skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your question reminds me of this quote from the movie Sneakers:

"There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!"

When you boil Google down to its most-basic form, it a company in advertising business. In order to present their users with the most relevent ads (which theoretically will be more likely to be clicked-on) they need to build a profile of their users. In order to build this profile they need to get people to use as many of their services as possible, and the phone is just another component of that. The phone also reinforces people's dependence on their other services. So while you may not see an ad when using GMail on your phone, you're likely to use the desktop version of GMail as well, which means you'll see ads there. Same goes for search, as well as the other services that are linked through Android.

If you think about what information they have about somebody using their services (Search, GMail, Voice, Reader, Blogger, Maps, Shopper, Books, Finance, YouTube, News, Picasa, etc.) adding mobile to that set of data is the obvious next-step to ensure they know as much about their users as possible. It's all about the information, and who controls it.
What tablet would a "power user" use then?

A laptop.
Just about the only lick of sense in this discussion.

I'm surprised that so many here, a community where lots of people are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures and where many donate to the unpaid author of widely-pirated shareware [1], would appear to be so laissez-faire on this issue. Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good.

I suspect you would have a better sense of perspective if people could create and use "paid" accounts on your shiny web services without paying.

Anecdotes of (c) described in the parent are few and far between, and don't justify the instances of (b) or the unintended consequences / moral hazard of (a).

(Disclosure: I sell software for a living, and have discovered [and reconciled] piracy of my products by very large organizations in the past. I imagine there are many other instances I'm not aware of.)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875
Primate Makes Daring Escape From Cage, Becomes Entrepreneur: Society Uneasy
Summary for those in a hurry:
"fuck this, fuck that shit, dojo has better i18n and a11y plugins, fuck jquery, The End"
The tarantino writing style weakens his argument, IMHO. More scientific arguments and less passion please.
Speak for yourself...
Let suitor start the price dance
Confluence in real time with Flowdock
Hacker News is Dead
I started using HN about 9 months ago. At that time a good majority of the articles on the front page at any given moment were about actual hacking. Now it's simply not the case. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy (and will continue to enjoy) the melange of general news, lean-startup advice, 'x acquires y' and hacker news. In fact, I am a regular contributor to the not-strictly-hacker-news component (having posted two techcrunch articles this morning). But where can I go to get the experience that was Hacker News 9 months ago. Please, tell me.

EDIT:
If you're going to tell me I'm a newbie for having been on HN for only 9 months* 0_0, save your precious keystrokes. It's been done for you.
Nobody forces anyone to enter those contents. Get over with it.
The thing that's important here is the definition of "durable goods," I think. It makes the discussion a lot simpler if we avoid the "doesn't wear out quickly" definition and use the "yields utility over time."

The thing of it is, there really aren't many (if any) goods purchased by consumers that are genuinely durable goods under that definition. Houses, possibly, but we clearly know that can turn out badly. Everything else. . . . well, everything else depreciates, most often quickly. Cars, televisions, appliances, and so on.

There just isn't a return on investment in terms of dollars and cents for consumer purchases that justifies the use of debt. If a business borrows money, they're just leveraging to increase profits. If a consumer borrows money, it's typically because they're not patient enough to wait until they have the cash (been there, done that, know from personal experience).

Anyway, the point of everything I said is to say this: I don't think there's good leverage for consumers, with the possible exception of student loans and a mortgage (for a reasonable house!). Everything else is just impatience.

EDIT: Given my school loans I'm actually pretty skeptical of the utility of student debt, too.
The difference, at least for me is that games and gaming isn't really that important, it's a fun indulgence and not much more. If I can't play a certain game or use a certain controller on my PS3, then, so what. If on the other hand my productivity is hampered by the fact that I can't open a specific document, do a particular task or connect a particular peripheral to something I hope to use as a general purpose computing then that is a real problem. So it's not so much vendor lock-in as such, as vendor lock in that adversely affects me and gets in my way.
Hrm. The number quoted doesn't sound interesting because it sounds fake. $1 billion dollars sounds like something Dr. Evil would say, not a real figure that got worked out in some SEC filing.

I like how you broke down the different categories for search revenue related to mobile though. Let's put some phony amounts on them just for fun.

Let's begin with the assumption that Google gets $1 per mobile search. (I'm using mobile search here because that's the category of search we are interested in.) That is, every mobile search, on average, generates $1 in revenue.

1) Mobile searches which were made on Android but where, if Android hadn't ever existed, the user would have had another mobile device and made the same search anyway.

