skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plus: If you go Azure where will you develop? Will some nice M$ guy install Visual Studio in the cloud and you will use remote desktop? Where will you test? No local dev servers, really?

Besides that, Azure is NOT usage payed, Azure is an approximation to that I would call scalable server rental. You pay by time and size, not by use.
Maybe that explains Azure's momentum, they're getting things right and discouraging people by having expensive/inadequate prices. I hope they get it right soon, and that they start billing by usage.

I do .Net at an agency and I like it but it's amazing how much noise there is in the Microsoft ecossystem.
30% is simply an unsustainable cut of many things, of which music subscriptions are just one example.

I've said before--and I stand by the statement--that Apple doesn't have a lot of wiggle-room here without disrupting their retail channel for iTunes cards, which (IMHO) is a really important competitive advantage they have over, say, Android.

Having the retail credit channel is the equivalent of the importance of having prepay options for cell phones vs postpay. Many people don't want to put CC info in iTunes or they simply want to give gift cards to kids.

What Apple should do is make such a service optional. If it's compelling, people will use it. I also believe that for some people this will be compelling because they then don't have to deal with billing and all the infrastructure (payment gateways, receipts, accounts departments and so forth) that that entails.

Forcing it down people's throats is another matter entirely.

It's still unclear how this will relate to the Kindle, which is really what interests me, as it is a mix of subscriptions and single-purchase publications, all of which are purchased outside of the App Store.

Part of the problem is that there is an internal inconsistency in play. You can subscribe to the Wall Street Journal Web edition and use that on Safari on your iPad just fine. Why should the WSJ app that gives you access to that same content be any different?

You could sell an app on the App Store for $10 and Apple would get their $3 cut. Give a free version away and offer a $10 in-app upgrade and Apple still gets their $3 cut. From Apple's perspective, why are subscriptions any different?

I guess Apple are seeing this as people making money off their platform so they should get a cut. That position has superficial attractions but quickly breaks down if you go deeper.

To me it's a lot like the ISPs who want to charge Netflix or Google for all the bandwidth they use, which is nothing more than double-dipping. The customer pays for the bandwidth. What they use that bandwidth for should be immaterial to the ISP.

Personally I think Apple makes enough money from selling the devices, the App Store and iTunes that just nickel-and-diming people who produce material users subscribe to to the point of excluding such content from the device is really not in their interest or the user's interest.

Not having Grooveshark on my iPhone/iPad is a problem (that predates this). Losing other music services will be a problem. Losing the Kindle will be a HUGE problem.
Image licensing?
I'm working on a site specifically focused on NFL and college football now. As I look around at various blogs and smaller sites, I see images of Tom Brady, Cam Newton, etc. that I'm assuming the sites just pulled from Google Images or something. On the other hand, if I take a look at what it costs to actually license images from a service such as Getty, it seems prohibitive for any startup. So, at his point, I'm really confused as to what to do. Are 98% of the sites out there just displaying images with no regard to licensing (and, evidently, no legal action is being pursued)? Is this a "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" type of thing? ...Or is there some fabulous free image archive that I've yet to find?
I am a potential fool but would like to find out (a lot) more. I work centrally and live slightly north. Drop me a message and we'll chat.
Since the author of the article "identifies as part of Anonymous", that is probably true :)
A couple of Borders locations have closed in Washington, DC, and the rest are scheduled to go. As I recall, the routine was that close-out sale started at 33% off and then went to 50% off.
Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra
My first thought was that it would suck in IE. The effects don't work, but at least they degrade gracefully unlike other CSS tricks.
direct link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE
This is also what I do. The really annoying thing is that Dropbox doesn't sync permissions. It makes bit mess when a file is 777 in Git, but Dropbox resets it to 644 (I think).

This only happens when working on multiple machines.

Hopefully Dropbox will start syncing permissions soon.
I've always believed that dialog is better than confrontation, and that reaching an agreement is better than fighting a corner. If you and your manager can agree common principles, then you should be able to get a decent working arrangement.

But you need to get the statement of principle in writing, so your manager can't get screwed by those above.

If you can't get that agreement even in principle, do you really want to be working there? Maybe you don't ahve a choice, maybe any job is better than no job, but if they don't trust you to do your work, and keep side-projects on the side, should you really trust them at all?

These are the questions I'd have.

Good luck. Maybe you could let us know how you get on. If you blog, write a post about it and point us to it.
"We need to go deeper" - Leonardo Di Caprio
Apple music = Amazon music = DRM free

Correct.

