skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree completely about the need for pseudonyms online... If I'm asked for a real name, I'll format a handle that sounds "real" (ie, first last).

The Idiocracy hunting down quotes and pictures out of context are part of what necessitates the anonymity.
They're barely even superior to what's possible with HTML now.

If this were really the case — not just in a spec-sheet way but in a user experience way — why are all these companies making apps?
Link goes straight to a PDF. Can OP or a moderator please add [pdf] to the title?
My son just received an iPod Touch for his 6th birthday. Problem solved!! He can do whatever he wants with it and sync it to our family iMac using his own account. All I need do is be a bit careful about handing the 'iTouch' back to him right after I made a purchase for him.
The last morning train leaves SF at 8:30am?! Did they forget this is Silicon Valley, not Wallstreet? We don't all get to work by 9am!
Do you think this is from lack of belief or the overconfidence?
The Top Qwitters on Twitter - Qwitter Blog
Valentine's Day: The Day After
Forgot Valentine's Day? Here's what you can do to make up for it!
Proven track record of making other businesses work. Just not a software startup.
Stealth mode is no fun. Though it may make sense when you have a strategic partnership that requires silence until release. Of course, that's a very different kind of startup than most of the "my web 2.0 of the day" ventures often touting stealth mode.
Looking for guidance on canadian SMS gateway/relay providers
Could anyone point me towards a reputable and useable SMS gateway provider that provides canadian phone numbers? I know I can send to Canadian numbers via Twilio/Tropo, but I'd like to receive texts at a Canadian number (because texting the USA from Canada is ridiculously expensive on most Canadian cellular providers). Every provider I've found either hides their API/pricing and wants me to talk to a salesperson or seems simply unuseable. Are there any Twilio clones serving the Canadian market?
I think you're right that it isn't by definition a content farm. It is most definitely google search result spam though.

I've honestly never tried to get past the spammy "sign-up to maybe view the information you thought you'd find" message.
The problem with your analysis is most people already have a Netflix account, so Apple will get 0% of those subscriptions. Same thing if a new customer signs up on netflix.com, then starts viewing on their iOS device.

If Apple attracts a new customer via the AppStore, similar to how affiliate marketers bring new business to a vendor, they get a 30% cut.

I do however agree it is not consumer friendly. With the "most favored nation" clause in the agreement, vendors will have little choice but to raise prices to meet the commission on the fraction of sales Apple takes their cut.
Apple's store is not really a "marketplace" - at least not a free market. There's no competition allowed, in a market that's everywhere else free and open.

And as for Infrastructure - what does Apple own except the web site? They don't own the iPhone - I bought mine for cash, I own it. They don't own the network - ATT and Verizon own that, and I contract to them. They don't own the apps - they just try to.

That leaves them in the position of market predator - trying to make a buck by warping the market in their favor, throwing up roadblocks to anyone using their own hardware on their rented network for anything that Apple can't scam a buck from.
Exhibit B: In order to do things with your iPhone (like download podcasts, or update firmware), you need to plug it in to your computer and have it do a sync. The phone is on the internet, why do you need to plug it in? Google got this completely right on their phone in that everything syncs to "the cloud." I'm not saying android is perfect, but that is one aspect that's better about it.
The Pentium Pro was not the average CPU for playing Roller Coast Tycoon though. Although in the process of writing this comment I found out that the P5 series was the first Superscalar processor and that Roller Coaster Tycoon needed at least a P90, so it may well have taken advantage of it.
Not really sure. The MS one runs extremely slow in Chrome 10 (dev build), but the Flight of the Navigator never finishes loading at all.
Umm, I think you're missing the point. The point was about a pre-existing relationship that was exercised on a Apple-designed device. How does it matter whether it's prosumer or not.
This is a really interesting idea but the text itself really needs to be adapted by a native English speaker. I really wanted to plunge into the book, but it's barely readable. Here are the first two sentences of the second paragraph, a typical example of the book's style:

> It was at such a midnight hour that two men moved like gray shadows along the gravelly inner edge of a sickle-shaped gap between two low dunes, and the distance between them was exactly that prescribed by the Field Manual for such occasions. However, contrary to the rules, the one bearing the largest load was not the rear ‘main force’ private, but rather the ‘forward recon’ one, but there were good reasons for that.

It's probably brilliant in Russian, but an English speaker has to unravel and reconstruct each sentence. It makes for heavy going.

I say this not to negatively criticise, but simply to warn readers hoping to discover a fantastic interpretation of an epic tale. A future translation, I am sure, will make for brilliant reading.
Yeah, that always gets trotted out in this context. If what you think this suggests is true there would be more than one such story. To me it just smells of a demographic grateful of finally getting some mercy sex.

