skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the linked "Download Squad" "thinking"

> Don't be mesmerized by the tawdry typography, though: with juicy propaganda it's always what isn't said that matters. There is no mention of IE9's hyperspeed JavaScript engine, Chakra. There's no mention of pinned tabs or per-process tabs or Tracking Protection Lists. It feels a bit like a scrawny, bespectacled geek throwing stones at a fat billionaire with three trophy wives -- the nerd is probably right, but the pimp doesn't really care.

the next paragraph, somehow, begins with

> There's no doubt that Firefox 4 implements a broader range of Web technologies -- and don't get us wrong, it is an excellent browser -- but more stuff doesn't necessarily equate to better stuff.

This is what passes for logic nowadays?
Tell that to the DoD.
I don't know, I kind of think of XP as the AK-47 of Windows operating systems. As a non gun owner I guess I could only compare Vista to a Howitzer.
Good analysis, though I'd point out that Modcloth is not strictly speaking an infrastructure business.

Modcloth is closer to the traditional retail model. They buy inventory and sell it. Their innovation is in getting user feedback before committing to holding inventory.

What we're doing at Fabricly is building an infrastructure business, with a distribution and production network for fashion designers.
... or compare US with China. I know which one I prefer :D

300kb/s download, 1Mb/s up. That's international. I guess the firewall slows it down a bit.

No real shaping or anything, just certain sites are unreachable.

Cost is quite competitive. About $7/month. Only problem was setting up a router, this province uses some weird username-scrambling dialer software (windows only, of course), and my real username (sniffed via Wireshark) happened to get a new-line+char-return scrambled into it. I had to brush up on XML, then hand-edit a router config file. Did you know that XML has really stupid new-line/char-return handling? Anyhow ... it's better than Australia (on the sites you can reach), and the ISP service is only a little worse.

Big cities can get 20Mb/s, at ~$50 a month, but that's a premium plan.
Abusing 'the' is a pretty typical Russian error. Russian has no articles, and rules for using them in English are hard to formalize.
Clickable link: http://mit3k.com/

BTW, I used Pusher to implement the realtime comments, and it was ridiculously easy to integrate: http://pusherapp.com/
Thank you. No offense taken :)
Never doing soomething is rarely a sound strategy.

Just like all other aspects of business, there can be solid reasoning behind staying stealth mode. I'll agree that this USUALLY isnt the case for most people who go stealth, but to say that it is ALWAYS poor strategy is simplistic and trivializes the idea of having any business strategy pre-launch.
Ah, no. Reading that paragraph just doesn't work right. I've read LoTR well upward of 10 times. I've read 1800s literature.

I know how good, flowery, verbose English prose goes, and that's not it.
Should Software Evolve?
Does Tim Sneath, not realize that "modern browser" was just the rhetoric Paul Rouget was using to classify HTML5 support (and JS api, CSS3, etc)?

Who cares what you define "modern browser" to be? Rouget's point that IE9 still doesn't support the feature set that FF3.6 did is a valid concern.

Will MS push for larger feature set support? Will I have webworkers on IE9? What about javascript strict mode? When do I get SMIL Animations?

These are the questions I care about, not "what does modern browser mean?"
Keyboard Profiling, Finger Drumming, and ADHD
Watson destroys competition in Jeopardy, Day #2
Yeah, Mozilla's argument seems odd. It is basically saying that IE9 is not modern because it is about on par with their shipping browser (FF3.6x) -- and lets not forget that IE9 has a better UI, better tab isolation, JS perf, and rendering perf than FF3.6x. If anything Mozilla should immediately urge all FF3.6x users to move to Chrome.

I think a more true, yet less controversial statement from Mozilla would be, FF 4 will leave IE9 (and FF3.6x) in the dust with respect to standards conformance.

I'd even agree with that. But saying that IE9 is not modern seems dishonest.
Agreed, I started used the Zune software when I purchased a WP7 and really enjoy the software, especially when compared to itunes.