Apple iBooks = Amazon Kindle books = incl DRM

Apple movies = Netflix = everyone else = incl DRM

Less correct. Kindle and Netflix have DRM, but they don't have the platform lock-in of iBooks and movies. iBooks, as far as I know, is only available on iOS. DRM is bad, but DRM that's tied to a smaller range of platforms is even worse.
Ask HN: "Restrained C++"?
In an interview at http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/ , John Carmack stated the following:

I would prefer to do new game
development in (restrained) C++

My question -- what is "restrained C++"? I realize that there is a lot of talk about "subsets of C++" and "20% of C++, yadda yadda", but I've not found a satisfactory explanation of what that means in practical terms.

Has Carmack himself defined this term? Does it have a common meaning that those in the C++-know understand?

Thanks for taking the time to explore with me.
Ok fine, so it will take 10 minutes to whip up and test a quick Ruby script instead of 30 seconds to think of the regular expression. I stand corrected.
Al Jazeera has really come into its own. With their coverage of Egypt, and giving an un-punditized view of Anonymous, they're being true journalists.

I'm not sure if my overwhelmingly positive feelings towards AJ stem from it being unexpected from a news org based in the middle east, but bravo Al Jazeera.
Printing a CV?

Do they also allow you to browse Altavista, Lycos, Excite and AskJeeves and use ICQ for free too?
Cloudkick (API) client libraries in PHP/Ruby/Python/Obj-C/Java.
really interesting. One comment on the UX. Since there are no clickable buttons/links I thought this was just a coming soon page.

Create a button that says 'track now' or some other call to action.

Once I read the middle paragraph I understood how it works but I bet most people will never piece that together.

and yes, package tracking would also be good. Have a look at Dominos pizza order tracker. Something as easy as that would be fun and engaging.
It's not just that they're taking 30%. It's that they're disallowing authors to charge any more than they do anywhere else, and then taking 30%. So to make the same amount of money on iPhone, you would have to increase your prices everywhere else.
The Daily Mail: The Bastion of Truth
Ran this on my Droid X:

Works on the defualt browser,

Works on the Opera Mobile brwoser,

Works on the Firefox browser.

So my mobile phone has better CSS rendering then my desktop IE8. Go figure.
we've set a goal of releasing 4 issues a year. But of course, the magazine's not our primary focus, atm.
Google One Pass to compete with Apple
50% off LinkedIn Premium
Isn't it rather an extra 42%? If Apple takes 30% of the one dollar I used to make, in order to make that dollar again I'll have to charge $1.42, as its 30% is $.42.
Could you offer a service and charge a premium for accessing that service on the iPhone (regardless of whether purchased it on iPhone or online) ?
Personally, I wouldn't ever join a class-action lawsuit. But small claims court sounds perfect...

If Amazon ends up removing the Kindle app over these new policies, I would sue Apple (via my local Apple Store to establish jurisdiction) in small claims court for $139.

The case would be relatively straightforward: I purchased an iPad because it could do everything a Kindle could do as well as more; Apple then caused functionality to be removed, so I would like Apple to buy me a Kindle to replace the functionality.

I've been to small claims court 3 times in my life, and each time won a default judgment because the other side didn't show up. Then, I faxed my judgment to my credit card company, and they promptly credited me (and presumably issued a chargeback to the merchant). This was in Fairfax County, Virginia.

I suspect that Apple will quietly reverse themselves, just like they did on the "apps can only be written in C, C++, and Objective C" last year. But if they don't, your local small claims court provides a wonderful opportunity to make your dissatisfaction known. And it only takes about 4 hours.
Industrial revolution lead to the popularization of democracy and the emergence of socialism and communism which are all ultimately means for adapting society and economy to the revolutionary changes. Information revolution will have to bring similar societal and economic changes before all the short term negative impact dissipates and its benefits becomes more universally available. However the main difference here is the timespan afforded by the new revolution. Society had time in the order of generations to catch up to Industrial revolution; Information revolution reduces this by an order of magnitude.

I have read Manna (http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm) and strongly recommend it in the context of this post.
Yeah, I might like to be notified when it is actually shipped out, or maybe even when it changes locations. Often time you might have a date range so it could also be useful to know if it's at the local hub and should be delivered today if I need someone at home to sign for it.

Anyways, it would sure beat digging up the email and visiting the tracking page all the time to keep up with it. I also liked the suggestion about being able to see the status of all my packages on one page across shippers.

I'm sure all this complicates things for you quite a bit, as right now you don't need people to sign up or anything. You don't even need much of a website beyond what you currently have. If this version goes well I'm sure you have plans to incorporate some of this stuff, so in that regard, this seems like a great MVP.
America's 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies
There's always the option of finding a nicely sized hardcover blank sheet notebook, which is what immediately came to mind when I saw this (though the book used in the article does look gorgeous.)
Nano-coating technology: water-repellent on steroids
The trouble with a declaration like this is that it has no basis in fact, just your own personal experience.

I have never seen anybody click on an ad on a webpage. By your reasoning that means that obviously no-one clicks them.

