skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where do you read though? I'd imagine that it could be too heavy if you do your reading in bed/on a recliner with the device above your face.

I read many kindle books relaxed back on my recliner, Kindle in one hand - is that easy to do with the iPad?
Right... and 5$ is hard to pay when your a teenager, just because you don't have a credit card yourself.
There are vast numbers of young people out there that either don't have $5 or have no way to pay for something online even if they had the money.

The potential pool of software developers isn't (and shouldn't be) limited to the US and Europe.
So you can afford a $1500 Macbook for your hobby but not $5 for XCode?

Maybe they're trying to set the precedent that you can charge money for utilities in the app store.
And GBD/clang/gcc are all open source technologies.
The cynic in me thinks that it's $10 this year, $15 the next, and pretty soon Apple will be doing what Microsoft used to do. If so, it's a real shame.

I remember when I first switched to OS X as a student. The free developer tools were very impressive to me. I remember telling people "See, this is how it should be done. You shouldn't charge people to develop for your operating system. More applications for your system only helps you sell!"

I'm sure the free developer tools were also a factor in Microsoft offering a free version of VS. Now, it seems, as Apple is becoming more and more popular, they are moving more and more in the direction that MS did in their hay day.

It appears that a once fairly open system is becoming slowly more and more closed. I sincerely hope that the cynic in me is wrong.
http://bit.ly/gr4tKR
Backups as an anti-plagiarism tool
Yes, but that doesn't refute my point. My point was sleep deprivation doesn't make better doctors or even encourage better doctors to stay.

Frankly, I'm surprised that as many doctors make it through - the working conditions are pretty terrible. Maybe the pay makes up for it, but you only get paid well once you get out of your residency or fellowship.

Better conditions will probably produce better doctors, not subpar doctors.
Considering that you still need a mac, I don't see how much difference it makes. Note that I still think it's a terribly stupid idea.
Verifone asserts that Square has a gaping security hole
According to Verifone the dongle supplied by Square does not encrypt credit card information which can be read by any malicious app. Square security page at https://squareup.com/security does not mention anything about hardware encryption within the dongle, however it states that no credit card information is stored within Square client.
Ditching custom labels and filters in favor of this. Bye bye bacn.
Caching Facebook profile images with ListViews and Android
VS is also free to students and small businesses.
How on earth do you write an app like this and not come up with a way for me to buy a domain from you through it?!
>Apple Wants to see a strong HTML web.

They want this as long as they are not the dominant platform. If MS and Apple swapped places tonight and Apple suddenly had 90%+ marketshare, it's likely that their strategies would flip just as fast, because it's the most profitable thing to do.

Apple's interests are in ensuring that their platforms can run as much user-desired content as possible; they can do this by promoting cross-platform compatibility and interpreted code like JS and HTML.

Microsoft has no need for this, since everything runs on Microsoft by default, because if it didn't, you'd miss out on 90%+ of your potential market. Instead, Microsoft's interests are opposite; they want to do everything they can to ensure that Windows is still required for any and all meaningful usage. This is the major point of IE; do enough to mostly work, but break compatibility where you can get away with it so that developers can't forget about Windows and IE.

They also hope, though the environment isn't appropriate for this to work anymore, that IE will be your sole development platform and that considering the time it takes to make stuff work in IE, you will just leave things broken in all other browsers, further solidifying the MS lock-in.

Lock-in is the holy grail for the software vendor. Apple is putting this in place as best as they can in the markets they control, and they are trying to ensure that MS doesn't lock them out of the desktop game, because they're still vulnerable believe it or not. MS is trying to ensure that Windows' death grip remains in place FOR. EVER., just as Apple wants iPhone/iPod to do the same.
I suspect Apple is trying to build up the Mac App Store. I doubt they care about the money they get from Xcode or Facetime ($0.99).

Perhaps it sets up an expectation for the consumer - a small utility should cost about $0.99 and that a larger application should be about $4.99.