Besides, it's a charity. I was talking about commerce.
Maybe BART will finally be able to complete the loop and we can cut the awful Caltrain out of the transportation scene entirely. BART is so on-time and reliable.

It would be amazing if the Fremont line and the Colma line met up in San Jose.
I can see Apple offering monetary subsidies to a select few applications, granting them special access to engineers, to get exclusive access, but sorry, I don't see them doing this.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of those options. Still, that's only a small subset of parental controls that are needed.
RIP Pandora, Kindle on the iPhone
And looked at the pricing models for the API services that I would be using for the Beta code from Twillio, to Braintree + a modicum of understanding how I "think" the application will get used.
Tesla Lost $154.3m in 2010
I've just been playing with this stuff and wanted to put it out there despite its warts.

And thanks for that!

In hindsight my first reply came out more nitpicky than intended; all my concerns are aimed at (still to be fixed) shortcomings in the backbone/node ecosystem, not at your particular implementation.

Major kudos for not only coming up with (at the very least) an intriguing Proof Of Concept but then also writing a great blog post to describe it. This will be learning material for myself and many others.
No, they can't even put IE in a walled garden without the US Senate getting involved.

Apple walls their garden, locks everybody inside and shakes them down - and folks leap to their defense?!?
This is super cool. Lightweight, off-site Time Machine-style snapshotted backups.
it is missing the following:

- osdir.com

- markmail.org

- www.dennyweb.com
So we'll get several thousand more suburbanites who are afraid to drive in the city, driving around the city trying to run us over. This is a planned attack on San Francisco pedestrians by suburanites who are tired of our smugness.
http://www.hackersandfounders.com/

http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/

http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/ -- Great volunteer run CoWorking space in Mountain View. Hope this helps.
It's mutating towards the great white light...
Awesome feedback John...also I watched a bit of the show, intriguing :)

Don't mean to pry too much, does not very long mean 15-20 hours worth of work? less? More?
37signals: Customer Support Happiness Report
It's a glass half full/half empty thing.

If the (only) owner(s) of infrastructure or a limited resource offers access for only a select group, do you consider them to be offering a service to that group, or to be starving non-members of access?

What do you do about it? Do you hope for competition, or create rules against discrimination? If you create rules, how can you prevent the rule-maker from using the rules to do its own discrimination? If you hope for competition, what if there's not enough of the resource, there are network effects or other high barriers to entry, or everyone in the market decides to do the same discrimination?

So, who do you trust less to be the gatekeeper, the government, or the ISPs? Neither answer is really a good one.

The telcos are doing what's best for their business, but that's not necessarily what's best for their customers - positioning yourself as the owner of infrastructure is a powerful and profitable place to be, but if you get to be in too good of a position, the same debate will come up again - the parallel to the 1800's is a good one.
Yeah, I've been using a similar approach. Not as fancy as using DNode or Hendrik Joreteg's approach, but it's closer to traditional web app development and thus easier to wrap one's head around. If real-time isn't a requirement, that little bit of extra simplicity can mean a lot when testing, debugging and scaling.
Haha. Make that three.
I'd say 20 hours sounds about right.
I agree with your assessment. One of my favorite sites, Cracked.com, is Demand Media as well.
In regards to the client software, I must say that iTunes is an absolutely atrocious piece of software (at least on Windows). I think the Zune app really got it right for managing large amounts of music in a simple-to-use interface. It really is too bad that it will most likely be getting the can soon enough.
You're not a big fan of packing light, are you?
Which apps can you recommend?
Ask HN: I need advice. Major problems with my business & co-founder
Hello HN,

First off, I'm a regular HN member with 4-figure karma (if it matters). I'm at a loss and need advice.

I am the technical co-founder of a 5 year old company with $2M in annual revenue and 5 F/T employees. Over the past 18 months, I've become increasingly at odds with my business partner. My partner already has a relative working for us, then last year brought in a "designer" who is a close, personal friend and gave this person free reign on redesigning all of our print and web properties. Problem is, this person is a traditional graphic designer with no web experience. My design skills aren't superb, but I know UI/UX basics, how to measure and test things, seo fundamentals, etc. My partner has basically given this friend an executive marketing position.

Our traffic has been flat for a year or more. Our sales are down slightly. Instead of hustling, working on SEO/SEM, learning analytics and a/b testing, good product and customer development–basically all the things a non-technical co-founder should do–my partner and collegue waste countless hours dicking around with pointless design aesthetics or useless networking events. Over the same period, my partner has had personal issues as well (left his wife).

