skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Present customs about taxation seem to derive mostly from tributes extracted by conquering tribes

Tax money builds roads and other infrastructure in common. The origins of a system don't dictate its current reasons for existence -- it may have started as shamanic tribute, but now it's to provide for social needs. (And, perhaps, to pad the coffers of privileged corporations.)
And Zurich! Made for an awesome hike. But we never made it to Pluto.
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2008/11/visiting-zrich/
Sorry, but you don't realize how many of us use our iPads to read when there is no Wifi connection around. We can't do that with a web app.

I am outraged, fuming really. I read my Kindle books on my iPad all the time.

If they do not reverse this, this will all but guarantee that I am switching to an Android tablet as soon as it becomes a viable contender. Honeycomb can't get here soon enough.
I would just about sell my soul to get on FiOS instead of comcast here in Pittsburgh. I was looking into CLEAR, but then I read about them throttling anyone who downloaded more than 8 gigs in a month, so that was straight out. Way to nerf the entire point of WiMAX guys.
While I agree with most of the article, I also think it's important who you choose to get advice from. Some people just don't get it. They'll discourage you without giving real constructive advice. Though I've never met PG in person, it seems like that's PG gift - the ability to give good feedback and direction on a product. But not everybody has that gift. My preferred path is to talk with tons of people to brainstorm thoughts that could lead to real product. Once you got a good product idea, brainstorm and start building it with a team. Then, get some good advice. you don't need to go totally public, but you need some good advice. Keep iterating. There will be a time where you go public and get feedback from lots more people. Also, I think it depends on the product. Sometimes you'll incubate a bit longer, sometimes shorter. Sometimes you'll need public feedback quicker, sometimes later. Early advice and feedback doesn't always means advice/feedback from everybody you meet.
Coming soon: Kindle for the Web (Beta)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...

Looks like it was made for touch devices. I wonder if Amazon's about to pull their Kindle app.
Sirius is also going to have a real problem with this. I subscribe to Sirius-XM Online, and use their iOS app all the time.
A browser can be fully modern and platform specific; I fail to see your argument. Could a browser not be specifically developed for Haiku, Mac OS 9, or any other current or legacy platform and still be a modern browser even if it has the full feature set of Chrome?
It's a 10 year old OS that still has 42% share of the market. It's still the most popular OS right now. Anyone with half a brain can see that their only reason behind not supporting IE9 on it is to try and force people to spend 100's of dollars upgrading their OS when they already have a perfectly fine and working one.
When you say “passionate”, I think “show me”.
Actually plenty of average consumers I know actually like the Zune brand, the windows media program specifically.
It seemed to me that they went back to the original application and pivoted. They didn't go back a build the same people to people proximity app. They built the people to environment proximity app which let them know about things going on in their environment (example from website : the Bart train is not running for the next two hours).

So, I don't think they gave up something successful to pursue something less successful. Rather, they decided to continue to work on something about which they are passionate.
iBooks maybe, but iTunes? There's absolutely no functionality cross-over between the two, with the exception of the broad category of providing a way to listen to music...
That isn't a personal attack on a HNer (unless the tech support happens to be a HNer, then that's unintentional). If my project does well enough to get a HN discussion, I'm sure I'll be stunned at the rude responses, but that's not people trying to be mean, it's just that people talking about someone they see as a third party tend to be a lot more straight-talking than if they are talking about each-other.

It's just that asking somebody to show some ID just because their name seems strange seems a bit ... strange. It's a website, not a home loan.
And again, and again, and again. You don't have to be a Harry Potter nor science and philosophy geek; it's accessible and thrilling to everyone.
I see something distinctly odd about their proposal.

It would actually make my commute (home at 22nd Street in SF) to work (Stanford, via Palo Alto) much more convenient. I could catch a train every fifteen minutes.

I don't need this convenience. As it is now, I can catch express trains down every half hour (during commute hours) and back up at 5:06, 6:06, or 7:10. That is quite adequate.

However, under the proposed plan, I'm screwed if I decide to stay late, and of course some of my friends who make do without cars are much more screwed. It seems that's more important, and that there is room to accommodate this by thinning out the commute hour schedule.
Other than the unlimited songs which have DRM on it, you get to own 10 songs every month (in MP3).
why can't 'modern' also mean 'compatible?'
The first milestone in the success of a startup is getting the product out the door and the second being getting revenue. Stealth mode and empty signup/landing pages are just there to create hype and buzz. If you ask anyone in the valley what matters, it's execution.