This gets consumers in the habit of paying for software they might expect to be free, motivating developers to use the Mac App store and builds up an ecosystem to match the iOS app store.
I'm sure Steve Jobs is going to reply to one of the hundreds of emails he'll be getting on this subject, hopefully his answer won't be "Because. - Sent from my iPhone"
Teenagers might not have credit cards, but they receive iTunes gift cards as gifts, which they can now use on Xcode.
Keep dotting your i's and crossing your t's until you're out of school. Honestly, if you're above the work, you should blow through it without too much trouble. It's designed to be doable in a reasonable amount of time for someone who is in the same position as you except that they are just coming to terms with the material. You should be able to do it in half the time. If not, then you benefited from the practice.

Once you're doing real work, turning down work will not make you lazy; it will be an opportunity to say, "Sure, I might be able to assist you with that, but you will have to talk to <important person> and <other important person> about the impact on my work on <important project> and <other important project>."

"Oh... no chance of my project taking priority over those. Shoot, and I really need it done this quarter."

"I think <junior developer> can do the job for you. He might need a little guidance, but if he does, I will be happy to make myself available to answer his questions and point him in the right direction."

"Wonderful, thank you!"
Walt and Roy Disney come to mind.
It's fixable.

Financial security and social familiarization aren't the only sources of confidence. Understanding of skills' value, faith in the ability to learn new skills, curiousity about what others find valuable and willingness to provide it -- no one who has these has much deep anxiety about pleasing the boss. If the boss likes them, great! If not, they're happy to move somewhere that appreciates what they add. Confidence is out there for anyone willing to learn and work.
Entrepreneur. Meet Thought Leader.
I think people are forgetting that it's $5 AND the additional hassle of entering your credit card information and so on. The cost could be a dime and Apple would still be raising a non-trivial barrier to entry.

Further, it seems like a pretty big "fuck you" to anyone under 18 and/or living in a country, like Brazil, where you can't pay for it.
I'm not sure if this applies to Xcode, but at least with Coda, even if you purchase it outside the App Store, it has an 'Installed' label and presumably gets updated through the App Store as well.
>I had a Kia that did the job for 230,000 miles. If all you want is transportation, it does the job.

Thanks for the datapoint. I drove a rental Kia once, and it was...not totally crap, but lacking in fit-and-finish (e.g., the steering wheel vibrated a lot). But that was in 1996; it's good to know they've improved.
Not really because the comparative sizes of the install disks are substantially different due to the fact that none of the X windows environment or any X apps need to be shipped on server.
Home Sharing is great. Apple just lost 200€ because of it. (I wanted to buy a 64GB iPad for my whole music collection but now the smallest model will be good enough for me.)
Y'all had better watch out for my awesome new Socially Curated Vegan Recommendation Engine: saladdiction!

Edit: I want someone to build this... I registered the domain to avoid squatters, so if you want to be the one to build it get in touch with me.
Why Credibility Matters
https://www.pcworld.com/article/142272/accounting_rules_behi...

Apple reports iPhone revenues over a 24 month period, this is called subscription accounting. Since an iPhone is sold as a subscription, Apple can write off services associated with providing that subscription on an ongoing basis, i.e. give all upgrades away for free.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/tag/subscription-accounting/

iPod Touch and Mac revenues do not use subscription accounting, therefore Apple is not allowed to give away major OS upgrades for these products, it must treat upgrades as separate products that make or lose money for themselves. Apple is not allowed to give away a major iPod Touch upgrade and apply the costs of writing the upgrade to its iPod Touch business.

I am certain of the rules around subscription accounting and its effect on requiring Apple to charge for iPod Touch and Mac OS upgrades (and Apple is happy to charge for OS X upgrades any ways).

Whether the $4.99 for XCode is a byproduct of these rules is conjecture. I think so, but I've looked all over and I can find neither my Apple Employee badge nor my Chartered Accountant diploma, so it's more than fair to doubt me on this.

p.s. Another clue to the reasons for the charge is contained in the fact that XCode is still free for ADC developers. Since ADC revenue is subscription-based, Apple can give away whatever it wants to ADC subscribers.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5646/
http://llvm.org/releases/download.html
Usually, Apple forks off the software that ships on new hardware releases in the name of secrecy.

The functionality gets merged, as they mentioned, in the next release that starts after the people working on it know about the new hardware. 4.3 was almost certainly in the pipeline already when the CDMA phone came out.
gcc/clang are completely open source. In fact, the ones online are far more recent versions than what apple has been shipping. I believe apple still ships gcc42 as of the last free xcode.
Using Influence To Tune Signal To Noise On The Social Web
OK, so when is it not a bubble?

