skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are these solely for the domain name or was their a business sold behind the name. I would image that they are just the name. We exited Orlando.com for close to the top numbers, but it was an established business, even though HRN/Hotels.com dismantled the business and only used some of the technology and the name. So for them it was technically a name/tech purchase. We purchased the name only for 2 Mil in 99 or 2000 I can't remember exactly.
I think there's a large number of rules of thumb like this that can help detect that people you're working with suck. I certainly found the same thing when I would bring honest assessments of timeframes and suggestions about them:

"You need to be less negative."
Admittedly I wasn't clear there about the volunteers, these are people who volunteered via a BBC programme called 'Bang goes the theory' and I suspect probably also recruited via the BBC's website.

They do not represent a broad demographic, they are extremely biased. They are not, and never will be, a good group to base any sort of scientific test on. It violates the scientific method and these 'results' should never have been published in any serious form. To be frank it is medieval quackery.

Owen should go read some Karl Popper and bow his head in shame for even trying to draw any conclusions from results obtained by recruiting test subjects from a tv programme.

I'm not saying that he's wrong, he may be totally right. But his test was inherently flawed, yet he presents his results to Nature? He should never have written to Nature and his 'test' is as scientifically significant as 'Ask HN: Which browser do you use?'.

It happens all the time, but it's really beginning to piss me off.
From what I understand the non-paid users have a much higher probability to be "griefers" or those that destroy buildings/piss off other users.
I expect that they would probably still include keyboard+mouse, just add support for touch too.
The keynote video is worth watching, especially the part where they explain why they would never want to do this.
Awesome Fontstacks give you ready to use web font collections
A question: can open source projects submit just their most stable versions to the App Store and then also release in-progress versions through their own sites?

If so, that would seem to address most of the issues. The people downloading software from the App Store don't want buggy or untested software, and those interested in cutting-edge versions are likely to be aware and active enough to download it themselves.

Win-win situation.
A ruby framework for hosting your own url sharing / archiving site.

http://github.com/mmb/murlsh
Can I reach him at at@at.com?
X201 has also dock port.

I guess x300/x301 were only models without dock and the reaction to that was not that positive.
Real Go Projects: SmartTwitter and web.go
The mixergy was also very interesting:
http://mixergy.com/gary-kremen-interview/
Friends of a friend created this for Rails Rumble. I like it because I like design, typography and web fonts, and this makes it a lot easier to get a matching set of fonts. Including links to download the fonts, and the appropriate CSS, previews with the selected fonts, and (!) previews "what if the font was not downloaded".
I mean, open source projects already have stable branches and dev branches, so it wouldn't even require that much additional work from developers.
That is actually a good idea in settings where customers can/want to borrow a device from the store or mall, e.g. the RFID reader can be incorporated into the self checkout barcode readers that some supermarkets handout.

For a typical mall scenario, though, I think people will be reluctant to deal with the hassle of another device.
> You can get whatever widgets you want built using web technologies, and they run like apps

You must not know what a widget actually is. Unless there's been some startling update to iOS what you are referring to is nothing like an Android widget.
Training is a hybrid offering. It is not strictly a service and it is not strictly a product. Companies with large training offerings do not run them out of consulting regions. Training doesn't scale the same way consulting does, and its valuations aren't calculated the same way.

Specifically:

* A huge portion of the expense of training is in courseware development, which is a one-time expense.

* With solid courseware, the cost of a someone to deliver training is substantially less than the cost of a consulting domain expert for the problem domain of the course.

* The daily rate on a training course is substantially higher, worked back to $/billable-hour, than for consulting --- despite the fact that trainers are often cheaper than consultants.

* Sophisticated training operations (eg, pure-play training firms) can front-load and back-load training engagements with self-service courseware and with automated skills assessments tests, which drive billable time without an on-site consultant.

* Without a retention agreement from a single trainer, a package of courseware, self-service web applications, and skills assessment has value that can be sold to another training company.

In some sense, you can take any application that you yourself host and call it a "service". There isn't a bright-light dividing line between the two, or, at least, not a useful one. Regardless, it is not fair to lump training in with straight-up consulting.
They can't, by the very nature of software, reject all software containing any bugs. The store would never contain anything.

But if your software contains obvious bugs that impact the user during normal usage (it crashes when you try to save, or the preference pane only stays open for 5 seconds), they're not interested in being associated with your software. That seems fair to me.

This is only "unfair" to FLOSS if you take the position that FLOSS is significantly more likely to contain such significant, user-facing defects.

Now, I'm not saying that's true, but if it were true, that seems to me to be an indictment of FLOSS, not of Apple's rules for being in its store.
If the server is down, you can play offline, but disables updates and custom avatar skins.
Willful Ignorance
30% may be a reasonable trade-off. For that 30%, you get:

- Eyeballs! (A potentially huge built-in audience and higher chance of discovery)

- A payment infrastructure that users are already comfortable with

- An update infrastructure

- In-app purchase (I assume?)

