skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The discussion here at least seems to ignore one thing: 30% will not happen because that would mean Amazon would make -no- profit and still incur expenses. The agency model under which the vast majority of Amazon's ebook sales are done has a requirement from the publisher's that they get 70% of the sale price, regardless of what said sale price is. If Amazon jacks up the price for iOS sales, then they get 70% of that, and Apple gets the other 30%. Not going to happen. Personally, I'd bet on Apple announcing sometime in the near future a drastically reduced cut for in-app content purchases, more like a payment processor's cut, I.E. 5% or less.
It's 97% sun-drenched desert. There's plenty of energy in Egypt, on average 12 hours a day.
That's a good point. I already have a $0.99 iPhone-only version. The "full" version which is priced a $2.99 supports both iPhone and iPad. However, the $0.99 version sells really badly. Around 5% of the full version. I'd say it's because reviewers have only focused in the universal app and users are not finding the iPhone only version.
Is this site worth developing / promoting or too niche?
I was tired of running into problems with encrypted pages not being able to show off-site content without giving IE Mixed Content warnings, so I threw this site together in few hours to get around it.

Do you think there's enough of a market to develop it, or just leave it as a hobby site?

(I already had all the servers and ecommerce stuff setup from other projects, so it was pretty easy to just put all the pieces together)

What say the hackers?
I also checked out mog after reading your post, and it seems like a great service. My post was not meant as a critique of mog; the main point was that before Pandora, 'managing' my music was a time-consuming and tedious process. Discovering new music involved hours of browsing amazon listening to 30 second clips and trying to make educated bets as to whether I would actually like a CD or not. Making music playlists is another very fidgety exercise, especially when trying to update them with new music. Pandora solved all that for me, and for free! If I decide the ads on Pandora get to be too much, I might consider trying out mog, but for now I have very little motivation to switch.
Maybe it's time for an HTML5 based Kindle app. From a customer point of view I wouldn't care as long as the functionality is the same.

However, a main issue with this would be the limit space available via HTML5 databases on the ipad - afaik something like 25 megabytes.
"There's nothing to stop an end-run around any of this"

I thought the whole point of this outrage was that Apple was trying to stop the end-run. This step isn't a complete blockage, but they're certainly trying to make it harder for customers to get content from outside and easier to get it through Apple's paywall.
Pivot the product toward something less social that provides immediate value to church staff/leaders

I would go with this one, if you still care about the space. You probably have a lot of customer understanding and a good network.

Remember, though, that pivoting doesn't just mean tweaking the features. Sometimes it means throwing the thing out entirely and going after a totally different customer/problem with new focus.

What would you do if you poured every spare hour into something for an Internet eon, and came to the realization that what you're doing isn't going to pay off?

Speaking entirely personally, I would toss the product and build something new on top of what I've learned about customer needs. Keep the old site around long enough to cross-sell and upsell existing audience into the new offering which is solving a problem they [presumably] have and reveals its value quicker than the current product. Then you're only losing your development time, but you've been able to keep all of your sales, conversation, and strategy time.
Or alternatively it's why record label contracts make no sense anymore.
Do you believe that we have a right to a public education?

No.

Okay, so right to a fair trial is a negative right... but right to council is a positive right? How are you going to get a fair trial w/o competent representation?

I'll concede that point.
Stop selling books through iPhone and give Kindle app users a free kindle.
Good point. Hopefully solar tech will get to the point where making use of that energy is worth the investment.
You can now enable multiple account sign-in, I guess this is for switching between them.
To clarify, in case anyone thinks this is a repeat without clicking through: It's been available as a PDF, but now is available in ePub format, as well.

Thanks, chromatic! I guess now I really do have to buy a hard copy, as well -- show my support.
I just asked a few folks on how they were using node.js, check it out here:

http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/15/who-is-using-node-js-an...
Mind Blowing Examples Of Bridge Photos
Mind Blowing Examples Of Bridge Photos
I don't think that's a valid comparison. All watches tell time, but how they tell time varies greatly. I own an automatic Panerai watch (http://cl.ly/4YkQ) and it looks completely different from watches that Urwerk (http://cl.ly/4XvZ) or Richard Mille (http://cl.ly/4XZR) make. Comparing how different those three watches look with the visual differences between, say, an iPhone 4 and a Nexus S and it's night and day. The Nexus S and iPhone 4 are about the same size, same thickness, same dimensions/proportions in width/height, about the same size screen, and the screen takes up about the same size % of the phone face.
Another advantage is that when something breaks, the code is fresh in your mind.

If you only deploy in big steps, you have already worked on a few other things and have forgotten a lot about the (broken) code. So fixing things take more time and it becomes more difficult to learn the 5 whys behind the bug.
The lack of awareness and discussion about that area and the lack of access to it by everyday Japanese spoke tons about the Japan-U.S. relationship.