And yet google makes billions off it. Apparently 10% of internet users make up almost all the advert clicks.

I would agree that it's even more of a small % for nfo files and txt files in torrents because of the effort of getting to them. It could still easily translate to serious money when you're talking about 75% of the entire torrent ecosystem using only 100 peoples' torrents.

I have no facts, but the odd behaviour presented in this article makes me suspect you're actually way off mark as I find it hard to imagine that there is some small group of altruistic French seeders using one ISP who wish to bring the joy of movies and music to everyone for such a massive amount of effort.

The more likely explanation, just as presented in the article, is that there's good money to be made as long as you take the operation to scale.
Apple can do this because they have a monopoly on good design. Almost nobody outside Cupertino understands that design, user interface, and user experience matter.
Hopefully, HP changes that too!
I strongly suspect most people who are commenting on this haven't read the iOS developer terms or the updated guidelines. I think these updated terms are crappy and unfair, but they're not at all what some of the more lurid claims are making—including, IMO, the one made in the accompanying article.

These rules are all about iOS In App Purchases (IAP). If your app is not eligible for IAP, these rules don't apply. Period. End of story. If your app is eligible, these rules probably apply.

So, what's not eligible?

* Goods or services for use outside of the app. This means that Linode, TheLadders.com, Chargify, WeightWatchers, etc., are all in the clear because they can't even offer their services through IAP.

* Currency of any form. Even if Facebook's mobile app offered FB Credit purchases, it wouldn't be allowed to do so through IAP.

* Rentals. Pre-determined-time-limited content access is disallowed for IAP.

If one were to look at all of the materials that Apple has published on this, this primarily seems focussed around downloadable content, not around streamed or "rented" content, and certainly not around non-app goods or services.

Yes, Last.fm, Pandora, Netflix, Hulu and the like are in a bit of a grey area right now, but I strongly suspect that they will come out in the clear on this because they essentially "rent" the content to you; you can't download it and keep it—they're probably not eligible for IAP in the first place. On "The true cost of publishing on the Amazon Kindle"[1], I have a comment that outlines the exact sections[2] with paraphrases of the text involved.

I also have a comment[3] on "Why are you people defending Apple?"[4] that talks a bit more about who this hurts, namely reseller-distributors. Content owners are (for the most part) going to be ecstatic about this if they offer the content for sale directly.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228839
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229495
[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229353
[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228419
Nope. Its darwinian, the more modules in the gene pool means newer/better solutions need to fight harder to survive & win. So the outcome is often better for Perl/CPAN, for eg. Moose
You failed to suggest any alternative to current economic crisis?
Here's something similiar I did a couple years back in Raphael:

http://80concepts.com/graph
Isn't this the most objectionable part?

If Apple wants to charge 30%, fine, the companies impacted can just raise their iOS prices by 30% and pass it on to the customer. The higher cost of apps and subscriptions is not a tradeoff to buying Apple products. If customers see it as a bad tradeoff, they will by Android or WP7.

Instead, Apple is strong arming the content suppliers on their prices on other platforms. "make your price the same or less on our platform, or we will kick you off". That seems like the definition of anti-competitive. Why should Apple have any say what-so-ever on the price of pandora on Android?

If Google wants to pay Netflix and Pandora a fee so that their apps are bundled with Android phones for free, Netflix and Pandora could not take the money and give it away for free to users without getting kicked off of the Apple ecosystem. How is this not anti-competitive? Where is the FTC?
An update to Google Social Search
Seems like you are defending Apple's behavior without any effort to really understand what other people are shouting about.

It's nice that you don't care about Pandora and Netflix. A lot of people do. If those apps were to disappear or mark up their offering by the 40% required to compensate for Apple's take consumers would by definition be worse off.

If Apple's in-app purchasing turns out to be really convenient and worth a 30% cut then that's great for app developers, and they will use it. But I really fail to see how forcing people down that path is at all a good thing.
Congrats! Never give up...
Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs.

The truth of that assertion hinges on us not remembering the billion other counter-examples.

It might comfort free-market capitalists like ourselves to paint humanity with that thick brush, but truth tells differently: people don't always gather with the intention to buy/sell, in fact, sometimes, commercial intent is detrimental to a healthy assembly and is frowned upon.
In many non high tech areas, a paper resume is still required.
Borders was a revelation when it came to the Washington, DC, area. There were decent bookstores here already--at least a couple of which it helped kill--but nobody else had that stock and that range of subjects. Maybe at the Maryland Book Exchange in College Park you could have found _Transaction Processing: Principles and Techniques_ at one end and literature and history at the other, but nowhere else that I can think of.