- DRM (?) if you care about that sort of thing

All in all, this sounds like a fair trade to me.

My guess is that serious indie devs will target the OSX app store first, and later build in third-party payment + update. Early 2011 will be an interesting time for the Apple MicroISVs.
Does a domain name sale attach capital gains tax? because it really must be monstrous, if so. Can't imagine that many exemptions apply, and assuming the value at purchase was ~$10... or is it not that kind of asset?
Right, another device is always a hassle. Anyway, food for thought.
Because it offers a centralised way of nuking players off your server. And if they want to play again, a new copy of the game is 15 dollars more expensive than refreshing your IP address.
Hey, that's what Sparkle is for.
The App Store has always had this "problem". Just like an IT desk can't easily manage, say, 500 iPads. That's really what Windows is built for. Apple is really targeting consumers not enterprise customers.
VMWare and Parallels are already well-known and have their own direct sales infrastructures. I don't think they would ever have been interested in this.
The daily maintenance takes an hour. An HOUR. Most kitchens don't have a spare 5 minutes, let alone an hour.

Maybe this will be popular in places with gadged crazy chefs/customers, but I can't imagine it being a raging success. I'd rather get my lettuce from a producer who knows what he's doing and just charges me per head.
"""Business school should stick to teaching the mechanics of running a successful business as much as possible, and leave the psychology out of it."""

This is an interesting thought that I don't agree with. Management is simply the art and science of achieving results through people. If you broke management down into its major components, I believe that you would find that management is mostly rooted in psychology with a sliver of economics. If you leave the psychology out of it, there isn't much left.

(X-posted to blog comments)
Even isolated within subreddits, it's hard to get someone who is at odds with the ideas of most of reddit's userbase to visit a friendly subreddit when they visit the main page and see a bunch of f-bombs, nsfw links, militant atheist and liberal content, etc.

That's true of HN too, though, just in different political directions. There's a lot of polemical stuff that makes the front page, and especially a lot of fluff libertarian-partisan stuff, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1795577 . The comments often have a lot of militant-libertarian stuff too if the topic is politics/economics.

As someone who doesn't much like hardline socialism or hardline libertarianism, I don't really find reddit that much worse on this subject, especially considering its larger size. Mostly it's just skewed in the opposite direction.
Bartz: 3 of 15,000 employees have left Yahoo
Video chat is just one of those nice-to-haves in my opinion.

I work remotely a lot and always choose audio chat over video chat. Video chatting, in that context, just doesn't add anything for me.

Video chat was great when my girlfriend was living abroad for a couple of months though!
The New Hexayurts
Why the Mac App Store rocks for developers
I agree with your last statement: it'll be adopted more quickly by indie developers. I also agree that the arguments you list could be compelling for many.

The question I have is what will the likes of Adobe do?

I think the Mac App Store will see an avalanche of cheap/free apps, which is probably a good thing, as to do these with your own website and payment gateway infrastructure is probably uneconomic.
This project and the technology are pretty amazing great work. However, I have a bit of an issue with the idea these logos are intruding on the record of our lives. Not to get too Ayn Rand on you but A is A, this is the world we live in. Removing - censoring? - logos from record is whitewashing the real world.

I'm a big fan of ads from the 50s and 60s what if this technology existed then? A large record of the vernacular of the time could have been wiped from existence. There would be no 'Mad Men' - what would I watch on sunday night? :)

Don't get me wrong as art this is fantastic, but I'll keep the record of my life fully intact even if it includes Coke logos at my son's birthday party.
I think the perception different between "app" and "application" can mostly be credited to Apple's (successful) marketing.
Ascii histograms and more cool data analysis tools in Python
What it takes
The '30 days of standby' figure assumes that you let your Air go into hibernation, which has been supported by MacBooks for a long time, but only as a last resort when the battery gets low. The Air is apparently just more aggressive about using hibernation.

The underlying power management architecture (top-notch, admittedly) hasn't changed at all. Hibernation isn't any faster to restore than other MacBooks with a SSD. They've just made wake-from-sleep slightly faster on the new Air. Nice to have, but it doesn't seem as significant to me as Steve made it sound.
The crux of the matter:
1) Will Lion change the software install policy to App Store only (like iOS)

2) Will the App Store create an un-level playing field years from now by training users to only install Apple certified software.
Very cool. Does it support horizontal histograms? :P
Ask HN: How to go about developing a graphics intensive Iphone Game?
I have a game idea laid out on my scrap sheet. It is pretty physics intensive and i need the best possible way to go about developing it. I don't have much time to do it on my own and was wondering if you guys can recommend partners/other dev companies who can help with such a project. Also, what can i expect in terms of costs?
This sounds more like a case of people not understanding what proving by induction is (and as a consequence, not doing so) rather than them proving by induction and and not understanding what they are doing.
After several generations of netbooks, people are still pining for optical drives for the one or two times a year you wish you had one? I'd much rather the smaller form factor and a USB key for data transfer.
you can't compare technical skills with teaching attitude
Perhaps the author has a slanted view of how open source software tends to work.

