skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Gruber is ignoring the competitive disadvantage Apple is putting themselves in by shutting out the "middle man" apps. Kindle, Spotify and Netflix are deeply entrenched, best-of-breed services - consumers have deep investment with their Kindle devices, Netflix accounts, etc. These are not minor points. People will give up their Kindles and use iBooks the day they uninstall iTunes and start using a Zune.

So Android, which is already very feature competitive and may have a bigger install base, could have no competitor in distributing a range of very popular, rapidly growing services. Vic Gundotra must be grinning ear to ear.
If you're monetizing your content via adsense then they're taking 32% of your profit.

It's been repeated over and over again that this is about content publishers. eg. Selling magazine subscriptions.

Apple provides access to a large number are: A) affluent, B) have credit cards in the system C) are conditioned to buy via that medium, to me it's worth 30% to get access to that market.

It's like rent on a busy street, if you're selling trinkets with a minimal markup it's probably not worth it. If you're selling high end with lots of markup it's probably worth it. iOS isn't for everyone, it's a luxury brand, not every model is going to work on that platform. Want a marketplace where no one buys anything, there are confusing payment options, and your product is next to 10 task killer apps, well then there's a Marketplace for that.
IndexTank now has unlimited queries for all plans.
According to other accounts, the trick was performed by Bohr himself. Turing only won silver supposedly ...I guess bronze went to cannon shells.

http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/B.html

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Nies-Bohr/28076
I think this is a smart move. Zendesk already figured out that Uservoice alike "feature request management" is a must in a help desk system and they added this feature to Zendesk couple of months ago.

We were using Uservoice and Zendesk, ditched Uservoice as soon as Zendesk started to provide a similar feature to avoid having 2 systems.

Edit: Pricing is unusually low for Zendesk, I assume they'll increase that later on.
Well, do you want to work there? It's a challenge used for hiring. They might as well restrict it to people living in the US.
Well, it's very easy to manipulate people in need. A lot of these scam sites go after people with medical conditions.

Example: "Forbidden Neck Pain Relief", should stay forbidden because it's a lame scam.
http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.losethebackpain.com

They've also clogged up google for the keywords "Jesse Cannone scam" with fake reviews/testimonials. They're selling snake oil.

It's typical scam behavior, make outlandish claims, sell cheaply made product at high price, give kick back to affiliate. It doesn't matter if your product sucks, just market the shit out of it & make returning it hard to do or not worth the hassle. It might be worthwhile to sneak in a recurring charge while you're at it.

I am pretty sure the overpriced inversion table is similar. Also just because a saw cuts through a car on TV doesn't mean it does it in real life. Using an infomercial as an example of good marketing just shows the quality level that's being aimed at here.

There are too many worthless business ventures out there & too many stupid people falling for them. Some of these people though have serious medical problems & are desperate for a cure. Preying on these peoples condition isn't a trait I'd tout.

You may be good at writing convertible copy, but just because you've conned yourself into thinking what you write is true, doesn't actually make it so.
What really hooked me on programming is when I wrote what later became the Enterprise Knowledge Base of a Fortune 50 company. I was working on their help desk at the time, and the existing knowledge tools sucked, and had HUGE gaps between them.

I wrote something new, and specifically tailored to their process. This was over 10 years ago, and they still use it to this day, and have established a team of people to support it. I'll spare you the feature set (of which I'm quite proud), but the main thing that made it so intrinsic to their process was that it was written FOR their process. It was completely bespoke. It interfaced with their particular phone systems, their calendaring, their ticket tracking system, etc.

It was truly an enterprise-class tool, but for the fact that there weren't any layers of abstraction. The abstraction you usually have to put in to support a variety of databases, or a variety of phone systems, or a variety of calendaring tools because, the market for enterprise customers with MS-SQL + Avaya phone servers + Lotus Domino calendaring is crazy small.

Had it been re-engineered to work for all those systems, then it would truly have sucked. That is, I think the problem with tools like this -- you either conform to the process of the tool, or conform the tool to your process, and it's really hard to get right and stay lean. Maybe impossible.
Perhaps using the Web isn't the appropriate solution for a nuclear power plant control panel. There are other, more suitable, internet protocols to use for this sort of appliance than the Web (if indeed, making a nuclear power plant control panel accessible over the Internet is an actual requirement).
Prehistoric Groupon
Skweal - Keep Negative Feedback Offline
> This specific type of repetition is not wasteful repetition.

If the repetition doesn't link to previous discussions, it definitely is wasteful.

It's like adding a comment without having at least skimmed through the already existing comments.
bit.ly told me that daring fireball was potentially problematic...
http://bit.ly/a/warning?url=http%3a%2f%2fdaringfireball%2ene...
I'm curious -- why .info? YCPages.com is available, unregistered.
These are all really great points. It looks like #1 has been addressed, but #2 and #3 are definitely huge problems that I wish weren't so common :/ Hopefully UserVoice considers it.
However, they're not doing anything harmful with your information, and they're just addressing that information to you.