So let's leave all these empty promises and expectations at the door and bring transparency and openness to the table. That's where startups get people, like users and investors, listening and contributing in a big, big way.
Your company is 5 years old. Presumably, for something like 3 of those years, you liked and respected your cofounder. What was good about him? When he's firing on all cylinders, what's good about working with him?
My point is that the relationship you describe doesn't exist in the mass consumer space, and Apple is enabling something exciting and new there. Your point is that the pro/business space Apple's "must go through the app store" rule is a nuisance. I think we're both right.
Fingers crossed, late this week to our developer staging environment, next week to production. But we have a bunch of stuff going on this week with partner site launches that creates some (welcome) distraction for us and makes it necessary to keep those fingers crossed...

If you're in the opentok-developer google group, you will see the release update message in real-time.
Find a truly neutral third party you both respect. Have them sit down with both of you and talk out all the issues. Their job is to provide you both with some outside perspective.
Being non-white myself, I like to jokingly explain to anyone who will listen about how LOTR is all about racial purity and the perils of rampant immigration of brown folk. I certainly can't think of anyone good in it who is 'non-white'. I grew up on the books and I still have a soft spot for them, but I do like to make fun of this aspect of them.

My other hobby is outlining the racial stereotypes in sci-fi shows/movies...
That would destroy its portability.
Apple’s new subscription rules are better for users? No way « The Orange View
Huh. That must have changed since I last tried to play a podcast through Safari. Thanks for the info.
"if I were Groupon’s founders, I would have taken the $6-billion offer from Google in a heartbeat"

that's probably why you AREN'T a Groupon founder

ps.: more from the same blogger: "why Foursquare is dead because it's not canadian" - http://www.markevanstech.com/2011/02/14/is-foursquare-intere...
I really think there is some valid anti-trust possibilities here. It is one thing to require apps to be vetted - but to demand that 100% of all content is subject to an Apple Tax, even though it never touches any Apple assets at all?

One could argue that since Apple must provide storage, infrastructure, and man-hours for all the apps that are purchased for iOS devices, that they are well within their rights to take a cut of App purchases. But what justification do they have for demanding the same regarding content consumed by said apps? They do not store the content. They do not filter the content. They do not provide the bandwidth that delivers the content. They are not liable for what the content itself is. What possible justification could they have for doing this?

This is very nearly the same as saying that Sony should get a cut of all ad revenue for anything viewed on their TVs.
He has a bit more than hearsay going for him; Apple's success in various markets lately has been huge. Linux's success in getting people to spend anything like that kind of money in any consumer context? Basically nil.

Come on, we all know this, we don't need a page of citations to prove to us that Apple is the biggest non-Exxon company in world history, and it's not by accident or some mysterious means.
I watched a Nova on fractals not too long ago, it covered this bit exactly. Definitely a cool story :) I don't 100% remember the title, but I think this was it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/hunting-hidden-dimensio...
Big data vs bad data
> What problem(s) have you found with running "a web app that was built for a modern browser" on IE8?

Just take any project dependent on something on the list in the original article, and implement it on IE9.

But there are also a number of things like rounded corners, transparency, and event handling that are irksome. Thank God for jQuery. Seriously.

> As I see it, the blame for this lies almost entirely with Mozilla, Google, and to some extent the standards bodies, not with IE.

Different experiences, I guess. The last major web app I wrote (last year) ran on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, on Windows, Mac, and Linux. No browser detection was required. IE8 and below were simply too feature-poor to even begin to run it (start with missing canvas, and work from there). Maybe no IE9-specific code will be required to run it--we'll see.

When I read your last sentence, though, I see "the problem is with everyone else, not IE". And that's definitely one perspective.
A $10 million IPO doesn't make any sense when they will have to spend 20 percent of the IPO money on meeting Sarbanes/Oxley requirements in the first year. It it costs about $2 million a year to meet those requirements.
If it's coded properly, a web app can absolutely store books, as well as its own code, offline.
The Terminator: The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.
The Terminator: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.
John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?
The Terminator: Because Skynet knows the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here.
their use of rockstarninja did exactly what they wanted it to -- get the job listing on the front page of hacker news.
There is a basic lack of understanding here. This is not "unfair" in any way. Apple owns the platform, period. They have a right to do whatever they want with the platform and set any terms they want.

Developers are free to choose whether or not they like the terms of the platform.
Faster persistent data structures through hashing : Galois Tech Talk
You were shocked that her music collection did not magically spring into the iPod from points unseen?

What were you expecting to happen? Did it involve an omnipotent Deity?
Flagged for the spoiler. Some of us are on the west coast, and would like to actually watch without knowing the result ahead of time.
Which version of Chrome broke the rounded corners? What's its current market penetration?