You often have nightly builds, development (alpha/beta) releases and stable releases. Most people want and use the stable releases.

It's true the Mac App Store won't work for distributing the rest. This is hardly surprising and not the way you'd want to distribute this anyway I would think.

For stable releases, the App Store guidelines will probably result in more stable software. That's probably a good thing.
Agreed, if you want to know how things really work one of the best articles I've ever read on the subject is by Venkat from ribbonfarm.com.
Read the Gervais Principle it's long but well worth it, lots of fresh thinking, and if you watch the office you'll see it in a whole new light.

Part 1
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

Part 2
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...

Part 3
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/04/14/the-gervais-principle-i...

Part 4
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/14/the-gervais-principle-i...
In theory. But in fact, many apps do leave stuff behind, even when you delete them out of your applications directory. Hence the need for programs like AppZapper.
It's probably less than the 50% bump in revenue, and likely cheaper than building it the first time since you can reuse tons of assets...(of course provided that it's 50% of something sufficient).

Let's be realistic about what we're talking about here, most phone apps are not multi-million dollar, multi-year AAA development efforts. They're typically made by a couple guys over a few months. That's why the typical app per-unit price is so low compared to the typical app-per unit price for desktop software. In the case of a "AAA" title, we're likely talking about something that's multi-platform anyway...code is generally cheap, art assets and design is expensive. A great example, Plants vs. Zombies for desktops is $20, for the iPhone it's what...$4? Yet it was completely worth it for PopCap to rebuild the entire game for the i-platforms (twice!)

In other words, if it's not worth doing it for a 50% revenue bump, it probably wasn't worth doing it the first time either.
of course the birkenstocks would be featured prominently...
He has no debt.
I'll read them all over the next couple of hours. (I am sick in bed anyhow :)) Readings that I recommend are "The Great Jackass Fallacy" (I got my copy <$10 on Amazon) and "Drive" by Daniel Pink. There's also a Youtube/TED video that sums up "Drive" very well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
To me, you just defined the distinction further. Anyone on a company's sales staff can do an in-person sales meeting and sell a product. Want to sell more product next month? Hire and train more sales staff.

But only Amy Hoy can teach a seminar by Amy Hoy. People are paying for your specific knowledge/reputation. You have a fixed amount of time every month and cannot be in two places at once.

Still don't agree. Not a product :)
Facelette: Chat Roulette for FaceTime
Force Downloads in your webapp with HTTP Headers
"Business school should stick to teaching the mechanics of running a successful business as much as possible, and leave the psychology out of it."

I disagree. At least 85% of success is knowing how to put on a good show. Knowing what behaviors/signals/designs will get what reactions is key, and it's something that can really only be learned from a competent teacher.
There are a ton of great nuggets of info and insights into the process of getting and early stage tech company off the ground. Its pretty cool to see our lives on paper...
Yes, but how many have specifically whitelisted Reddit?
Closure doesn't do it that way, and the Closure Compiler will collapse the namespacing so that it doesn't result in runtime overhead.
"The battery life, while not terrible, isn’t as good as a 13” or 15” MacBook Pro."

Actually, the battery life is measured using a more real world benchmark now. Jobs mentioned it has improved quite a bit compared to the macbook pro.
Because I don't like how X11.app behaves when tabbing in and out of it. And there are a few bugs in the version of X11 supplied by Apple.

I have Arch Linux installed on a VirtualBox instance, but then it's the hassle of moving files between computers.

I'll come up with something that works for me eventually, but right now Terminal.app is the best option.
"Graham met Morris, an authority on the Unix computer language"

Sigh...

Great article though. And a wonderful portrait of pg!
But Nordstroms doesn't own the city. Apple does.

When all roads lead to the local men's department, yeah I'd be concerned with which products do, and don't make the cut.

No kexts? Seriously? No outside updates? Can't wait for the first app store 0-day.
iTerm2. Interesting. iTerm(1) was really slow. I'll check the sequel out. Thank you for the tip!
i think that depends on your product. what is your target group? is there a pattern on how wealthy this group is?

is the service very specialized?

when a/b testing, interpreting the data correctly is key.

take your time and try stuff...
What Joe considers important (public source tree and outsider commits) are probably amongst the absolute least important and interesting aspects of openness. It's the type of thing only a maintainer would care about.