Many iPhone apps do this with your address phone book as well - such as Viber.

I'm not too sure what's going on in the backend system, but I doubt they're able to look through your whole contact list. In any case, turn off the Push notifications if you don't enjoy them.

Where it gets harmful is when they use your information for something else - then I agree with you. If the information is meant to serve your needs, it should be fine.
No, Gruber has stated that he does not believe Apple is ignorant of the consequences of taking 30% of Kindle sales or Netflix subscriptions via iOS — after all, Apple built Netflix support directly into AppleTV. He believes the company has probably been in talks with Amazon, Netflix, and similar companies for some time.
QR Code support seems like a software and cultural issue; they have public awareness in Japan and are thus useful. But it's not like most phones don't have the horsepower to read the things.

TV on phones is a matter of the local broadcast technology making it easier to support smaller recievers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1seg). And also (again) a cultural issue; what's the use case for watching TV on your phone in the states? In Japan, it's so you can watch baseball when you're on the train.

But I'm with you about payment. I got a special iPhone case with a slot for my train card (icoca) just so I could feel modern. :)
Full Text RSS Feed: Get the whole feed and nothing but the feed
Dr. Harold Liu - Staff Researcher, IBM Research
1) Yeah we're working on more in-depth workflow videos and a live demo.

2) It's for giving feedback on your product. We don't force people to signin but we do ask them for a name and email (like blog comments). It's so that you can follow up with those people when you launch that new feature or fix their issue.

3) Design customization is on all accounts (like what Foodily used). Full HTML/CSS customization is currently only on the highest plans.

This is great feedback on where we're creating confusion. I appreciate you taking the time.
Nice. Grabs the whole article text so you don't have to leave the RSS reader.
Why be sad? It's the way of things. A scientist does science, interested in analysing something. An actor is interested in presenting themselves to huge numbers of people and being popular in doing so. It's the whole point of the job - the actor's job is inherently self-promoting; it can't exist without some form of self-publicising.
Ask HN: Best Bank for Business Checking Accounts? (USA)
I'm tired of Chase and will be switching as soon as I find the best alternative. Does anyone have any tips?
Brands like Costco and Amazon make a huge chunk of change, but you don't see them getting into petty stuff like this.

Is the following statement (from the article) false?

As for ruthless profiteering, consider that Amazon, with their e-book publishing, originally took the fat end of a 70-30 revenue split with authors.
It's still status-seeking behaviour, just with different totems.
LFTR should be worth all the prizes and money :) (Wigner and Teller were more hawkish)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/LFTR
Well, my Mom likes WordPerfect. Version 5 in which there is no mouse. She is a master of the reveal codes.

(Not to get into a your mom vs my mom or anything)
This PDF is the article referenced by the following New York Times article.

Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/science/01compute.html
They literally foam at the mouth? That sounds implausible. You should edit your comment.
Also in some parts of the world there is a leading H sound, specifically Ireland.

We also pronounce R like 'or' instead of 'are' which causes endless amusement every time I use the abbreviation HR in the states.
Have you looked into Charles Schwab? I have a good friend who literally raves about them. He compares their level of banking customer service to that of Zappos retail customer service.

That is quite the compliment if you ask me. Might be worth checking out! Its huge to be able to get someone on the phone who is helpful and caring - esp when you are a small business.
Ask HN: Review my startup
It will be a live video network of business experts built on the Justin.TV api that will have live events with various subject experts including a live chat and threaded forum. These videos would be riffing on various business topics (i.e. marketing, sales, finance, etc...). Along with this would be a video networking application that would say allow a florist in Des Moines to be in a network with a Wedding planner in Indy to hook up by video. There would not only be this interaction between small businesses but a built in referral system. Think BNI except without the expensive price and time envolved.
Lol: http://fulltextrssfeed.com/news.ycombinator.com/rss

Works well for keeping up with HN too :)
Difficulties building product - Q&A with founder of Sitepoint
There are always Efene and Reia if you want sexy things. (However, I find it somehow disturbing that there are almost no documentation on Reia beyond the examples on its site's start page.)

One could compare Node.js to Twisted, Tornado or EventMachine. However, comparing Erlang to Node.js is somehow weird as they have different paradigms — Erlang is highly-concurrent with its "green" processes, while Node is single-process single-thread with "asynchronous" paradigm.

(However, there are some aspects, that could be compared. Erlang has "let it crash" motto, while in Node.js one has to be careful with any exceptions. Erlang is distributed and Node.js has no notion of processes.)
Wow, thanks for that comment. I never even considered them. I'll look into that today.