I can tell you what its market penetration will be in 3 years: less than 0.1%. IE6 could learn from this.
Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review
send me your routing number, I'm ready to invest.
Being a slav I can attest that it's a pretty common slavic error. Took me years to get it somewhat under control and I used to take english writing as a pretty serious hobby. (nowadays I'm just a english nerd more so than a writer)
The only justification I've heard, and it's a very weak one, is that Apple provides the customers. That is, if Apple weren't around to run the App Store, then customers would be too stupid to find anything interesting to read, listen to or watch. Surely, they can justify some amount for payment processing overhead, but requiring all apps to use Apple's payment processing terms is beyond ridiculous.
HTML5 localStorage / cache manifest / Offline Web Apps can deal with that perhaps?

http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/iPh...
Different markets have different day count conventions. For instance is a 3 month deposit rate the same as a 90 day CD? When it comes to 'wholesale size', it's not about gouging clients for a day of interest, it's making sure that everyone is talking about the same dates and penny-accurate amounts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_count_convention
There's actually a whole category of individuals that do this for a living: business counselors/mentors. This is a lot safer than going with a friend you both know, and they don't cost much.
Exploring Digital Audio Myths and Reality Part 1
It's deeply disturbing that the people at Apple feel entitled to radically change the rules of the game whenever it suits them. This is like an extortion racket. Submit to their demands today only to find out what new whim strikes them tomorrow. How can iOS legitimately be called a "platform" when Apple pulls a leg out from under it every six months?

Thank god Android scares them. I can only imagine what they'd dare without any competition.
I did not know about that. Well, let's just hope, then. Still pisses me off.
geez, I almost entered my email on the "notify me" first time I opened this!
safari supports HTML 5 Storage and apparently there is a 5 mb limitation per url. Looks like most of my kindle books are under 500kb, so that shouldn't be an issue.
> It never occured to me that some readers might not enjoy it.

Well that depends, maybe I just got a bad taste in my mouth having had read the book early in high school as a foreigner. It took me literally 6 months of nearly daily reading to get through. My personal pet peeve was that Tolkien apparently hated the comma, which made sentences particularly difficult for me to parse.

But I should admit, having read a lot of Austen and Dickens ... Tolkien was pretty damn unflowery ... but then you compare him to King and you think "What the hell was Tolkien smoking!"

Then again, King is known for a very direct style, which results in 500 page books one can read in a week. Being very busy I kind of like that :)
We were close friends and had a previous business together. So, we'd been through it all. He has good organizational skills and stays on top of all the accounting/tax/HR crap. But that's all (yes, I know that's not much but I didn't know better).

To be honest, we started at just the right time in a growing niche and money was easy for a while. We have a lot of competitors now and technology has changed a lot.

Hope that answers your questions.
I think this whole thing is overblown.

When I trade stock, options or pretty much anything, I get charged commissions. So by the same reckoning e*trade, Schwab, Ameritrade, <insert brokerage here> are thieves and have been "stealing" from investors/traders for centuries.
All the hubbub about the hashbang URL system got me thinking about sharing client/server javascript just this morning, and then lo and behold, a post about it pops up a few hours later.

Instead, though, I was thinking that perhaps controllers and views could be re-used across the server and client. When a request comes in to the server, it renders a page just like a typical MVC framework would, but also directs the client to download the view/controller javascript. Any links the user follows could then be rendered client-side. When the framework is running server-side, the model layer talks directly to the database - when it's running client-side, it talks to the server through JSON.

It could give you the best of both worlds - an initial request returns a quick, fully-formed HTML page, so it's speedy on the first load and crawlers will know what to do with it. Later requests use AJAX, so things are responsive and the server isn't weighed down with HTML rendering.
If I were a serious book reader on my idevice, then I definitely would buy a Kindle. The markup on books in the iBookstore compared to the Amazon store is enough to pay off the Kindle in less than a year's worth of reading.

(Hell, it'd pay off my -iPad- in a couple of years, assuming I converted all my paper reading to ereading)
Impossible to apply general advice like this to every situation. As usual, reality is "it depends"

Here's a legitimate reason to keep your product or service stealth: when you're in customer development mode and you have plenty of customers to represent your possible target markets and therefore plenty of feedback, and therefore more feedback and exposure would be redundant and likely mean disappointed customers. Why burn through a lot of potential customers when you're not ready presenting them with a bad first time impression.
While she does primarily use it for music, she spends just as much time playing games and surfing the web. She can add games without connecting it to a computer, but it still requires a computer to get it that far.

It's just surprising that a device with so many capabilities (other than playing music) cannot do anything without that initial connection. You can't even just play around with the home screen icons!
iBooks doesn't even make any sense, considering Kindle came first by a longshot. iBooks is only there to turn the iPad into a (poor) Kindle substitute.
Yeah, I had been semi-ok with it till now. Now, I realize a lot of these companies really can't make the 30% work.