He's arguing a point that nobody cares about. Even RMS is probably saying, "You're being a bit pedantic here about the definition, aren't you Joe?"
6.4 Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good it may be rejected

I can get behind this.
Gotta thank Hoisie for writing this. Nice shout out to HN. :-)
So that's the thing - if Apple promises that there will always be a way to directly install to the machine, I'm totally okay with these rules, they're quite reasonable.

However, this sets them up to do the same thing they did with iPad / iPhone, then require me to pay $100 to bless my machine as a "Development machine", then I can install what I want. Or maybe even then, I can only use Apple-certified binaries but I can use XCode. Curated experience is fine, but only if I have the freedom to choose an alternate one.
I thought about it, but man, they were like a hundred dollars back then. And, if I recall correctly, you had to fax a signed contract back to Network Solutions to complete the registration
Sachin's conflating the teaching of techniques he finds distateful with the general notion of teaching management skills in general.

Trying to teach the mechanics of running a business without going into psychology is like trying to teach the piano with only a book and a metronome. I cannot tell you how many times an MBA2 student (I'm currently an MBA1 at Michigan, which is awesome and amazing) has made a comment like "I was in [x] situation that was eerily just like a roleplay situation in my MO class."

The mechanics of running a business are exactly the sort of thing you can learn in a book (or a blog); dealing with people to get optimal outcomes takes a classroom environment with an excellent teacher and groups of other students. You have to bang the keys to really learn how to be an effective manager of - and hopefully, leader of - people.
Thank you.

I am probably going to do a "ask me anything" about this stuff once I have a chance to catch my breath.
The desktop sharing of skype has a long way to go to be used seriously. I can only assume from your comment that you haven't used it. They may have their audio codec down, and the video codec works for live video, but not for content. It's the same deal with JPEG for text for instance.
It surprises me there isn't a gentleman's agreement that the Library of Congress can make and store as many copies as they want for the sole purpose of archiving, and that the copyright holders don't press charges since it's not as if they'd loose anything by it.

Seriously, the LOC should just go ahead and do it. Aren't copyright rulings supposed to include damages? Any competent judge would rule zero damages on the off chance that someone did bring suit.
That's odd. Most great designers I've seen have pretty good sites. If not a bit gawdy, but certainly never this frumpy.
Have you ever worked at/with a company that does enterprise sales? It's not true the "anyone" - even sales staff - can do any sales call.

The training is, actually, more product-like than Freckle in terms of how tight the ties are and the ROI on time.
DNS was a terrible idea. So hierarchical and monopolistic. So full of flaws.
A bigger point Bruce makes is the issue of confidence in Google. Groups is consumer oriented, but as developers we've seen Google turn on a dime, change its mind, and leave developers who've bought in to their technology, out in the cold. Bruce mentions Wave... no follow through from Google. Anyone who pitched a Wave based service in their own companies or business plan is fired, but the Goog keeps rolling on unperturbed. Microsoft, whatever else you might say, never hung developers out to dry like that.

Who's ready to build a full HTML 5 site now, and ask IE users to install Google Chrome Frame? Ready to bet your company on it? Six months from now, Google could get bored with it. Yawn. Not working out, fellas. But hey, it's open source, so you guys keep working on it, ok?
Highlighting A Collection of Creative Media
ist it only php that you don´t like?
or generally the web stuff?
(personally i don´t like fiddling with wordpress too. it doesn´t feel like the right tool, most times)

anyway your stomach (at least mine) is more often right than one might think. :)
I simply refuse to believe that locking a platform down is the best way to improve user experience. There has to be a better way!
Yeah, absolutely, the optical drive is a waste of space almost all the time.

With regard to slow networking, I wonder if a gigabit ethernet/USB adapter like the Belkin F5D5055 would help. Obviously USB 2.0 maxes out at around 30-35MB/s, but if the adapter can actually attain those speeds it should be fast enough when you need a bit more than Wifi.

Generally, I'm very tempted to go for the maxed-out version of the 13" MBA. I'll probably take a look at the screen at a retail store though, I'm not keen on the glossy finish, and my old 2006 MacBook has terrible angle dependent colour representation. Going to make this the motivator for launching my first product. :)
I disagree with his opinion of the MacBook Pro glass screen. I think it looks great, it's very easy to clean, and it simply doesn't scratch. It's one of the main reasons I went with a MacBook Pro.

Between the all-aluminum enclosure and the glass screen, you'll have a laptop that will always look almost as good as the day you bought it, and that means great things for resale value.

On the other hand, my original plastic MacBook looked very aged after two years of heavy use.
I cringe every time he writes "could of" instead of "could have".