And just to reiterate: Chase sucks.
Everyone isn't born equal, but everything we have doesn't solely come from genetics. Nurture plays a huge role in our development. Saying Natalie Portman is successful solely because of her DNA is wholly disrespectful to her hard work. She didn't get best actress and a masters degree by just slumming it because her genes did all the work.

It's naive and ignorant to ignore nurture in the debate. A lack of Vitamin D or cholesterol can inhibit myelin growth, which notably in the womb causes a miscarriage or still-birth/brain dead baby. It's reasonable to assume that a lack of Vitamin D or cholesterol in a child's formative years is going to cause severe developmental problems.

Natalie Portman has a degree and an oscar for one simple thing: She works hard.

If she didn't work hard she might be a recognizable actress, but she'd be like a huge number of university enrollees in that they never get any degree.

Genetics is a firm foundation, bad genetics can cause lots of problems. But only work is going to build a house, and only hard work is going to build you a mansion.
ADD / XOR / ROL: Wow ...
think it has to do with the fact that he is running a URL shortener himself (i would guess bit.ly pro?) when he tweets it: http://df4.us/h8h
this is an interesting idea ->what are you looking to do?
Grubers gonna grube :(

Talk about burying the lede!

"But leaving aside the revenue split, there are technical limitations as well. The existing in-app purchasing system in iOS has a technical limit of 3,500 catalog items. I.e. any single app can offer no more than 3,500 items for in-app purchase. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of Kindle titles.

"Something’s got to give here. I don’t know what, but there must be more news on this front coming soon. I don’t believe Apple wants to chase competing e-book platforms off the App Store."

In other words, all the rest of the article, defending the Apple terms, is so much codswallop. Because Gruber believes that these terms are unacceptable, as in Dead On Arrival, to major users of in-app purchases and will have to change shortly to accommodate them.

And once you have figured that out, why not apply this to the other users of the platform, the rest of these arguments? "Eating margins will chase applications off iOS" and "Catalog limits are too low for many credible use cases" apply to many more developers than just Amazon Kindle.

But for some reason these arguments are dissociated from the ones Gruber wants to make. Instead of putting together the whole picture, he comes to these major stumbling blocks and writes the equivalent of "Does Not Compute."
>20 years ago before any consideration was given to the Internet being used for more than viewing anything but linked documents [emphasis mine].

You mean the web. Do not confuse the web with the internet.
It turns out the pricing for this full service product isn't directly under the "Pricing" button at the top, but under the Pricing button under the prices on the Pricing page.

So, the prices for the full service product definitely seem a lot lower than the "Feedback" product.
I'd love for Amazon to remove the DRM from their books, and just sell books in epub format which can be read on any device without a Kindle app. That would solve Amazon's problem with iOS/Apple, and also be an ideal solution for end users. EDIT: what I mean is, music is now sold without DRM. Why do we still need DRM for ebooks? I'd love to be able to just put all my ebooks in a Dropbox folder, and not depend on Amazon to create an app for every platform where I want to read my books.
CharlieSheen gets 100,000 followers in 1st hour
The reason is I can leverage muscle memory with alfred. I don't need to look at my screen to determine which app is mail. I can slap ctrl+space and type mail in the time it would take to cmd+tab to it.
Well in many cases the actual cost of the product was covered in the "Shipping & Processing Fee". To return the product the customer would have to pay the shipping back as well. Sometimes they say they'll pay shipping back, but they've probably accounted for this by making a higher initial shipping cost or making a it a pain in the butt to return or just by conveniently "going out of business" after a month or two.
Let's take a look at the alternatives to breaking the back button, then:

- The web application could serve static pages and then update them with AJAX

What if the user clicks back /then/? All the AJAX updates would be lost, and they'd go back to an older version of the page - they'd then see the data on the page "jump" to the updated version.

- The web application could not use AJAX at all, and serve everything as static pages, without automatic updating

Some web-applications can't work like that. Mine has instant messaging, and I want the IM windows to be there when it loads. Besides, most users /like/ AJAX. They're not thinking "oh no, this application ruined the web", they're thinking "nice, the page updated itself".

- The web application could use Flash or some other plugin, instead of the native HTML/Javascript

Which of these are you suggesting developers do instead? Why is the HTML5 history/hashbang URL model not better than all of these?
Hmm, there's the Marriott Conference Center in town (where the Full Frame documentary festival is held every year), but I guess that might be a little too big…(or booked out)
BeOS/Haiku (http://haiku-os.org/ - not a dead link, surprisingly)
China Just Won SimCity With Censorship - Bypassing 3D Baidu Maps
I think CCNx is going in this direction. There's also IETF DECADE and the older Internet Backplane Protocol.

IIRC the DMCA has an explicit exemption for caches.