I should hope so, given that it's the US Embassy.
I set it up as an RSS feed and read it on my iPhone in idle times in Google Reader.

I've also found that I seem to need at least one distraction, so if I play some good music (I seem to work best to Queensryche or Eminem) that keeps the "I want a distraction" part of my brain happy and the rest of it can focus on getting things done.
One thing I like about coding is the projects that are hard that you actually finish. I struggle with these, not understanding, fighting bugs, and just going slow in general. But I keep at it. At some point I look back and I see I've actually coded something that very nearly works like I wanted it too. That is very satisfying.
Macam resep masakan daerah: SUP KAMBING KACANG HIJAU
This article is incorrect, as far as I am aware.

Apple has implemented a policy where by everyone who sells something through their app needs to provide the same set of products and services through In-app purchases. That means that the kindle app can maintain their current store but must also implement an in-app purchase alternative, powered by apple, and thus with Apple's 30% tax applied to it.
Well, at present the cars are pretty much written off at the end of the year as total losses anyway - you might see a few cropping up for sale, but for well below the manufacturing costs in my experience. So forcing a sale wouldn't really change the economics of the situation in the way you're thinking.

Who would buy though? The cars gain new parts on a race-by-race basis - they're never line production vehicles so there'd never be a stock of parts available to support them. The support infrastructure to run them is horrendously intricate, components are designed to be inspected every few hundred miles.... I can't see how it'd be viable - the current market that buys the few cars that crop up is hardly enormous.
Just curious, how have you marketed it so far?

I see 75 people online right now, how many total players in month do you have?

Monetization is free to play with an item mall?
AFAIK, this behaviour is only illegal if you're deemed a monopoly. Certainly Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smart phones, but it could be argued that they have a monopoly on app store purchases, since I'm sure that they have a greater than 70% share (by dollars) of app store purchases.
This is a wonderful idea, particularly since even a partial implementation would do good. Just having a license for derivative works and the latex source would do wonders.

A typical situation is that you notice an obvious extension to a result in a paper, which does not warrant publication. Being able to make an updated version of a paper with that easily would be a good thing.
I've seen single line changes cause data loss, corruption, system outages, remote root exploits...

I'm not sure that the number of lines makes the change more or less risky.
Dr. Dre started burning man?
I guess the BBC has found, after 25+ years, what a white hat hacker is.
I use to wonder the same thing myself before I started using Vim.

Now I'm not a Vim expert but if I had to sum up the benefits, I would say that it allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard _and_ your fingers on the home row the entire time when programming. It's a subtle usability benefit that means that I can use more of my cognitive resources on the programming logic when I don't have to take my eyes off the screen to find the mouse, reach for the mouse, bring my eyes back to the screen, use the mouse and place my hands back on the keyboard. This is a bigger distraction than it sounds.

I know most editors have keyboard shortcuts but for me the user experience is just not the same as Vim's and I didn't fully appreciate this until I was reasonably proficient at using it.

Edit: formatting
Your 2 examples are no different than what PayPal does. Granted PayPal has few restrictions to what they allow you to buy/sell through them. However, there are restrictions and PayPal (as will most payment systems) does cut off malicious vendors. Our movie industry has managed to make movies "child friendly" through a rating system. And they did this without selling tickets through one payment processer.

Apple has little value add here and as their store grows, the long tail and new business models suffer due to there being only one store. AppleVAT is a good term for what they do. Their strategy is almost guaranteed to make the company less innovative.
So what do you do when you want to make a change that isn't a logical evolution of your existing codebase? Say, for example, you have an ecommerce site, and you're switching payment processors to use one with an entirely different API. Surely you can't just push a change like this straight to your production server.
Would you support the same compulsory licensing for the software you write? Are shareware authors bad people? (I'm trying to push this argument to understand why we need to treat music differently).
Most of the talks on the congress were in given in english, you can browse the schedule on http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/ and download all recordings http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/wiki/Conference_Recording...

Have fun!
AFAICT, the article is saying that if there's a way to purchase content externally and move it onto the device, there must also be a way to purchase it internally with the AppleVAT.

So they're definitely targeting books purchased off device.
Google Chrome 10.0.648.6 Beta
Fast downloads of the latest free software! Free software download,The biggest software directory for freeware and shareware download at mysoft101.com
I love Django to bits - this is the app I written in Django http://beepl.com/jan Hoping to go public in March this year..
The first thing that comes to my mind... This will be a huge sell argument for Android: "Buy Amazon books 25% cheaper than on Apple phones".
Blockbuster also 'survived' pre-Netflix and look where they are now.
Could this be a reasonable stand if for the definition of life?
tl;dr - No RC. Beta2 instead.
I have very fond memories from when I was 9 or 10 about a book called I Hate Mathematics: http://www.amazon.com/Brown-Paper-School-book-Mathematics/dp...

