will be restarted?
Mac App Store Review Guidelines, Oct 21
1. Unless the Mac app store takes away your ability to install apps that aren't in it, I wouldn't be too worried.

2. They're not dropping support for Java, they're just not making it anymore. If Oracle makes a version of Java for the Mac, then it will be supported. If not, then losing Java must not be that big a deal right?
Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics
I haven't looked exhaustively.

After the chargify free account fiasco, I'm staying away from them. I would have started with the free account there and moved up, but now I'd be too nervous to look at them. Not familiar with the others, but I'd be nervous to go with anyone who doesn't have serious momentum, or size in their favor, as I don't want to rewrite my code if a startup fails or deal with stranded account information.
Why did the registrar give you a refund?
Although I'm a big fan of great ideas, in the grand scheme of things they don't really matter, not if you're trying to build a business.

What matters is customers, and you get customers because they know about you, and they learn about you through marketing.

To rephrase what you're emphasizing:

"Market the fuck out of your great idea"

Be everywhere, talk to everyone, always be selling. Don't be "viral", be invasive. Show up, pitch, and close. Get deals not by word of mouth, but by being there.

Make noise. Create spectacle. Generate exposure.

People forget that things like Twitter are not only products, but platforms that literally market themselves. Marketing is baked into their idea. Facebook went "viral" only because it capitalized on people's inherent narcissism. Most products don't have this luxury.

Always be promoting.

Too many companies have failed simply because they forgot to tell people about what they were doing.
No Title Bar?
Thanks, I like his market payment model esp how demand modulates supply - but I believe that just the fact of payment adds admin overhead/transaction costs, and slows adoption - you might as well charge a little more and make it a business.

I think my suggested payment model makes Open Services easier to adopt, because it has no admin overhead. The API is there, you call it, done. It is paid for by amazon/google, because it benefits their paying customers - who indirectly pay for it. Note that they would be paying for its hosting anyway, if they deployed that open source themselves.

- There would be admin savings from having just one deployment (more efficient for everyone).

- And it would be just as fast, if deployed in the same cloud (theoretically - I'm assuming a coarse-grained IPC world, where apps are built by assembling services anyway, which is where we're headed. I'm thinking of it like static method calls in Java, that so get JIT inlined/stitched into one big lump at runtime, even though they are in separate modules (class files)).

- Plus, these free Open Services act as an advertisement and enticement to non-EC2 users (or free users) - and once you've started using EC2-hosted Open Services, the easiest step up is of course to move to becoming a paid EC2 yourself. There's a bit of lock-in. So it is in Amazon's interest, too. So it's economically a little bit like advertiser-subsidized TV. And technologically, it's like Google's many free API's (eg. map API), but the case is more compelling for the supplier, because it costs the same to provide, but more directly pulls in paying customers.

- I agree there would sometimes be issues with how much processing power it gets (Dos attacks, abuse in general), but this is a complex issue, and I think you'd need to actually run it for a time to discover the real issues and experiment with solutions. But the vast majority of open source projects are not used by anybody - these aren't using any resources (apart from memory, which is close to 0 cost), and so their cost is negligible.

- once one hoster provides it, it gives them a competitive advantage, and other hosters need to match it to stay in the game.

- over time, with Moore's law, the hoster's cost of providing these Open Service approaches zero.

I think it's inevitable for Open Services to begin and spread (or something functionally similar).
I would have to disagree. Qt has been written on the wall for the past few years ever since Trolltech was acquired.
They weren't first to implement it, but they were the ones who made it a part of their browser and their OS very, very fast ("support Java for the platform" was the start of this thread). Sun's Java 1.0 was shipped on January 23, 1996, and Microsoft was sued in October 1997. There was indeed "a rush" by Microsoft. Note that I referred to your "I can't see Microsoft rushing to make that happen" so I apologize if missed that you wanted to discuss only "the initial implementation." Note that you replied to the parent which wrote "it was up to OS vendors to support Java port, period. So Sun did it for Solaris, MS did it for Windows and nobody did it for Linux." Note "support" not "initial implementation." MS really did and wanted to do it for Windows and rushed to it. Of course, it was not in the form that Sun liked.
If you've not taken the GRE subject test for CS, then unless your program doesn't require it for entrance, it's going to be difficult or impossible to get into any of the top-tier schools (I don't know if that's your intent or not).