To get ISP caches deployed, you have to convince ISPs that they'll save money. CDNs actually work against you here because they are either free or in some cases paying ISPs, and if an ISP allows CDNs to get close to its POPs then CDNs are just as efficient as ISP-operated caches.
All this talk about Gruber, the fanboy that blindly defends Apple, seems to be missing one thing, which is why he should be unhappy instead.

John Gruber in general likes the way Apple does things. Right? Not a controversial position, well understood and, these days, pretty common. So first off, I'm never surprised when he posts about "here's the thought process and mechanics behind the way Apple does things" even if that's the top-level business decisions Apple makes.

So with that understanding, what kind of thing should he naturally be unhappy about? Things Apple does that are uncharacteristic, bad moves for their users, or just downright unethical (i.e. knowingly lying to customers). I truly believe that's it.

Let's toss aside the idea that this move is uncharacteristic (even detractors say "that's the way Apple likes things.") Second, he's explained how he thinks these rules seem good for users. And finally, although I know a lot of people think Apple is doing something unethical, I really don't think John sees things that idealistically when it comes to these kinds of things.

He did demonstrate some sympathy to criticism that Apple changed their rules, but I don't think he sees that at all as unethical. He's idealistic about design but I don't think he's idealistic about business and the marketplace. I actually don't think he really cares as much about the business angles, but that's where the interest is these days.

I really don't see any reason he should be unhappy with this plan. I think he's explained pretty well why he thinks it's a reasonable approach, and given that evidence I think you need to argue pretty forcefully to suggest he's being insincere.
Hey Justin, thanks for your message.

the problem with point 2) is that he was claiming this mysterious social media buy for $5 a day which I asked him to tell me before sending the payment, but he didn't.

Anyway I'm gonna contact him in a last kind email tomorrow and see if I can get something out of this.
A Little Hand Holding Goes A Long Way
Does anyone know of a browser plugin that will automatically eliminate from view any Hacker News comment containing the phrase "ad hominem?" Ad-Hom Block Pro or some such?
This was true until iBooks came out. Keep in mind that a 70% cut for the publisher for books is better than most authors traditionally get. Meanwhile, record labels' cuts are usually more than 90%.
Working on the Railroad
Once again, the philosophers are stuck in a busy-loop, waiting for empirical evidence to sweep their debate away into the tedious realm of science.
The Role of Open Source
Ad Hominem? He said only one thing about 'Gruber' that he is tired of him. Rest of his comment was about Gruber's arguments and non arguments. I didn't see any Ad Hominem attack in the original comment.

And how is Gruber's overall argument right if he is critical of Apple in two of the four points? How does that even make sense?
To me they're just degrees of abstraction/assumptions/givens (I'm not really sure what the best/right term is).

There's an evolution from:

label:
if (i > size) goto exitLabel;
yada yada yada

To iterators. When you see an iterator you don't care if there's an exitLabel or fall-through. For the most part you don't care if the loop counter is an int or long, or if there's no loop counter at all, as its using a null terminator or something. The iterator is the "what", the old skool method is the "how".

But the walk from iterators to select is similar. A select statement (grossly simplified) is simply a for-loop over a collection where you don't care about order:

select * from collection

That's not so intersting. So lets look at a common looping construct. It might look like:

for (obj in collection) {
if (obj has some property) { add_object_to_new_collection}
}

We can abstract that and make it:

select * from collection where property_holds;

Of course, this select, again, doesn't care about the order of the iteration at all (which also likely means doing things like having side effects evaluating the property will result in non-deterministic behavior). The iterator has become the "how" and the select the "what".

But while this is one man's high level abstraction this is another man's "how". For example, if I'm looking for anomalies in the data, I may not care to specify what the anomaly is. Just something that looks "out of the ordinary". One could imagine a language saying:

find uncommon relationships in collection1 x collection2

It should have well-defined semantics, but these semantics probably don't care if you use the "select" statement or the "for-loop" or some other mechanism. Those are just implementation details. Those are both "how's" not the "what".

To me you're just walking a chain of abstractions. There's no discontinuity where things suddenly break from "how" to "what".

Remember when Fortran was created it was a revelation because you could now just tell the computer what to do, not how to do it. You no longer had to load specific bits into specific locations in specific flags or accumulators. We certainly would no longer consider Fortran specifying the "what", but people did.

Now when I see people saying here's an abstraction so you don't have to specify "how", my question is "what are the assumptions?"

I don't think this is a fundamentally different way of looking at things, but rather a way that puts the emphasis on the nuance rather than the benefit.

One more point I should make on assumptions (and this goes to the convention vs ceremony debate) is that I think that part of why Raganwald like the notion of "what" is that it captures the right assumptions or best practices. Like above when I mentioned the side effects during property evaluation -- that's a pretty yucky thing. Just makes reasoning hard. Part of what makes good library/language design is capturing assumptions that bend programmers to make usually good tradeoffs. This is the whole trend of conventions in frameworks. But again, to me this is a gradient -- not black and white.