skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, this confused me a lot. The press release [1] says quite clearly:

> Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app. In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

It's that last clause which clearly states that apps like the the current Kindle app, which includes a "Buy Books" link at the top, will no longer be allowed.

This will be a massive shock to the nascent content-based app market on iOS. I can see only two possibilities for developers of these existing apps: primary producers of content who can afford to wear the extra 30% will just lose on their margin; or apps reduce the price of content on iOS so the Apple cut isn't as big. Neither option will be particularly palatable to most producers. Many might avoid the platform entirely.

But over the long term, I suspect this will have a positive disruptive effect in the iOS content market. Smaller producers who can build a business model around the 30% cut by Apple (similar to app developers) will have a better chance at maintaining a healthy margin.

[1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/02/15appstore.html
Congrats Andreas!
I liked the post!

I just started noticing more and more Americans using it in blog posts and I wasn't sure when this trend started.
It’s a scripting language but it doesn’t even have case/switch statements. </quote>

The same could be said about Python.
Congratulations on launching. It is always nice to see startups targeting that tiny niche market "the other half of the world."

Friendly advice from your neighborhood SEO: owning two sites in one vertical gives you cross promotion opportunities, particularly if one is more linkable than the other (gallery is more linkable than commercial offering). That said, I would give a lot of thought to consolidating your offerings into one site with two facets if you can do it without confusing customers.
Please, link to something better.
I've been using scribd for a pretty big Slide deck. It takes enough time to upload/convert on scribd that I usually go do something else while I wait for a new version to upload.

With Crocodoc it was fast enough that I didn't mind watching it process. My doc took about 1 minute for Crocodoc versus 7-10 for Scribd.

And they do HTML based rendering in PC browsers which I believe isn't done by Scribd yet. I think they have it going for Mobile Phones but not for PCs. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I like Scribd still I'm just impressed with what Crocodoc is doing. I haven't even gotten into their annotation system which is what they are most proud of.
It kind of amazes me that someone can make a statement like that bolt cutters analogy and not stop to ponder why bolt cutters are still legal, despite their utility in stealing bicycles.
I don't know about other businesses, but for me, unemployed or not, degreed or not, I am willing to hire anyone who is talented at what they do. The problem is finding the right talent and the right fit that benefits both the employer and the employee (at least in startup culture).
"Vim’s Normal mode lets me fly around a document"

Isn't this just because he is more experienced in Vim? I'm not an expert in any case, but is it really true that Vim is that much faster (editing-wise) than Emacs?

I'm guessing that everyone's editor of choice would be the one they're most comfortable in. In other words, the one in which they've invested the most time into learning.
Yeah. What are the Authors Guild going to do when all their bolts are the wrong length?
Sort of a random query, but why are you using Celery with Redis? Last time I looked into it, the documentation basically said "you can, but you should really use AMQP".
You might be conflating notorious with "nefarious," which is used when someone is notorious for something bad.
It's not so bad on Android. And Google is very good at Web Apps. Try viewing the web app versions of gmail and such on your phone. They're not as full featured as the dedicated apps, but they work damn well. The big thing is making them look like real apps to the end user. No one wants to have to remember a bunch of web addresses. Something like what Chrome does on the PC is good...instead of a classic link shortcut for your desktop, it makes an "app" out of it. Giving it its own icon and name like any other program on the computer.
A Tweet's Effect on SEO Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study
>as physical property rights
...

>We should rather call IP an intellectual monopoly privilege, than a right to a piece of property.

I hope you don't overestimate what physical property rights are, in particular that typical "fee simple" title is basically the license ("monopoly privilege"?) to a real estate vs. allodial title which is almost impossible, at least in the US nowdays.
Surefire DOM Element Insertion
Ask HN:  How do you find a tech centric group of people outside of the valley?
You can close your browser, go home, re-open your browser, and you've lost nothing. You can see that as a permanent "screen" irc.

Also, the fact that it's web based give them the opportunity to build the protocol as they want. For instance, they have the possibility to prettify snippet of codes, play video, show images (as they are already doing), etc.

It is also a bit different as each "channel" are "group" in convore where you can have multiple topics. So basically, for the django community, it's like if you had #django-performance, #django-host, #django-debug, and on and on. So, the second you join a group, you can start new topics.

So, basically, I know it is possible with IRC if you stretch it.. for instance, building your own irc client or hacking with mIRCscripts (Been there done that). Also, you of course can change the IRC protocol and host it yourself.. But then, convore just come with all that for free with a beautiful web-based interface.