Unless your expectation of grad school is 16 hour days work every day for 4 years, then it will be harder than you expect it to be :P In all seriousness, work will ebb and flow. Some weeks/months you will be inspired and working whenever you're not sleeping or eating. Some weeks/months/years, you'll be uninspired, spending a few hours checking email, news sites, then sit down and play video games or watch TV.

Really though, those days intermix, and the sum total of the work that I did for my degree (aside from coursework for the masters degree) could have been completed in 6-9 months. The rest of that time was spent (in order of most to least time) relaxing, trying to figure out what to work on, campus politics, working on things that didn't make it into any paper (but which expanded my knowledge in other directions), and waiting on other people.

Edit: forgot the requisite infographic http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
Let's see, I spend extra time compiling, my debug version runs a lot slower while I try to find the bug, and I get laughed at by people working at other companies. Not to mention crap machines might not even meet the specs of the development tools.

Thank $DIETY that this guy doesn't run a shop for embedded programmers.
What he says about not needing publishers when developing video games isn't entirely correct. Except for the Xbox Live indie games marketplace you cannot hope to ship a game for a console unless you are backed by a publisher.

Publishers provide capital when getting started, especially on larger titles, plus resources that small developers may not always have access to like localization teams and QA testers.
The intellectual property for minimizing charge backs, preventing fraud, and handling exceptions and edge cases--knowledge built up over handling millions of transactions--is generally not worth relearning. Then there's the outrageous business crushing liability if something with CC data goes wrong.

You're usually better off keeping your brainpower focused on your app's differentiators, and leaving the recurring billing part to someone whose brain has already been sucked down the black hole of gateways, processors, and PCI compliance.

Chargify, Spreedly, and CheddarGetter come to mind as SaaS billers discussed frequently here.

(If your pain tolerance is higher, PayFlow Pro has tremendous institutional knowledge under the hood from handling over $100 million USD daily, despite changing corporate owners several times. Also compare Authorize.NET.)
May have legal duties?

If you wish to handle credit card details in your systems, you must pass PCI compliance, and this is something you really, really do not want to do if you're a small company.
Tell HN: Stories showing up multiple times
Just noticed this on the Ask page. The same story/submission is listed three times in a row. Identical number of comments, but each listing has one more point than the last.

http://imgur.com/g4fGl.jpg
Not sure why you donwvoted me here. Could you please at least explain. I truly think I was adding value. Cheers!
It transforms apps into something more like dumbed-down content.

How about "appliances?" Really, the ordinary non-tech end user wants something more like an appliance, and less like a software project.
I have always done this with checks and with invoice numbers. I generally start at some number just over 10,000.
http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/06/the_iphone_sdk_in...
You can statically link if you provide all your objects. You can also release your source or just license the commercial Qt.
Follow Friday: Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian
By day he’d be working at Breadpig and Hipmunk, and by night he’d be “trying to make the world suck less”, which would include working with Kiva.
We always hear about Facebook using PHP as a justification for it.

Unfortunately for this line of thought, Facebook wanted to move away from PHP 3-4 years back, specifically to Python I believe, and realized it would be too much work to rewrite their entire front end. So, they're trapped in PHP, not using PHP because they think it's the best choice.

This was mentioned in the article announcing HipHop.
We solved this problem for web development for orbs.com by doing the following:

Everyone has fast dev machines.

We access the site through a local domain name like orbs-sunny.com referring to my personal computer; however, this is routed through Nginx with throttling on to simulate a slower external connection.