Last year, after some conflicts between myself and this designer, I told my partner this person had to go. He agreed but never followed through. When I pressed this issue, he simply claimed this person is "too valuable". Since then, we argue constantly. Maybe I'm wrong, but as I see it, a year + is a long enough "experiment" ... this person is doing nothing to improve sales, there's a major conflict of interest, and should go. With my business partner, we might be past the point where the damage can be repaired. There is definitely no trust on my part.

We each own 50% of the company and are the only board members. In multiple meetings with an attorney, I discovered that our company has no deadlock provision for resolving major decisions. Even more interesting–I never signed the buy-sell agreement in our corporate papers (he did). So, technically, I could sell my stake to anyone at any time–but he can only sell his shares back to the company. Other than an outside company acquiring all or half of the company, the only other option would be for me to move to simply dissolve and split or sell the assets.

There is so much technical knowledge about the business in my head, that I'm fairly certain it couldn't function well without me (at least not without a solid transition period).

What to do? I have a family and the company has treated me well financially. But there are a lot of things I still want to do startup and entrepreneur-wise. Do I give an ultimatum? Can I shop my half of the company to others in the industry without alarming them?

Thanks HN. You're a constant source of insight and inspiration.
a camera access API in Mobile Safari, it probably would have found its way into a spec and been implemented by other browsers

To give the curious an idea of what that might look like: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/c...
Did you hear they're releasing Firefox 5, 6, and 7 this year too?
No, I have no connection to Microsoft. I'm familiar with technologies around .Net and have nothing against using them where a project calls for it, but as it happens none of my current commercial projects is built on it today. I certainly have no vested interest in promoting it over any other platform that might be more suitable for any given job. More generally, I have been rather critical of Microsoft/IE for a long time, for much the same reasons many here apparently still are.

However, I do try to look at situations objectively and consider the facts, both quantitative and qualitative, and that in an industry that moves this fast, those facts can lead to different conclusions rather quickly. I honestly see Microsoft's current direction for their browser as healthier and more sustainable than that of say Google or Mozilla.

I don't think more frequent releases of new toys or a factor of 5 difference in synthetic benchmarks can trump an emphasis on providing/speeding up core functionality that real users depend on today and tomorrow. Also, so far Microsoft are mostly rising above the silly political games that Apple/Adobe/Google have been playing lately in terms of knocking out functionality for non-technical reasons.

Meanwhile, I have been less impressed with each successive version of Firefox, as performance of the UI slowed, things got moved around or more cluttered, and they didn't keep up with what I regard as essential features in a web app world like running tabs independently.

I have nothing serious against Chrome, except that their release schedule and tendency to break stuff makes my life difficult as a developer. However, I also see little practical advantage in the areas they have been speeding up lately, since they were fast enough even for the web projects I work on that do fairly intensive DOM manipulation and such. As anyone reading my posts here can probably figure out, once functionality is fast enough to use in practice, I am more impressed with making it easy to use, robust, and/or easy to develop than I am with getting another notch up on some benchmark.
Making sense of science
Annotated version of "Is IE9 a Modern Browser"
Both crashed my Chrome tabs. But both demo's look they're from 1988 anyway.
"Google doesn't know how to have fun"

Has anyone ever actually said this? Between the logo doodles, April fools jokes, and bright colors, Google is one of the funnest companies around.
We could of sold specific versions for different organizers (we did actually give out 2 versions for free to our first event organizers that are hardcoded as a thank you gesture to them and it is still in use). But we wanted something more flexible to sell to the people that contacted us in the past. We spent 2 weeks, cleaned it all up, and got it ready. At the last minute, we started to speak to someone we met at a conference we were at again that wanted to push it. We worked out a deal for his team take it over, maintain, and support it and the rest is history.
Don't knock the power of ideas.

I have this awesome idea for a teleportation ray that will instantly transport me from one city to another. I even have a 15 page powerpoint presentation and I have 4 of my country club buddies who committed to putting up some cash after I got enough long island iced teas in them.

Now all I need is someone to build it for me.
You can sell on Cydia...
A Computational Love Engine
Exactly. I would be surprised if people working on WebKit for Apple weren't involved in those kind of discussions, and would fully expect Mobile Safari to support a workable device API.