Note also that I feel it's more serious as you need to login with your facebook/twitter which means less trolls.

The founder of convore really liked IRC.. so if you want, it is IRC+Twitter 2.0.
Didn't Apple say basically "if you can sign up in the app, you need to be able to sign up in the app in a way we get a cut". So as long as linode doesn't take on new customers in the app, no problem?

Similarly amazon could have a free iOS reader, no problem, from which you cannot buy any books. it's when they want people using the iOS app to buy books but not pay apple a cut that apple is unhappy.

Now I'm not saying I agree with Apple. I'm pretty skeptical of interfering with the kindle app much because that sounds to me like it won't be good for users. But I'm trying to keep an open mind and see what apple is actually saying and trying to understand what's going on. I haven't seen anything about apple trying to get 30% of linode monthly fees and i think that's a bit of a straw man.
Pessimism can stop painkillers from working
I'm not a fan of piracy, but it's hyperbole like this that has to stop. The recorded music industry seems to be quite vibrant - contrary to the claims of the MPAA for the past, oh, 10 or so years.

(edit - voicing agreement with the parent)
Thanks for all the tips!

I will definitely like to do some non-programming things on the side, such as read some books I've been meaning to and perhaps some martial arts as well.

These next few months will be a good time to explore.
Interestingly, serving e-books over HTML would destroy the DRM models that Amazon and others have developed to "protect" their content. I can't see there being a Kindle web-based reader unless Amazon takes the same road as Apple with regard to DRM [1], and tells all their content providers to get on board.

[1] http://www.apple.com/fr/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
Give A Beer
IRC is pretty hostile to nontechnical people. Centralized (read: easy to find), user friendly, pretty-by-default, these things are all important.

That said, I haven't really been using it simply because the web interface is so slow.
Steve Jobs reportedly seen at California's Stanford Cancer Center
Hey, that's a pretty apt description, actually.

I can still go down to my local hardware store and buy bolt cutters.
Meetups have been my biggest success here in the rural UK. Find a BarCamp, find a local tech mailing list, things like that. Even find a user group for a technology you don't use and attend - you'll probably find people who attend other local meetings you didn't know about.

Here in the north of the UK, the "Geekup" events and mailing list, Think Visibility conference, iLinkoln and the NWRUG (a Ruby User Group) have been most helpful in getting me "into the network" as it were.
Rich people don't go to jail.

Example: http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/26164101/detail.html
Congrats.

How much did you pay for the domain Catch.com?
I see almost entirely positive points on your comments? In fact this comment is still at 10.

For myself I agree with the good points you raised about Apple, but this article and all these comments are much more about the specific issue at hand. I feel like you're not seeing the context in quite the same way as other commenters myself included.

Considering you didn't mention compulsory In-App price matching at all, you actually haven't defended Apple over this issue in these comments at all. It just kind of reads like you didn't read the article and are just responding to the headline.
Has there been any successful criminal prosecution of BitTorrent users?
Who doesn't love some popular culture - a virtual lynch mob piece?

I would have less issues with writing like this if they actually cited some exampes where laws were broken, and which laws were broken. I'm not pretending that the whole thing was always on the right side of the law - I'm not - but you can't just say 'they're all criminals, lock them up!'.

Because from what I've read, most of what caused the issues were not only legal, they were government backed up and sanctioned.

They might have been a bad idea, some morally wrong, some the result of some very poor judgement or influence by the wrong lobbyists. But criminal in the popular sense is vastly different from criminal in the law sense.

I'm right behind locking people up for breaking the laws. But if it's going to happen, someone needs to cite specific examples where specific people (or companies) broke specific laws.

Because all I've seen is a case where the government relaxed regulations regarding speculating with depositors money, opened up the monetary taps to let debt flow freely, and then guided that money into questionable lending for social and political purposes.

Completely unlike the insider trading accusations from the 1980's most of all the obscene money that was taken off the table was done in plain view of the regulators, and backed up by politicians convinced they'd found the magic cure for endless economic growth.
Oh, come on. None of these things even existed a few years ago. People are consumers and will adjust to whatever is the newer, better tech.
A). I want to hold a trial before any punishment can be meted out. Yes, I think that concept has a long history in common law. Warrant for evidence are a different story.