Google loses money here because the search would have been made anyway. The loss comes from developing Android. Let's say Google loses 10 cents. (Total BS number!)

2) Mobile searches which were made on Android where, if Android didn't exist, the user wouldn't own a smart phone and the search would never have happened.

Google earns $0.9 here because they had to develop Android, but making $0.9 is better than making $0.

3) Mobile searches which weren't made on Android.

I feel like this goes in the same category as 1) because these are mobile searches that would have been made anyways, regardless of the existence of Android. The only difference is that in case 1) the search was made on Android. But for the purpose of justifying the existence of Android, they are one and the same. So Google loses 10 cents here because the would have gotten this search if they had done nothing.

Clearly Google needs category 2) to be as big as possible in order to justify the existence of Android. So the whole thing boils down to: "If Android didn't exist, the user wouldn't buy a smartphone to do mobile search".

I feel that if Android didn't exist, users would go out and buy an iPhone or something similar. I don't think the phone manufacturers would have just let Apple run away with the smartphone market so it would be in their best interest to create something competitive. But the bottom line is that Android seems like a needless expense for Google.
USPS can't pay $5 Billion due for benefits, 2000+ locations to close
Get Funded Faster
ImpressPages CMS
i'm only here to educate others on the business model and to stick up for the health of my industry.
Compared to the Netherlands, it is pretty accurate. Where I live I can choose from more than 10 ISPs (both cable/ADSL), and then there are several mobile providers. Compared to here, the telecom market in the USA is pretty much monopolized.
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Using Your Own Stuff
What Apple hopes you didn't notice about iPad2
> literally all you have to do is visit one more web site and download and run one more installer?

Your statements are only true for the simplest of cases.

I've been working with both LAMP and WAMP (Windows version) since 2003 - about 7 or 8 years now...

And even provide a pre-packaged WAMP type-distribution with a Pro edition and a Community Edition: http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper

I'll skip you the drama, but take my word for it, getting AMP to work well together (and working with AMP) is not a trivial task and requires literally years of experience. There are about 1000 ways you can screw it up. You might laugh at this statement with your "apt-get" or your Windows-based Apache setup.exe, but what happens afterwards? And what happens if there is a problem?

Having provided support for so many years, I can tell you it can be a nightmare for some people.
Isn't this essentially the stable-marriage problem matching staff to shifts where shifts have no preference who staffs them?
I'm happy to be able to say both that I realized how awesome Trumpet was back in the day, and that I made the choice to send Peter the $25 registration back when that was a harder choice than it is now. It's nice to be able to remember and renew my license, as it were. :-)
The problem arises not over some strawman of usefulness to society. The problem people have is that equating material property and intellectual property has some pretty serious flaws. It overlooks various attributes an (please excuse the overloading of the term) properties of each that are not shared. These attributes allow for some very different use cases between the two - and using the same words for very different actions is confusing. So while the arguments coming down to definitions may look like semantic wrangling, it is really an attempt to get people to see the different attributes as actually different.
I agree whole heartedly with this point. I currently work for a large bay area company and I noticed a new intern come on board who just has the 'X' factor, and could well turn into that top 1% or close to it.

Needless to say I'll most likely approach him as my first hire when I get to that stage with my own startup.
Perhaps these will be sufficiently dispassionate for you:

- http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/on-rolling-your-own

- http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/on-jquery-large-applications

- http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2009/11/12/dojo-confessions-o...
First of all, I think you are conflating prior and posterior probabilities. P(brown skin | illegal) != P(illegal | brown skin). The standard for a police stop is reasonable suspicion. Do you think having brown skin in Arizona is reasonably suspicious?

But much more importantly, the statistical evidence (which you haven't shown) would only be a consideration if justice were a statistical property. But if justice were a statistical property, there should be no objection to giving police arbitrary discretion to make stops and searches, since statistically speaking it is overwhelmingly likely that a citizen chosen at random has committed some illegal act for which they have not yet been convicted. But somehow that reasoning does not seem as appealing when we are the ones staring down the barrel of it.
Demand Media Buys CoveritLive
So is the engine still going to be available outside Disney? Hope so...

Any comparison with Impact? (http://impactjs.com/) Still meaning to try that one myself.
They don't care if their competitors backstab them. They just want web traffic to increase.

They could just wait for everyone to buy an iPhone (or maybe a Blackberry), but that will never happen.

They could have waited for Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, LG et al to make a better OS, but that wasn't going to happen.

They could have waited for Microsoft to build a better mobile OS, but then Microsoft would make bing the default, and people might not remember to change it to Google.