If we need a faster connection for certain types of testing like uploading 100MB files, we use orbs-sunny-fast.com. This goes directly to our machine and skips nginx.

It is not perfect in that it doesn't simulate a slow computer; however, it's good enough to make everybody pay attention to speed.

We did this because speed related issues were often ignored at the time of original development. We found that the slowdown on execution hasn't slowed development since our app is supposed to be responsive anyway. If it's not responsive, it's much better to fix it while your head is in that space. This results in faster overall development.

Sunny
Great quote but it was F.B. Silverwood, part of a rousing sales pep talk from a hundred years ago:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bdetermination-alone+%2Bfb-...

He was a merchant who moved from Chicago to Los Angeles and wrote the little-known official song of California:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_You,_California
Check out these Amazon acquisitions:

* Woot (leading deal of the day site)

* Stanza (leading e-reader)

* Zappos (leading shoe retailer)

* dpreview.com (leading camera review site)

* AbeBooks (leading used book marketplace)

* Audible (leading audio book seller)

* BuyVIP (group purchasing)

* Amie Street (online music)

There model seems to be to try to compete with a home-grown offering, and if it doesn't work, buy the competitor with their cash.
This is horribly confusing "current job" with "lifetime earnings".

I took 2 months off last year to go skiing in Colorado with some of my friends who were ski bums. One in particular was about 26, was a web developer with a CS degree, and had been a ski bum for 3 years.

During that time he had been a janitor/house cleaner. Was that using his degree? Obvously not. Did it pay the bills and allow him to ski every single day while working in the late afternoon/evening? It sure did.

This year he moved back and is going to graduate school and consulting on the side (why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me). He is back on his "real" career after taking that time to do what he wanted to do with his life.

Honestly, I don't think it is a bad thing.
This reminds me of the Garbage Man in the Dilbert comics for some reason.
Small chunks? Call it "WeeDB"
Check out the extra data they served in the source that went to space: http://yfrog.com/86ul8p
while tweeting from a native app http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/21/beltzner
There is a glimmer of truth to this idea, assuming developers are being lazy about performance, but I still think it will reduce productivity.

My experience: I work at a high frequency fund. We do not skimp on performance - I rewrote Java's Math.exp for speed, and I rewrote our data store reader (already optimized to be read sequentially) to use multiple cores. Nevertheless, slow performance == downtime. I should be writing code right now. Instead, I'm waiting for a simulator to finish testing my strategy. I've probably wasted hundreds of hours this year waiting for tasks to finish, in 5-15 minute chunks.

I think there is an easier solution. If your developers are being lazy about performance get new developers. If that really isn't an option, pay them more if the code runs faster.
This is actually an intriguing question.

I remember reading a quote that claimed that the reason Windows UAC is so messed up is because all developers run as admins on their Windows machines, so they never bother to make their programs run without admin permissions. Opposed to, say, Linux, where the default is to run without root priviliges, and only run as root for the things you really need.
"I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning"

I'm not sure how that follows from the data. I'd be more likely to conclude that the job market doesn't support the levels of college graduates being produced.
"Novel geneticist" (= looking in detail how literary text/novel are produced cf. link) P.M. de Biasi distinguishes between "with Plan" literature and "au fil de la plume". 1st example is Flaubert (Many Plans and scenarii before "writing" the text) vs Stendhal eg. La Chartreuse de Parme: 3 weeks to write without detailed plan. http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14021.html
Definitely. For small developers, a 30% cut is cheap for the exposure you get in exchange (larger developers will typically expect to sell more items at higher prices. That changes the economics)
Intel killed off their ARM (XScale) for Atom...

PowerPC owns gaming. MIPS seems to still be common in networking devices. ARM is mobile and the rest is Intel and noise.