I wonder if they could just make it as a "consumption only" device... like don't have a link to get a new customer, only allow people to subscribe through the web.
I think that says more about what the Linux and OS X teams were able to achieve 10 years ago than it does anything about XP.

Yes, if the primary objective of your OS is to avoid exploits by script kiddies than you should probably choose something like OpenBSD, or Linux SE with a very hardened profile. XP probably isn't a good choice of OS if your primary objective is protection from script kiddies. As long as you aren't pissing people off on 4chan, or dealing in sensitive data you should be fine with XP.

However, if your needs include surfing the web, email, using an Office productivity suite, and playing a triple A game title, and are willing to install something like Microsoft Security Essentials then you'll be reasonably protected from viruses, and have the ability to complete your day-to-day tasks and goof off at the end of the day.

Personally, I find that Win7 + VMWare + Ubuntu 10 suite my needs best unless I'm doing iOS development in which case I use OS X + VMWare + Win7 + Ubuntu. I've had issues running OS X inside VMWare so I just use another machine for iOS dev.

Could I do the same thing I use Win 7 for with XP? Definitely, I suspect it may be tight on RAM as I don't think VMWare supports PAE, but other than the 32-bit memory limitation it would work perfectly fine. I bet I could meet all my needs with XP 64-bit edition.

Mozilla, Google and Apple are actually doing about 42% of computer users a favor by support the OS they have chosen to run. It's not up to you to dictate what people should prioritize in their choice of computer software and hardware. They could be more secure upgrading to Win 7 or Linux but I bet they feel it's not worth the trade off.
Umm actually the guys who coined the term "first mover advantage" actually wrote a paper explaining why they were wrong. They published it in the harvard business review so u should be able to find it via google.
Depends on what you mean by "stealth".

If stealth means spending over a year and a boatload of cash developing a product without ever getting any feedback from any potential customers, then yeah, that's likely a dead end.

If stealth, however, means meeting quietly with a small (but representative) group of potential customers while you work the kinks out of your project before launch, then I think that is a smart strategy. There's nothing wrong with giving yourself as much of a head start as possible.

As a general rule, I don't talk about my ideas/project with other developers. I especially don't discuss it with industry people who may be my future competitors. What I might discuss are things like the overarching problem I'm attempting to solve. I may even describe some of the very basic mechanisms, or ask questions that hint at the philosophy behind my approach.

I know HN can be fiercely against the notion that ideas matter at all, but most successful businesses have their "secret sauce" and it's not smart to just give it away before you're primed to leverage it to your benefit. I mean, front page today is an article about Coke's secret recipe; sometimes, the what really does matter as much as the how.
It's not so simple as that. Not at all. For one thing, a platform is a concept. As far as ownership is concerned, the users own their respective devices, not Apple. Moreover, it is not "fair" to exploit a monopoly (in this case, one unethically created by means of a closed platform with undisclosed and inconsistent app approval rules), and as such, many countries have laws preventing the unethical exploitation of monopoly-derived power.

Anyway, I find it very odd to speak of Apple's "rights" whilst simultaneously ignoring those that actually have rights: the users. The philosophy that organizations can have rights independent of and greater in extent than any of its constituent persons is, to say the least, bizarre to me.

Oh, and as for liking the terms of the platform: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/quotes?qt0358500)
While execution > idea most of the time, I think it's become a little too accepted, for its own good. Ideas are worthless when they're another spin on a web 2.0 site, or rather a spin on something that already exists. From the link:

Oh, and what was the company? It was yet another Web 2.0 flavor of a question-and-answer, poll-your-friends site with a distant revenue model and no user acquisition strategy. Ran if for two years before we shut it down with almost no revenue achieved. Shocking, I know.

Going stealth is more worth it if your idea isn't in the same universe as ye old web 2.0 social network/web analysis/etc. tool. Hint: these aren't real businesses. This is especially true if your idea is simple to implement technically, but not necessarily simple to implement on a whole.

And the idea that "someone is already doing it" is far from a truth. There are plenty of HUGE problems that no one is working to solve - most likely because they aren't problems with technical solutions. The notion that "ideas are worthless" is really only valid if the idea isn't all that original in the first place.
Given the challenges subscription services already face re:margins, giving away another 30% is game over.

If this stands, the labels are probably going to have to give up on subscription services as a category, or lower their wholesale prices dramatically.
Google does say they'll anonymize search log data after 9 months... though I can't find any claim they'll ever delete it, and it's not clear how strong the anonymization is.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/google-changes-d...
It would be unfortunate if the weekend service were terminated since I rely on it to visit San Francisco on the weekend when I intern at a company in the valley.