The open source strategy means that nobody is likely to gain complete control of the mobile market. That's good for Google. I'm sure Google would rather control the system, but it would be harder to get handset makers onboard.
Is the iPad 1 price cut ongoing, or just until March 11th?
My understanding is that this rate is only for peak hours, and only if she doesn't tweet anything else for an hour afterwards. So even at those ridulous rates there are probably many days when it doesn't make sense to do it.
Techmeme vs Hacker News
>The edit-in-place model as demonstrated in this post makes so much sense. It seems crazy to have a CMS with a separate backend when the backend can be the frontend.

Absolutely. In my experience "normal" users are much less confused - and more likely to actually manage their content - when they can edit their content in context instead of in an entirely separate interface.

Concrete5 CMS is pretty good at this - though the code behind the scenes is a bit wonky. This UI looks quite nice as well, but again behind the scenes... And I've yet to see a Rails CMS implement this at all (though I'm keeping my fingers crossed - please HN prove me wrong).
defaulting on a $20K car loan is not nearly as disastrous

Unless of course there are 100 times the number of housing defaults, because the car is not worth the price it was bought at a month later after it's used. Unlike land, cars never increase in value, they only plummet.

I've never owned a car newer than 10 years old, I don't know why people have to drive brand new cars, they certainly don't get better gas milage (and apparently many people are using the credit to buy SUVs anyway).
This Is Just the Start
Not if the contract is itself illegal and/or immoral. A contract is not necessarily enforceable by virtue of it being a contract. But this is a straw man; the point is that the terms "piracy" and "theft" have been misappropriated to protect intellectual property, bringing along a lot of basic assumptions that can be justifiably challenged. Even the term "intellectual property" is vulnerable for the same reasons. The whole debate takes place in a virtual world where not everyone agrees to the same conditions. But the same could be said about the ownership of physical things, which probably originally meant whatever you possessed at the moment (a piece of food, a scrap of clothing, a hand weapon) and was eventually extended to mean whatever you could protect over longer periods of time (livestock, shelter, huge tracts of land). The concept of ownership is continuously evolving.
I don't think this should be down-voted. The guys there probably didn't consider their profits when they put up their pledge but it is worthwhile to consider that they will more than likely profit (eventually) from what at first appears to be pure altruism.

If they'd termed it as 1/365 of gross annual turnover then it would be a different undertaking but without such an analysis this is not clear.
Lack of proper contentEditable support on typical mobile devices is indeed an issue. iOS somewhat supports it, for example you can make formatting changes but don't get a keyboard. There are some ways to go around this:

* Wait for Apple to fix this issue (there is a bug open)

* Implement a form-based workaround or do a on-screen keyboard in JavaScript

* Do something completely different. We've had quite good experiences in publishing from mobile devices via email
Except Microsoft _has_ used patent threats in the past (e.g. against the VirtualDub project, and there are a few more). When the threat comes from Microsoft, and it goes to what is essentially a one-man-show open source project, you don't actually need to get to court.

It's called "a chilling effect".

Furthermore, Ballmer was, and still is, FUDding all the time about Microsoft going to enforce patents that Linux infringes (though not name anything). Even though no action was taken, it also has a chilling effect.

Your defense is acceptable for google. Microsoft deserves to be patent trolled.
Given how much trouble he has had running a nightclub, for years and years, I don't think he picked that for any reason other than it being what he really wanted to do.
I think the post is saying that patent trolls provide something like a way for small companies to outsource their patent enforcement, which arguably levels the playing field a bit, but not as much as patent reform would. (sounds reasonable to me)
I actually think he is deliberately unclear. That's based on previous statements he has made, plus the tendency of other politicians to give false definitions of net neutrality.

You or I might think that this statement of his:

"My view on net neutrality is pretty simple: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I want an open internet, with a few simple guarantees - that everyone should be able to access any legal content they want; that there should be no discrimination against content providers on the basis of commercial rivalry;"

...is a perfect quick description of net neutrality. But you'll notice he doesn't say that is net neutrality. He says things like "Supporting net neutrality means supporting unfettered access to the web for everyone. But there's a problem here." and "The self-appointed defenders of the internet... are now actually calling on governments to regulate in order to guarantee net neutrality, or at least their version of it."

He's dissembling. Their version of NN is the version of NN. It's the same version he earlier said he supported. And this isn't the first time the minister for communications has had to try and clarify his statements: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1899719/ed-vaizey-s...