B) Read my statement again. Your example doesn't contradict it at all. The fact that some people sometimes get some relief after the fact doesn't prove that doing things this is fair or that it involves anything like the spirit of due-process. You can fight bureaucracy and win occasionally in even extremely authoritarian countries.

Edit: OK, reading my original post, I should have said "when you lose everything before, the claim that you can sue to get it back becomes a mostly empty claim". I hope the direction I'm going is clear in any case.
iBooks has a significantly smaller variety of books than Amazon.

But will this be true for long, now that this particular shoe has dropped?

Apple's primary target here is probably Amazon. A company which, incidentally, is no stranger to the art of using a powerful distribution network, an existing customer base, and a DRM-locked e-reader platform as a lever to demand big shares of revenue:

http://www.jeremyrossmedia.com/2010/02/21/word-kindle-70-30-...

According to this article, and the Stross piece linked therein, Amazon's standard deal is that they take seventy percent. Their "generous" deal for self-publishers is that they take a mere 30%... but the publisher must give Amazon the right to set the price as Amazon sees fit.

Makes Apple's 30% cut look pretty good, actually. But, of course, if you're a print publisher you pretty much have to have a deal with Amazon, so I expect there are a lot of negotiations going on right now.
It's supposed to discourage people from piling on. Doesn't really work though (as you've seen).
What should scare them is that they are fighting an exponential. In their daily lives these people have become accustomed to constants that pretty much remain the same throughout their lifetimes, but computing by its very nature is exponential. As people follow Moore's law religiously and the price of computing drops so does, proportionally, the price of digital distribution.

It's this sudden increase of processing power that allows millions of computers to run protocols like BitTorrent. That creates the infrastructure to run them in the first place. Although now they appear to be hardly computationally expensive, but even 20 years ago in 1991, would this have been possible?

Their problem is that this exponential nature of computing has vanished the floor on the price of distribution. Since, they're fighting an exponential this means that iteration also becomes far more easier. It's just a question of just a few more processor cycles.

The real world systems they're using to clamp down are fairly constant. Politicians and the art of law making hasn't really changed over the past 80 years or so. So, by the time it takes them to iterate and be ready for the next wave. It's successor would have knocked them off their feet.

So, in one corner you have a constant system. In the other you have an exponential. Who do you think wins?

That aside as Fuller would say, "don't fight forces. Use them."

note: as donaldc points out it really is more of a result of hard drive growth & bandwidth than pure processing power.
This is great! I'd love to see a variety of startups profiled, it seems like the bulk of the press out there is focused on web services when there are probably tons of great lessons to learn from companies dealing with physical products or boxed software.
Completely agree:
(a) What laws were broken? Who broke them?
(b) Why is there never any blame put on those on "main street" who took the loans that they couldn't repay?
Setting aside the difference between taking a tangible thing and copying an intangible thing, BitTorrent is more like a pickup truck than bolt-cutters. It's useful for transferring large files, like a pickup truck is useful for carting around large objects.

The funny thing to me is, I would think if they want effective tools for tracking down who is infringing on their copyrights, BitTorrent is great, because it's easy to see who is transferring what. Before BitTorrent came around, everyone was using ftp, irc, nttp, etc. which are harder to track.

Anyway, DVD decryption software would be the bolt-cutters.
Well...yes..isn't it known that he's had signs of cancer for a while now?
It's both.

It's something in addition to the existing rules (a new feature; recurring subscriptions) and a change to the existing rules (content provided externally from the app store must now also be provided internally to the app store and give Apple their 30% cut).

I don't care much about the former; I don't like the latter.

It's also not yet clear whether this applies to any subscription service or merely content subscription services. Even within the concept of content subscription services, it's not clear whether this applies only to downloadable content (a la The Daily or Amazon Kindle) or streaming "rental"-type content (a la Netflix or Hulu).

Apple will need to clarify those positions, but I believe that this probably applies to downloadable content only. I do not believe that it applies to services (e.g., Dropbox or Salesforce, etc.) or to rental services (e.g., Hulu or Netflix).

This rule change badly hurts reseller-distributors (Amazon Kindle, Amazon Audible, B&N, Kobo, etc.); they don't have 30% of margin to give up and they can't afford to raise the price on everything 30%+ across the board just so they can stay in the iOS game. This is (to me) clearly anticompetitive and probably is just at the edge of antitrust-legal.