Great products but unfortunately failed for other reasons.
> The best strategy for humans, then, is to start at the highest value questions.

Also because doing that searches for Daily Doubles, which are concentrated at the higher value clues.
I didn't imply a positive or negative view (though I do disagree with it). I was simply offering a better hardware analogy since I disagree that Apple's hardware lock-in would be similar a Microsoft Windows lock-in.
Ok then. My experience is we process hundreds of successful transactions per month, get about 1 complaint every other month, and 1 chargeback about every 3-4 months. They do impound fees on any dispute or chargeback, but I would hardly call it business crippling. Certainly less severe than our merchant account which has a higher chargeback fee than PayPal, and also PayPal doesn't charge for customer disputes. Also PayPal has ruled against every customer who filed a complaint about delivery once we showed proof of delivery (not a signature). Our merchant bank has screwed us every single time there is a chargeback over non-delivery, even when we fax them a copy of the recipient's signature.

In short, I can't wait to get the "delete merchant bank/switch all processing to PayPal" task to the top of my to do list.

PayPal has never required us to leave a reserve amount in our account. I believe that is due to our low complaint/chargeback rate.
It has been extremely well documented that closures are planned for Java 8. If you absolutely, positively can't wait, anonymous inner classes are your best work-around at the moment. However, it turns out you can, in fact, get by without closures.

Or is this just a thinly veiled attempt to insult the current state of Java? If so, it might be more productive to simply choose a different programming language that you like better.
Translation: we prefer our pillorying to be private.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has been mentioned many times on HN but is worth mentioning again.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
You know, as a guy that uses free software whenever possible, I never liked a Microsoft product until I gave the Zune a shot (got it for free, so...). It still pisses me off, having to run a virtual machine just to load up my music, and I've never used an iPod, but I honestly like the device and the firmware a lot. It's one of the best offerings they've put out.

I hope the product design and engineering talent in the Zune team continue to do great things for WP7, even if I'll probably never use one.
I'm gonna take a wild guess at what's going to happen:

- If you're an existing, popular service on iOS, you get grandfathered in, and you get to keep your current way of doing things so long as you don't rock the boat.

- If you are a new application/service, you have to pay 30%. No workarounds, no exceptions.

My theory is this: if Apple tightly enforces the policy on services customers already know and love, at least some will be forced to remove their offerings from iOS. Existing users are disappointed, and are now (a) upset with Apple, and (b) incentivized to go buy an Android.

On the other hand, if a service is small and not yet widespread, most users won't be disappointed if that service can't afford to put itself on the iPhone, and there are plenty of other apps/services to choose from, so no incentive to leave the iOS walled garden.
Yes! This is what culture and creativity is. How can we grow as a society when we cannot comment and build on the culture we live in?
"Hey kids, go to html5-instead-of-native-app.com, subscribe to our service, and have fun or something!"

Problem. Solved.
> However, one should not that the original LOTR was written by a linguist. As such it tended to be pretty wordy and often full of horribly complex sentence structures.

This is exactly what delighted me in Tolkien (LOTR; Silmarillion was over the top for me) or Maria Semyonova (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/880518.Maria_Semyonova_ , translator, Russian fantasy writer, bad film, no English translations that I know of) I was disappointed to discover that many other fantasy and fiction writers don't share the love or skill for such flowery language. It never occured to me that some readers might not enjoy it.

When I was reading some of the acclaimed fiction writers e.g. Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep" not once did I think "Heck, I bet I could write better than this!" I have no illusions of my chances of being a writer in English, when I haven't been one in my native Russian yet, but still. I would not think that thought when I was reading Tolkien or Semenova.
Good enough for what? Good enough to be exploited by a script kiddie in 10 seconds? Mozilla and Google are doing no one any favors by support XP.

It's like adding sweetener to poison. You may think you're doing good by making the poison taste good. But rather you should be encouraging people not to eat poison.