I suppose if everyone says it's a bubble, it's not one, but how often does that happen?
He left Google in 2005. Opened his own restaurant in 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
iTunes gift cards are not abundant resources everywhere.
Show HN: Friends on Netflix
http://www.friendsonnetflix.com

About a year ago Netflix removed their friends feature, where you could see your friends' ratings. This was a great way to discover new movies, but according to them only 2% of their userbase cared. So a few months ago I built this web app to recreate that and more.

My goal was for sign-up to be as simple as possible. I don't even ask for your email (maybe I should though?). When you connect your Netflix account it pulls in your ratings/reviews. When you connect your Twitter and/or Facebook, it'll find your friend's profiles and follow them.

This was my first attempt at creating something in Python on Google App Engine. Having to denormalize everything was a challenge, but it seems to be working and the Task Queue came in handy. Supposedly it will now scale to millions of users. Good ol' premature optimization.

The Netflix API is kind of a pain, in that they don't provide a direct way to get all your ratings. For the initial import, I have to check every title you've ever rented/watched/queued to see if it has a rating. There also isn't any date information associated with your old ratings :(

I hope to find better ways to encourage people to share the site with friends. So far hardly anyone follows anyone, merely using it as a backup. This site is a lot more interesting with friends. I even have browser extensions that show your friend's ratings within Netflix.com

Any suggestions/feedback is appreciated. Thanks!
> Node.js is ideal for such routing/switching based interactions where it takes data from one end, pumps it to the other and does the reverse.

I've been intrigued by node.js since it comes up on HN so much, but this has really got me interested as this describes exactly a portion of a project I'm working on right now. In my case, the data would be copious and binary rather than instant message text -- anyone know if node.js is performant enough to handle that case?
From my experience as a Caltech undergrad, there was a "tragedy of the commons" in some of the larger classes. A student had a choice of doing the work early entirely on their own, or waiting until their classmates had started working on it, and being able to exchange advice, compare approaches, or verify answers with those classmates. Thus there was a fairly strong dis-incentive to always being the first to dig deeply into an assignment, unless you were so much smarter than your classmates that their cooperation was useless to you.
Does it matter in the slightest if every man and his dog does download this set of tools?

The more people (or dogs) who download this framework, the greater the potential revenue for Apple.

I understand that it is "only $5". But Apple makes $billions, so why the heck do they need to make $5 off someone who may want to code for their platform?
Maybe they want to create an incentive for developers to release their software at a low price on the App Store instead of making it free? Transform the freeware into low priced apps on which they get a share.
It's not about money it is about investment. $5 dollars means you have to invest into the system. Free means that you just spend a bit of time downloading and installing. If you stop using it after a half hour who cares. Money though has a higher barrier of entry.
Apple's gcc isn't available from Apple in an installable form outside of XCode, though. Their version on opensource.apple.com is just the source, so somebody else would have to host a binary. Definitely doable, but will be a change from the current practice, which is to expect users to have an Apple-supplied compiler binary.
As long as they use an uppercase M glyph in their logo, I will capitalize it however I like. :)
Right, but who bought them that mac?
Just the chef was worth $26 million. http://searchengineland.com/google-employee-53-charlie-ayers...
(in the US)
Might want to rethink your position in bonds. Much more to worry about there than in startups.
I think Apple should by Text Mate and charge $4.99 then it would make sense. I like TextMate is much better especially for writing Ruby on Rails
Another interesting thing to do is play back image data as audio. I used to use this for wild sound effects in tracks I was making about 15 years ago. Never did get to the point where I could play around in photoshop to deliberately create sounds, but I suppose one could if you made a study of it.
"due to the difficultly of it, there have been no real successes so far."

That's possible. Or else it's just one of those things that sound good in theory but in practice never seem to be very useful.
Ask HN: How to calculate initial valuation of start-up?
How do you calculate the initial valuation of a start-up that's just co-founders and doesn't yet have a product, income, or assets?
In general, good investments should remain good investments even if there are no buyers. I'd bet this is true for startups as well. Overvaluations help, but aren't necessary.
Big History: An Introduction to Everything
This implies that providers are either severely limiting their caches, or expiring in a shorter than posted TTL. Even though pinkbike looks like it has thousands of users, one would expect the front pages to be largely identical for most user sessions, so the ISP dns caches should already have most of those username.domain.com records cached. Either that or the ISP's DNS servers are more numerous and distributed, with fewer customers each, or something like that.