There are still independent bookstores hanging on here. Reiters has technical and scientific books, squeezed down though from what it was. Bridge Street Books on the edge of Georgetown, Kramerbooks at Dupont Circle, and Politics and Prose out Connecticut Ave. all seem to be doing ok.
Not a startup but I'm using it. I was doing Java for awhile but we started getting into .Net at work. I happen to like it a lot better, and it works nicely for me. The only problem I have with Microsoft stuff is that it's so damn hard to keep up with the curve. I'm still learning parts from the .Net 3.5 framework and 4.0 has been out for nearly a year already...
The idea of bindings is the same as you're describing, however I don't understand what you mean by donuts being objects mapping to an HTML representation.

In MVC style, a donut model shouldn't know anything about its HTML representation, and there's a 1-* relationship between models and views on those models.

For example, you might have one view of a donut that shows its picture, and another view that shows its ingredients. When displaying a collection, you do want the collection to manage whether to display these things using an HTML list or table or lightbox picture browser or whatever.

But each donut should be a model that knows what it is to be a donut but not how donuts are displayed, each donut view to know how to display a donut, and the collection view knows how to organize what each individual donut view renders.

The other reason you need a view for each donut is that you might want interactivity. For example, if you want a zoom control for a donut picture, that logic would go in the donut view. The donut collection view knows about scrolling, paging, whatever but not zooming. The donut view knows about zooming. And donuts know about sugar and flour and chocolate and sprinkles.
Lendio Helps Small Businesses Secure Loans, Raises $6 Million
How is this different from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229756 (still on the frontpage) ?
its not...
The money grubbing part is that the existing free version will expire and you will no longer be able to use it. So even if you are willing to use the existing product (which doesn't require a "dedicated team of developers"), you are out of luck.
Well, when you bought your iPad, weren't you fully aware of Apple's whimsical and capricious nature in dealing with the App Store? Even though Apple are just being assholes here, I have no sympathy for computer-literate people who would willingly take part in an ecosystem which has DRM built into its DNA.
I do contracting in NYC (similarly to what you do) and even though I submit my resume through email, I was always asked to come with printed version when I was called for an in-person interview.
See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_loops

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld
Cool! We could have done something similar for our website as a marketing idea!
"I would also like to point out that it's not a meaningful feature as templates still cannot be written in isolation by designers without a lot of previous agreed upon structure." True. I don't know of any framework that's truly nailed developer-designer interaction, though.

Good, short read: http://alexgaynor.net/2010/mar/29/designer-developer-relatio...
If content owners are going to be ecstatic about offering IAP for a 30% fee, why does Apple need to force them? Won't they just implement it on their own?
I do not find the Mom argument particularly compelling. Humans are some of the best things at learning on the planet.

(From reading HN, I'm starting to believe that I must be one of the blessed few with a Mom who is not a complete jackass).

If she wants to switch (and she will if she can no longer get the things that she wants), it will get bitched about for 2 weeks, then she will figure it out and you'll never hear about it again. This is some sort of squeaky wheel confirmation bias.
How to do usability testing on your web site
I simply use filters to keep only the necessary stuff in my Inbox.
Shame on you people for having opinions that don't match mine.
I think he's aware of the formal procedures from his previous involvement with GSOC and Django. The post seems more to be stating what's what, how it's probably going to happen, etc.
Losing the Kindle will be a HUGE problem.

I agree. I've invested in a bit of content on the Kindle. It's ideal for technical books, which often should be disposable.

That said, I'm of two minds about this. I think we should get to the point where there are no longer multiple upstream "distributors" getting a cut of content. Often, this just gets between me and content producers without adding real value.

I guess Apple are seeing this as people making money off their platform so they should get a cut. That position has superficial attractions but quickly breaks down if you go deeper.

The writing is on the wall. Tablets are inevitably going to become commodity items. Apple is already in the software and content distribution business, and wants to ward off big competitors like Amazon. It's just natural that Apple wants to protect its turf.
The Real Secrets to Apple's Dominance
My Puny Human Brain
if they offer the content for sale directly.

There's probably a reason they went through middlemen. Not every content company wants to handle the distribution. They could simply have done so before. Was using PayPal that much harder than this new system that they weren't willing to touch it despite it offering much better margins? I doubt it.

and the like are in a bit of a grey area right now

And how long til Apple wants a piece of their pie too? I don't mean this as FUD, I'm serious. Apple has shown, repeatedly, a willingness to fuck over developers by changing its rules to suit Apple whenever the fuck it wants. Sure, some of these are marginally, arguably, better for the customer, but not to the point where it justifies screwing over the developers. For now, iOS is mostly where the profit is. But is it worth putting up with Apple's whims every few months, seriously?
Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”
Sounds like multiple VPSes/seedboxes
https://bitbucket.org/loewis/django-3k is the initial 3.x port mentioned in the post, started at PyCon 2008.