This rule change does not (immediately, if ever) hurt content owner-distributors (newspapers, magazines, major publishers). I say "(immediately, if ever)" because this is access to an additional stream of income, although it's at a fairly high premium. Apple's 30% may be a fairly low customer acquisition cost, though. The newspaper that it might hurt a little is the WSJ as (IIRC) it doesn't give access to all content unless you're already a WSJ subscriber. They will probably be required to implement in-app purchase to a WSJ-app subscription for an update very soon.
The bigger problem is why our politicians are underwriting irresponsible risk taking, why they believe bubbles are the only way to prosperity, and why they simply cannot stop spending money we don't have.
We're good on all fronts except 4, and the transaction pool mode :)
Re: Removing your comments:

Yeah, some people seem to be very downvote-happy. Sorry. I appreciated hearing your opinion, though I did think it was very weird. Weird is interesting.

Just remember that with as many users as HN has nowadays, there will always be some people who feel the need to downvote anything they disagree with. I've found that, in general, it's not the same people you're talking to.

I think the best policy is to ignore the downvotes unless they're accompanied by a comment with a good reason why, because jerks who downvote frivolously are not worth your time.
Articles like this can very rarely call out specific examples or name specific people without he risk of being sued for defamation. Besides, this is an editorial piece not a work of investigative journalism.

For a bit more background, I found Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short, enlightening about some of the dodgy actors in the subprime mortgage disaster.
Because we already had redis installed, and I like less moving parts rather than more. So far, it's worked out just fine.
Love this idea...keep them coming.
I don't know what you're talking about, in the upper right of my gmail is "sign out" ... and that's what it does.
great stuff, congratulations.
Depends whether you're innovating in the frontend or the backend. The user interface for the iPhone was completely designed before any of the frontend was coded. There's a great comment by tlrobinson somewhere about how the iPhone was designed and developed but I can't seem to find it.

Also consider New Twitter. I don't understand how you'd start coding the HTML and the JavaScript without understanding the visual design for how the dynamic, two-pane interface was expected to work.

But if you're building a search engine, then you can probably put off the design until later. The analog is that you really wouldn't (or shouldn't) start writing code until you had an idea (a design or an architecture) of what you were trying to write. Same way you wouldn't start to code an interaction (HTML+JavaScript+CSS) if you had no idea what that interaction looked like.
Danke!

Sorry, I can't give the exact details but it wasn't that much.

What was really cool is the seller of Catch.com could have sold it to a much bigger company and chose us instead.

These acts of kindness are so touching, it is incredibly how people go out their way to help startups.
Another Apple Records? Isn't that a trademark issue? hehe...
If you're in school, join one of the tech-centric clubs. Otherwise, scout around for local or semi-local conferences/events.
Yeah, and even less logical. Which court has ever ruled that we should ban bolt cutters to prevent bike theft?
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I will act as the CEO, project manager, and "architect" for the company (among other things!).
Currently an engineer, and looking to finally move into the start up world with my winning product ideas and implementation strategies.

Looking for:
Are you extremely passionate? Driven to do great things? Want to be a co-founder of your own company?
Solid mobile app programming (iOS, Android) or creative development skills and experience
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If this sounds like the what you've been looking for, Tell me about yourself and why you want to get involved at my e-mail below:
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Bitwise operations don't really make sense on floating point data, especially not in javascript. Based on a quick one minute test it appears that javascript just uses the integer part of the number if you try bitwise operations (e.g. 2.6 & 6.2 == 2)
Or, more to the point, bolt cutter users?
Humanity Lost on Jeopardy
This might be the best thing that ever happened to Ireland.

Since independance it has operated like a corrupt african regime. There were elections but the same party was always in power. The politician's job was to go off to Dublin and get money for their local area. This used to be european handouts when Ireland was the poor relative - all over Ireland there are huge freeway projects that go from nowhere to nowhere just because one county got a grant.

Then it managed to attract a few US corporations to HQ there to avoid paying tax in the UK or Germany - it then managed to convince itself that this made it a celtic tiger. Rather like Liberia deciding it's a great naval power because of the number of oil tankers registered there.

With a bit of luck we will now get real elections, a real economy and a chance to become a real european country
5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck (Seriously)
Read one, and you've read most of the rest. I've thought about reading one carefully, making notes, and running a diff on new ones.

Saves time and avoids risk.
davidu owns operate OpenDNS which competes with Google DNS.

http://blog.opendns.com/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns/
Yes, they've got the money.
They can do whatever they want.

Jail is prepared for poor people.
I am having the same issue. Please let us know if there is a way to get this working in google apps mail.