I'm really amazed at the pure Orwellian doublespeak that goes on when politicians discuss NN. "I don't support net neutrality, I think instead we should [do exactly what net neutrality calls for]."
Sure they are. $10 - $12 per device sold, depending on volume. In return the manufacturer gets the right to use the trademarked 'Android' name, non-open source apps like Market and a very good deal on Google Ads.
You know that the best sportsmen, and that includes the best soccer players, don't just perform their sport, but also do, say, auxiliary strength training?
I can't believe no one pointed you at this analysis:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022547
Hacker News wasn't about just hacking 9 months ago, or even 2 years ago. It's always had a strong startup focus (in fact, it started out as "Startup News").

If you want just programming stuff, http://reddit.com/r/programming is probably going to be what you're looking for.
It's not really the effort to protect, but whether you see it as a choice society can legitimately make, or something inherent pre-existing society. Is private property something that a society should recognize or not recognize based on pragmatic reasons, like how well society functions as a result? Or is private property some sort of inherent/moral right (as e.g. John Locke and most libertarians argue)? A similar debate comes up with copyright: is it a privilege that we as a society choose to recognize as a means of encouraging the production of creative works? Or is it some sort of inherent/moral right of a creator to control the reuse of their works?
Google's profit come from secondary sources. If they make you use gmail and address they're able to know what kind of ads to show you and your friends. Increased profit is incidental for them.
I think the correction below confused things rather than clarify because of its use of German spelling.

In German, the letter "v" is called "fau". The letter "w" is called "veh". What you heard, "veh-veh-veh" was, indeed, "www". "VW" (the company) is pronounced "fau-veh".

Of course, the German sound for "v" is "f", which is why the correction made things more confusing (in my opinion). The poster assumed that people would pronounce "vau" as "fau", since that's how Germans pronounce it, but English speakers who don't speak (or read) German can't know that it's meant to be pronounced that way.
It's completely irrelevant what you call it

It is important in a debate to not allow people to vilify any participants in "piracy" by declaring them to be criminals from the get go. "Theft" does this. "Copyright infringement" does not. Definitions are important because without sharing a vocabulary, we share nothing with which to debate logically.
While I absolutely agree with you, I believe you were looking to use the word precedent.
Do these kinds of frameworks support mobile features like touch and tilt?
I generally support examples like this, but it's important to note that Minecraft development budget is hardly anything compared to the investment of a major game studio, hence the lower price point.
Your Body, Your Mouse
The lwn article has a number of insightful comments http://lwn.net/Articles/430098/
I completely agree with that statement. I have actually never applied for a job yet. The startup I'm working for right now hired me because they stumbled across my app and contacted me asking me to work for them. I have received five other job offers recently in the same way, without sending out a single resume.

Not that I am assuming myself to be in the top 1%, but to my way of thinking the top 1% isn't going to be searching for a job, they will be making their own job, creating their own startup and websites. It is up to you as the employer to discover these people and try to hire them. They may not even accept your offer if it isn't tempting enough.
Strictly speaking, it sounds like Dojo is the one that's "for noobs". I mean, all the stuff that "happens" when you use jQuery are rookie mistakes:

Including multiple libraries/plugins to do the same thing
Not being ready to handle i18n/l10n
Not having tests

Point being, if you know what you're doing, these aren't things that are going to blindside you or that you're just going to forget about.

We have apps that have well over the mentioned 5k LoC of JS that even our Ruby programmers have no problem cracking open and working on if needed.

(And for God's sake, just because they're Rails apps doesn't mean they have to depend on Prototype.)
Future presidential candidates would also do well to note that the GarageBand presentation was overlong and tedious, just like the iPhoto presentation was when they unveiled the new MacBook Airs.
One assumption I never see questioned is the assumption that you actually need the top 1%. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases, you don't.
In a given context, rights can be more or less fundamental. Imagine a hypothetical post-scarcity society. Protection of private property in our sense ceases to have meaning there and cannot be considered a right. How can anyone of sound mind mistake private property as a natural right in light of such thought experiments? It's a contingent and therefore non-absolute right.

You can consider protection of private property the most important right in societies like ours, so important it occupies a lofty stratum of its own, and yet not commit the fallacy of claiming that private property is a natural right. However, it's understandable why people with priorities like that would make such a mistake.
I don't think judo does much to contribute to the "ideal body" at all. There are judoka with the ideal body, but there are far, far more without.
"There are conditions that make it so in the US"?

And every other western country (and pretty much every other developed nation full stop.

Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal. Whether that should be the case or not is a matter for debate, whether it is or not isn't.