XP is ten years old. I don't know anyone on any other platform, including my friends using Linux, who is still using a 10 year old build of the product.
How Apple May Inadvertently Boost eBook Linking
Here's a quick comparison between the iPulse, SD Card, and latest gen iPod Nano with sizeeasy:

http://sizeasy.com/page/size_comparison/31203-inPulse-vs-iPo...

Only the watch body itself is shown: SizeEasy only supports cubic dimensions, so I couldn't find a way to show the wrist band.

Also, SizeEasy requires all three dimensions be provided, and since I couldn't find official dimensions anywhere else I used those cited around the web, for example:

http://www.berryscoop.com/2009/11/questions-answered-about-t...

Overall, decently sized but definitely not head-and-shoulders above the Nano.
There is, but it's crippled. Only the simplest of controls are exposed to Javascript, and the music stops playing when the app closes or the device locks.
You CAN make infographics to promote your site. Just get more creative!
My parents just purchased a laptop; they're not really "computer people" but it's hard to get by without one these days. They might have been better off with an iPad but they could never use it because it requires an existing computer to work.

My daughter got an iPod touch for Christmas and I was shocked that it's just a useless brick until connected to a computer. I had to bring her laptop to Christmas (and hide it) so she could use her shinny new toy once it was out of the package.
Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley?
You would not believe how many facebook accounts my cats have.

(for testing purposes, I'd never actually have one myself)
Yes, indeedy, permissions in the OpenTok API are coming very soon. Also, in our release 10 days ago we made it easier for sites that want to let people "ask a question, then kick them out ago" using forceUnpublish().

And thanks to a whole bunch of default event handling we've been adding over the last 4-6 weeks, we will soon publish a new "super simple" piece of sample code that gets a basic everyone-sees-everyone implementation of OpenTok down to about 30 lines of sample JavaScript code. This will make for an even simpler starting point for incremental code development.
Amazon will open up Kindle for the web and then whatever value-add Apple supposes they are adding will simply vanish.
While we are at it, please give links to some.
you still don't understand that by company I mean people it consists of?
Whoa! Slow down, buddy. Didn't mean to push your buttons there. You're right, I do get by just fine using inner classes, and will continue to do so. I was just wondering for the pure convenience of making code prettier.
Yes, MobileSafari plays music (with <audio> and direct links to MP3/M4A, etc.) quite well. The biggest issue with this as a path to replace native audio playback apps is how the browser manages resources for background tasks (tabs): they are thrown into a single pool and garbage collected when resources become constrained.

This directly mirrors how the OS manages suspended/background apps, but with the critical difference that the OS specially treats apps which are registered for different background services, like background audio playback, avoiding eviction for things like this which are effectively under active use, even when they are not on-screen.

The solution, I'd argue, is for Apple (and the web working groups, in general) to bring the same sorts of OS design concerns to browsers—in this case, richer interfaces for more intelligent handling of background tasks by both the runtime and the tasks, themselves.
It's not brilliant, but it's certainly valid, albeit stylized, English prose. Compare the paragraph above to the following.

It was at such a midnight hour of darkness and unwonted danger that they of whom I write sprang to arms. It were as though an Hannibal were on our borders and thus viewed; it was a nobler and braver deed than that for which Leonidas and his brave followers are renowned through all historic ages. They were trained soldiers -- their trade was war -- stationed at the gateway of Thermopylae expressly for its defence, but these men, used only to the arts of peace, from the highest motives of patriotism and duty take arms and go forth into the dunnest clouds and storms of war to meet a triumphant foe and face mortal peril. Nor were inroads made upon the foe or successes attained in the East or the West till the Northern armies felt the impulse of these opportune auxiliaries and the Confederacy under their conjoined forces began to yield along the lower Mississippi and in the far away Department of the Gulf.
I just can't seem to figure out why we supposedly live in the richest (if not that atleast in the top 10) and can't even compete on internet speed?