I wonder how long before iOS development is like WebOS development?
Well, one real story is a whole lot more compelling than hearsay.
It's worth noting that mismanagement (I don't think there has been significant mismanagement, but it's up for debate) is not the main cause of the requirement for cutbacks. The main issue is that CalTrain is no-one's responsibility in particular. Almost half of CalTrain's funding comes from ticket sales, which is not the normal pattern for public transit. The other local transportation agencies (GGT, SamTrans, and BART) have dedicated sponsors from municipal governments. CalTrain, as the name implies, used to be state-funded. A couple of decades back, CalTrans, the state agency, stopped funding it, and municipal governments stepped in. However, their funding has always fluctuated - and this year, has pretty much evaporated.

Remember, public transportation runs the way it does because it's a public good - it is pretty much by definition something that the market is bad at providing, but which people need anyhow. If CalTrain had to survive off of ticket revenue alone, it would cost more than twice as much to ride, and would thus exclude some riders, harming revenues further. On top of this, CalTrain relieves traffic - it provides a significant positive externality instead of capturing value. Government subsidies to public transportation agencies address this externality.

CalTrain is dying because of the tragedy of the commons: a great many people can benefit from it (traffic, air quality) without paying for it, and will resist any attempt to require that they contribute to it. This is the situation that many, many public agencies are in.
I sure hope they don't succeed in making tongue-scraping a requirement. I of course brush my tongue and floss regularly, but I hope it never gets to the point where I have to be ashamed of not having a special device explicitly for scraping my tongue.
The last thing Apple should want to do in these times, where their superiority over competitive devices is growing ever thinner, and there is a growing risk of actual shrinking market share, is force developers to choose between Apple or all other platforms.
My guess is to generate interest for a "month" compounding daily. Bank didn't want to get cheated by February.
Beats me; so often IME it's true though. There've even been cases where I've installed the app and found I preferred the company's mobile website so used that instead.
A Taxonomy of meta-programming systems
By everyone I meant all parties involved, not every single person in the entire world (that would be a ridiculous statement):

Apple: benefits by having exclusive apps of a quality standard they can determine where the platform and the store are almost synonymous. Ex: I'm getting an iPhone so I can play that game.

Developers: Benefit by having a platform with as few barriers to purchases and a large audience. Ex: I'll target my game for iOS because there are 100M+ potentials users and popular opinion is to get an iPhone to have access to the most games.

Consumers: Benefit by having an easy method to purchase apps with a certain level of trust and a vary large selection available in one place.
Thank you for your reply. I agree money is currently the easy part, the biggest issue is execution. The ideal is fools gold if I can't transform it from a pitch deck into a reality.

You gave me some really great ideas here about reaching out to other engineers that I have worked with and some siblings of friends with CS degrees and startup mentalities.

Cost structure is really low right now - I already have a succesfull Internet marketing business that is doing 500,000 per year with 2 USA full timers and 11 full time off shore resources.

This team took a long time to build over 3 years now with trips to India to work out some of the bugs. Right now, I just don't have the time for missteps or mistakes.

The problem that is being solved is "somewhat" technical, some social integration, some dollar tracking, some analytics tracking, fraud detection, recurring payments etc. But I am not trying to re-invent the world.

Basically I KNOW of the companies that do everything that I need, I just need to glue it all together and add some special sauce.
That's easy, you don't develop an app to sell on iPhones.
"Apple's single app store can only exist in the economic distortion created by U.S. government regulation which provide severe penalties for unlocking an iOS device."

I wonder if Jobs understands this, if so, he would probably invest a fortune into defending the DMCA.
My personal plight is the opposite -- In order to do things with Android, you need to sync to the cloud. Plugging it to the computer is not enough.
I wonder why didn't that happen on any of the several "open" mobile platforms beside iOS (including Android)? Or in the cases where they existed (carrier-specific app stores for symbian/javame), is there any case where ANYONE made any money out of it at all?
If anything, this post further reinforces the notion of trolling. If this was true, then your original post makes even less sense.
They did respond. They said Mozilla's definition is wrong. No use arguing using the definition your opponent has if you don't agree with it.
That reads a lot like a NaNoWriMo novel. Many many word padding and abuse of the 'the'.

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.

For example:
> That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to silver and glass, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.
You're boycotting Apple over charges whilst this happens?
And it could have been written straightforwardly as a roman-a-clef without incurring copyright hazards. The reason it wasn't is probably the reason it's at risk: marketing.

It might even make for a better book that way.
Show HN: We made LinkedList NYC. A weekly newsletter for New York hackers.
Yet, we actually owe many modern web features to Microsoft with IE. There is the obvious stuff, like xmlHttpRequest (Ajax) but also simple stuff like allowing event handlers on every DOM element.

All the stuff that Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera are doing now is exactly what IE did for it's entire history up to version 6. And really, IE very quickly became the superior browser of the day. But from then on, they appear to only be putting in minimal effort with no innovation.