It was the thing that really made math fun for me. So sure, stop telling kids that "math is fun", but don't stop trying to make it interesting; it's definitely possible.
Apple doesn't "own the right to put material on that device", as apple provides many mechanisms to put material on the device outside of apple's control. Here's some of them:

1. iTunes file sync lets you put arbitrary files in there. I put many pdfs that I bought from pragmatic programmers in iBooks. Apple doesn't get a cut. iTunes also lets you sync any file type with any app that can read it (And apple lets free reader apps of all types in the store, it just has a restriction on operating a store via the app.)

2. Apple has provided a mechanism and gone into great lenghts to educate developers on how to build web apps that live and run form the device. These applications can have local storage, have an icon just like all the other apps, and can be connected to the net or run independant of the net. You could write a porn app that lives on the device and, unless apple heard about your website, apple would never know.. and they can't stop you either.

Now consider this: The Amazon Kindle operates as if amazon owns the right to control what material you put on it, right? Apple is not allowed to sell kindle books. Kindle books are an arbitrary proprietary format...while Apples' bookstore uses the open standard epub mechanism.
lol the comments on that site are crazy.
VLC: A slight misunderstanding...
I'm tired of working for others. What I'm doing is meaningless and unexciting. When I look around at other development jobs, they look like more of the same. The more interesting jobs appear to require several years of experience with skills I don't have.

I'd like to spend more time learning new things, and I get very little of that in my current 40+ hour week job. If I'm lucky, I learn some obscure tidbit at work about once a month. I study on my own time, but progress is slow.

It looks like developing web apps is a good solution, although not the only one. It leverages some of my existing skills. I find the work enjoyable, provided I'm not doing it to excess. And if I'm working for myself, and want to take time off to learn some new skill, I can just do it and not be worried that my manager is breathing down my neck for being "unproductive" for 4 hours.

If I can create multiple small streams of income, I will finally be able to cut down on the amount of time I spend working, and put more time into all the other things I enjoy.

I haven't had any luck yet, but I'm working on it.
Think Tanks are paid to consider all possible and plausible eventualities, forecast outcomes and correlate dependencies for their given client or scenario.
Let's hope so, but the article put it differently - if an app presents content bought elsewhere, there must be an option to buy that content also in-app. So if you are right, the article is wrong.
I think Amazon could resolve this really easily by doing a cross marketing deal with Apple.

But at least Apple is only taking %30. Amazon has completely excluded Apple from selling books via the iBookstore app on the kindle. In fact, you can't even read iBookstore books on the kindle because Amazon doesn't allow Apple to produce an app for the kindle.
One does not need to go all the way to Redmond to find illegal activity, one can find it in Cupertino as well, e.g. Apple back dating stock options.
DataLeak Prevention Bypass (via faked USB keyboard)
[1] Neither the C nor C++ standards mention threads at all, so I don't think they disallow doing anything with them.

[2] volatile was never strictly about memory ordering, but that's definitely implied. It was really originally for "this variable is really a hardware doodad. make sure you poke it in exactly the manner the code says to." reordering writes to a hardware device can be disastrous. The standard of course, came quite a bit later after the hardware.
For music last.fm does a wonderful "gigs in your city" RSS feed.
I've never really understood tablets.

I'm of the opinion that if I was going to carry around something too big to fit in a pocket, I might as well just make that thing a laptop.
Amazon writes a player for every platform because the kindle format is a proprietary one created by amazon.

Apple doesn't have to write a player for every platform because epubs are an open standard.
Some of the talks are in German and some are in English. You can tell the language in the filename, -en- or -de-. And the talk numbers on the left of that chart link to notes, slides, and blogs related to the talks.
Intel kept in the dark over Nokia’s MeeGo plans; operators reject first device
Isn't that why there is now a app store for macs? Apple wanted 30% there too.
Your Twitter is full of bullshit
William Faulkner on splendid failure
White House: What's Blocking Innovation in America?  My Answer: IP Laws
Why not double the price?

http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+(and+no,+Im+not...
And how exactly does this relate to the way they deploy their code? As far as I can tell, they actually review code before marking it ready for deploy. That kind of changes would be an issue with "usual" large batch deploys as well.
The VC investor is, I think, to stop the property loophole that used to apply here. To get a visa you had to invest $1M in a business, so people registered a company, bought a $1M house, leased it to themselves, employed all their family and moved in.
> But with food, housing ... _someone_ has to provide it.