God help us.
Awesome to hear you're taking the dive, especially when coming from a consultancy. My co-founder is from Accenture and he's looking to take a LOA in few months as well. I did a similar thing 3 months back when leaving my job as a head hunter. It just dawned on me one day when I had to grab lunch with a candidate I was placing vs a meeting with prospective alpha user who was calling about the idea I was conceiving over a paper mock-up. Being the business guy it was the best move for me. Before that move I had trouble recruiting co-founders outside of my friends. My co-founders are now all people I've met through networking in trying to achieve a similar vision rather than simply being a friend and convincing people to join up with you. More importantly, my co-founders are now 3 other engineers to complement my business skills. Going full-time put me fighting right in the arena rather than commentating from the stands.

I think I've come a long way even in the last 3 months going full-time when thinking about the stupid things I did 5 months ago. Basically I was about to pay with my initial co-founder/roommate $20k to prototype the mock-up. Instead I've picked up coding (even at what I consider the old age of turning 27 but what the heck i'm in this for the long-haul) and found 3 other engineering co-founders who are all contributing to bootstrap and have instead $20k surplus to start with now.

Strangely enough, I offered equal equity as well but they said I should keep more of it since I'm full-time and invested more time into it up to that point. Furthermore, even though I never pushed it on them, two have approached me already to go full time starting the summer to pick up the pace as they've begun to get more excited about the idea. Now we're on our way to launching an alpha in 2 weeks!

Oh, and to note the paper mock-ups did wonders. If I had paid to outsource the project with all the iterations I had done up to that point based on the usability testing I would have easily paid triple. Thankfully, we haven't had a need to pivot yet from the responses, but we definitely have iterated a whole bunch since even three months ago which I could never have imagined I would have found out if I never left the job.
If you ever wish to chat and exchange ideas/stories email me anytime. Best of luck!
People buy Apple because they like the way they work in comparison to everything else. Since a lot of people seem to be buying Apple devices, by extension does that mean a lot of people don't understand the internet?
What AT&T has done goes far beyond simplification -- it's downright dishonesty.

Google does it more judiciously

Comparing the two, that's an understatement.
This is tough. From an outsider's perspective, it feels as though you've already moved on mentally: "we might be past the point where the damage can be repaired," "no trust on my part," and "there are a lot of things I still want to do startup and entrepreneur-wise."

Arbitration, litigation, and ultimatums all have their place in business, but sometimes the best case scenario is to just get out (dissolve, sell, etc.) Often times, the partner is just as upset as you are, so start by seeing if s/he'll privately buy your half, and if not, see if s/he's interested in shopping the whole company to new owners.

I understand that walking away from or selling a company with 5 employees and $2m in revenue isn't a decision that's a.) easy or b.) happens overnight, but it seems as though you've thought it through and are ready to move on.

One way or another, thanks for sharing, and let us know how it turns out.
That's like saying because Paris Hilton has an address in Beverly Hills and attracts tourists, the city should pay her. Actually that's not quite as insane as it sounds. Cities and counties give tax breaks to companies that bring jobs to their constituents, all the time. It all depends on who is in the position of power. If your app really is that good, concessions can always be made. Look at how long it took the Beatles to get on iTunes.
Ian, thanks for the direct response. Any timeline on when you're going to be releasing this next update?
I think the limitation has more to do with trying to build a richer feature-set to get users to migrate from XP to 7 (and beyond); but on the other other hand, it's not fair to complain when your ten year old OS isn't getting those newer features -- hell, they should be lucky Microsoft still supports it!
The problem with this book, of course, is that it ignores the lore Tolkien shares in the Silmarillion, his letters, and other books regarding the origin of Sauron and Orcs.
I haven't really seen a great deal of 'push back' against the practice.

What exactly happens if one uses a pseudonym at Facebook or Quora? Does Big Brother come to drag you off to Room 101?