Seems to me that the killer feature ARM has isn't technical at all, it's that you can buy a core, graft on a DSP if your core doesn't have one (OMAPs already do) and your secret sauce needs a DSP (half the phone vendors have their own audio enhancement stuff or echo cancellation code that they think makes the difference) graft on a mobile chip and fab your own part. Then you add memory, flash, a battery and you've pretty much got a phone.

I'm not aware of any medium volume products that use custom Intel based hardware, I have no idea what the costs or terms are but I'm under the impression that unless you're going to make 5million chips, it's just not worth it with Intel parts. Now say intel opensourced an SSE echo killer and built some kind of 2watt Atom with GSM built in style chipset and it cost $15, I bet you'd start thinking ARM was in trouble.

Intel can pretty much build the highest performing per dollar chips, they can build them cheaper than anyone else, they have much more reliable processes than anyone else and they've shown time and time again that when they put their mind to it they can compete with anyone else.

I'd need to see some really compelling evidence that ARM was moving in to the serving market in any meaningful way. I thought they had a match with PowerPC, thought so with AMD, thought Linux was going to make alternative platforms viable, and probably thought they were in trouble several other times but they are fiendishly good.
I agree that higher education is on the brink of major change, but the author presents that data in a vacuum.

How about:

- What is the historical data set for higher-ed graduates aggregate? During recession?

- What fields of study are represented here? I would bet the data skews hard to BAs vs. BS.
This would be a reasonable defense of PHP if it didn't genuinely lack any sort of intelligent design. More sophisticated programmers hate PHP because it was thrown together like a Mad Max car.

PHP is popular in the same way Miller Lite is popular: it's convenient, cheap to run (on shared hosting) and adequate. However, if you're used to something finer, Miller Lite simply will not do, and people who think it's fine are not going to understand.
POSS - running OSS web services in a self-sustaining way
In all versions of PHP, callbacks are extremely easy (no eval or variable-variables required). You just have to pass the name of function or method around and use the call_user_func() function to call it.
Have you looked at the Pogo Sketch?
If you're paying on credit, you're not paying up front.
Poker Copilot (http://pokercopilot.com/ - a hand history database/HUD for online poker) is one example, and actually a good example of a business approach that many people here would doubtless love to follow (one guy, making a reasonable salary off of a medium-high-priced niche product, with no delusions of future massive growth).

Steve McLeod knew that he'd never be able to compete with Pokertracker on Windows (it doesn't run on OS X), so he decided to focus 100% on the OS X side of it and add features as he was able, and I think that was an excellent decision. The product is quite good there and doesn't feel like an afterthought like many OS X products. It's a small market, but he's pretty much the only player in town, so...
Why bother breaking the DRM on their media?

Because it is there. People do it in part for the challenge, and in part to send a message along the lines of "you can't stop us this way".
Ustream Lets Users Set Up Their Own Pay Per View And Ad Free Broadcasting
The problem is that for a lot of the jobs listed as "underemployment" the nash equilibrium is that a significant percentage of these jobs will always have bachelors degrees. If you can get a receptionist with a bachelors degree, would you hire one that is right out of high-school?
Amazon has a history of few failures

I think Amazon fails all the time. I think it tries to get the opportunity to fail as often as it can. However, Amazon's failures are mostly small scale, and not visible in the press.
PHP devs are the silent majority.
Note: this is from almost a year ago and it had been submitted to HN by the author, progrium, then. However it didn't get picked up and I'd be very interested to read what people think of this idea.
I can think of some reasons why they might be priced with the expectation of massive growth:

- The nascent cloud computing business

- The potential to be the iTunes of books (the kindle store independent of the hardware)

- No serious competitors in terms of becoming the wal-mart of online retail and a huge reservoir of expertise in this area.

The real question is whether this is all now rationally factored into the price.
"why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me" -- either you've never done consulting, or never cleaned a toilet.

From experience, I can tell you I rather clean a toilet. =)

But alas, cleaning toilets can't pay my mortgage. =(