No they don't. You can provide it for yourself, you might not get the latter to meet local standards easily, but then here in Canada you can build a shack out in the country so long as you vacate if loggers roll in.

You might end up sharing it with a bear, but that's why you buy a gun and then you're providing your own defence too.
One interesting thing is that not a single Github DMCA takedown notice so far deals with direct copyright infringement, nor do any of them specify which lines of code are infringing. I'm sure the more traditional copyright infringement happens on occasion, but we have yet to see any DMCA takedown notices as a result.
If a mobile app wanted to be updated every single week, I would get annoyed at some point. The point is that web applications can do this in a seamless manner.
>"walled online directory and social network for their members."

Maybe a walled online directory is a good idea. A walled social network is stillborn - you might as well do a private list-serve and save people the trouble of logging in.
I'm experienced with the appstore, including having an app that sells for the same price and leveraging short term exposure by lowering the price.

Absolutely lower your price to $0.99. The goal here is not to maximize revenue for the short period apple is featureing you, but to maximize momentum for the next week or two.

If you have viral features, such as sharing, etc, then you have a chance of sparking a lot of further growth by having new people introduced who then share it.

Never once had anyone complain about the price being lowered.
This really isn't an apt comparison at all. Music has a pretty limited set of uses than can be enumerated and license fees can be assigned to. This would allow for more competition and innovation in the music space if every new service didn't have to spend years upon years negotiating with the record labels.

It would be even better if television and movies also had compulsory licenses. Maybe not for new releases but after a certain amount of time the value of certain types of videos becomes nearly equal.
That's a battle I just don't care about winning.

Times were crazy, and missteps and miscommunications may or may not have happened. But I've got nothing but love for these people. Going forward, I'm way more interested in being "a guy with $1.5m looking for top people to build an amazing company with" than "the guy that got kicked out of YC".

Thank for going to bat for me, though! :)
We adopted continuous deployment at my last company, and it was a huge win for us. It resulted in less downtime, reduced the cognitive load on our developers, and let us turn changes and bug fixes faster, which just made everyone happier. Here is the approach we took --

We got continuous integration working first by setting up an automated test server. We used cerberus, which is a trivially simple ruby gem that simply polls a repo, grabs code, runs tests, and reports the result. You could install this anywhere, even an old Mac mini if you wanted. We spun up a low end server for it. We wrote great tests, got decent coverage, and made adjustments in our automated testing strategy to increase our confidence.

Then we worked on zero-downtime deployment and rollback. This was actually the hardest part for us. With regard to schema changes, if we had to hammer our database (new index on a big table) then we needed to take the site down, but otherwise our strategy was to always add to the scheme, wait for the dust to settle, and then remove things later. This worked for us, but we had a relatively simple schema.

I haven't quite figured out how an ajax-heavy site would pull this off. That seems like a hard problem since you need to detect the changes and refresh your javascript code.

We then combined these two to get automated deployment to a staging server. We could have written monitoring code at this point, but we decided to punt on that, relying on email notification for crashes and watching our performance dashboard.

And finally, we set it up to deploy to production, and it just worked, and we never looked back. It was the most productive and pleasant setup I've ever worked in.
Ask HN: How do you interact with HN?
Hacker News is a challenge for me. Using it regularly is tremendously valuable, but very time consuming as well.

So, do you interact with HN by regularly checking it for updates, or have you built some other system to interact with it?
>But I’m convinced that almost anyone can be drawn into maths if they are presented with something intriguing or surprising which prompts them to want to investigate

That's what I used to think when trying to get other students into programming -- like getting a kid do say 'Holy crap, I just created multiplication'. But it doesn't seem to work that way.

I've come to be used to the concept that other people think on a completely different plane than me, so it's pretty hard or often just doesn't work at all to try to find this 'intriguing or surprising' thing that can get them others to be interested.
Well, the idea was to synchronize member info with churches' existing membership database, so that everyone is already ON the network -- they just have to create a password.

It really worked with our own church, but took some effort to promote among the Sunday School classes and small groups -- they were really the driving force for adoption.

Point is: it took some effort outside of just paying a hosting bill -- that's what most churches don't stick around long enough to see it pay off.

[edit: oh, and the product does have a email-based list-serve feature as well, which is one way a lot of members use the product]
Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2011.01 released
Most of our deploys don't have a schema change, and often when adding tables or columns the migration can be run before the new code is deployed. When dropping or renaming columns you'd usually need to first deploy code that is able to gracefully handle the migration.

However, sometimes it's not worth the extra code complexity and we just take the site down and migrate.
I wish there were more Cosma Shalizis in the world. Somehow, statistics has become the ultimate in cargo cult mathematics. We need more statisticians who can write clearly to set fire to our thatched airplanes.