Perhaps few people bother to push back against the Real Name policies because there's nothing much to push against. If I decide to use a pseudonym, I doubt that a site would rush to stop me: Better a user with a non-"real" name than no user at all. And even if they enforce the policy, I doubt that they expend much effort. How could they? As patio11 once pointed out at great length:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

... the One True Personal Name problem is intractable. It's so difficult that entities which actually care about identity, like major governments, don't bother to solve it: They issue numbers instead.

The Real Name policies also aren't the big threat, IMHO. A company with a Real Name policy is actually being very above-board: Explicitly asking for your real name, and then visibly stamping it on everything you submit, is a clearer signal of a site's privacy policy than any actual written privacy policy. It's intuitive. People understand names, and pseudonymity, and anonymity as they apply in the real world. What they don't understand, and the source of the bigger problems, is that on the web the things that you type under a pseudonym can be traced back to you anyway -- by cookies or IP addresses or traffic analysis or cross-correlation of credit card numbers or mobile phone IDs or word frequency analysis -- and that companies like Google and Facebook are built around building those links and then selling the data. The problem with Facebook isn't the parts that are explicitly public; it's the parts that ought to be private but aren't.
A Watson Victory? This is About a Contest, Not Science
I can't stand the walled garden approach Apple takes.

I think the OSX/Mac overall experience is the best out there, beating Ubuntu 10.10 and W7. (Reliability, programmer-friendliness, 'normal' programs).
Sounds like Chrome isn't a "modern browser" then.
These types of markets have only been around a few years. I don't think you can extrapolate much. Its a very short time frame.
HTML5 is descriptive, not prescriptive, so the complaint about features not being ready doesn't make sense. They're ready when browsers ship them.
I think it would be more accurate to say that from Apple's perspective 'the internet' is more than just the World Wide Web. Apps (and desktop applications) are peers to the browser - not something that necessarily has to run within it.

Part of the reason so much online activity shifted to the web in the web 1.0 era was that the browser sidestepped the problems of distributing and updating client applications.

With its app stores, Apple has solved these problems, and put applications back on an equal footing with web apps.

Whether or not this is is the winning strategy over the long term remains to be seen, but I think it's hard to make the case that Apple doesn't understand the internet.
Oh definitely, I never said Modcloth was infrastructure. =)
Risk assessment shows NASA's odds were high for greater losses
Only 512kbps up though. Have to go up to $160/month to get 5Mbps up.
Top 200 Pharmaceutical Products by Worldwide Sales in 2008
Not true. I'm working on a music webapp for iOS and the audio keeps playing if you exit Safari/lock the device. It's actually quite annoying as the only way to stop the music is to open Safari and pause the audio.
How was it better than Rhapsody? That's only $10/month, and you can, as far as I know, download whatever you want to listen to offline (though I may be wrong... I listen to most stuff online)
Pandora and Kindle both duplicate Apple services (iTunes & iBooks, respecitvely) to some degree. It's not particularly surprising that Apple wants to kick them out now. They've probably had this planned all along and ready to put into action once they got big enough.

What do you think your average iPhone or iPad owner is going to do in response to this change - buy a Kindle or Android device so they can keep using Pandora/Kindle, or just buy stuff from Apple's services instead?
Obviously there are native app advantages to the end user beyond that, particularly given the slowness of 3G internet and the ease of making payments via the App Store. In many cases though its simply the same reason they also have Facebook fan pages and once had AOL keywords - branding.

Steve Jobs even started extolling the virtues of Apple's ability to "bring subscribers" to digitl publishers, and going by their latest announcement, Apple themselves regard their platform as being worth 30% of the value of the content, even to those who would rather process payments themselves.

It remains to be seen how far consumers and creators agree.
You're probably right, and boy is that evil.
What made you think iOS was open?
I bought an iPad thinking I'd be able to access my Kindle books from it. In fact, I bought more books on the Kindle system specifically because I could read and sync them across the most number of devices. I'm not saying Apple isn't within their rights to make this move, it just really pisses me off. This is the kind of crap I'd expect from Verizon, not Apple.