Anybody at an ISP that can fill us in on DNS TTL mangling or cache limiting?
My weekend project: alarm clock that makes you prove you are really awake
I've been reading a bit about sleep cycles, timing, and trying to be more awake lately, and I had an idea - an alarm clock that makes you do a simple math problem before it will turn off. That way, you wouldn't turn off your alarm while still half asleep, without consciously realizing it.

A few hours with heroku and twilio later, I have this: http://www.getwakeupcall.com

I kind of like it, because it seems simple and useful. But if I do pursue it, I'm not really sure how to. A subscription web service is easiest and simplest for me, but if I go that route I would have to charge much more than I would for, say, an iPhone app with similar functionality (since the web app calls the user's phone, potentially many times per day, and a local app would probably not have so many ongoing costs).

I'd love to hear your thoughts on 1) whether this idea is worth pursuing and 2) if so, in what format?

Many thanks!
New networking platform connects docs via smartphones 
Very exciting to more and more health-related web2.0 startups. The potential for innovation and elimiating operational inefficiencies is very high (and more effecient doctors are good for everyone)
Fellow nerds: please critique my startup :)
Curious why so many people upvoted this comment.

Is it because you are interested in hearing the answer? It's a social media company focused on attracting users and eyeballs (at the moment). The revenue is nil, same as it was for fb and google in the early days (not saying that dailybooth will be the next facebook and google, just that there are examples of companies that were once focused on users and eyeballs that are now focused on revenue).

Or is it because people enjoy the snark? Screw that company that just raised $6M!! I'm not jealous, I'm just...Bubble, bubble, stupid VCs, no revenue, no business model, pictures, bubble!
Why would I buy an app when I can just use http://werdmerge.com/ directly?
Kids in places where the App Store doesn't reach still can buy Macs from channels other than Apple, they can buy and borrow books and teach each other. They can't download Xcode 4 unless they have an account with Apple, a valid credit card (issued in the right country) or a couple of iTunes gift cards.

This is a step in the wrong direction.
Choosing a version control system?
Can you file a bug with the appropriate browsers' bug trackers so they know about the problem?
This is just the beginning. Apple is in the position of "Your going to take it, and your going to LOVE IT." What are you going to do? Not develop for iOS/OSX with Xcode? Bwahahaha. Don't forget apple is a large public corp. I don't think making less money is in the plans.

This is just a small part of the plan. Just wait until you have to be in a Apple approved facility, wearing apple approved developer uniforms to independently program anything for Apple.
I think the only valid answer to this is a tweet from http://twitter.com/hackernewstips:

> Today, @PaulG claimed there is no tech bubble. In unrelated news, @AdKeeperInc raised $40 mil. in funding for "Delicious, for banner ads".

Which is exactly what AdKeeper is, btw.
It may depend on the amount of RSI damage your hands have taken. I've played with iPads at the Apple Store, and I can't hold it comfortably for more than a few minutes.

By comparison, I can hold my 6" Sony Reader (or the Nook Color I had for a few days) indefinitely.

And, yes, I do realize that the iPad is heavy for good reason: it's got a bleeping big battery.
Suppose I have 4 Macs but only 1 developer account ($99 per year). Can I download Xcode 4 for free on all 3 machines, or is there a limit on the number of Macs per developer account? Has anyone tried this?
But only if you have an account at Apple's store.
I'm trying to think of what would've happened if I had to ask my parents for their credit card every time I had to download some tool when I was a kid just messing around with programming.

I probably wouldn't working in the field today, that's for sure.
Well, they couldn't copy everything!
Depends whose opinion on importance you're using for prioritization.

If you postpone things that aren't important to you, but are important to your boss, that's not going to go well. If you postpone things your boss doesn't care about, in order to do a better/quicker job on something the boss considers important, that'll probably make your boss happy.

(Note, I'm using "boss" as short-hand for "your boss, and all the other interested parties, customers, etc. who can affect your boss's opinion of you".)
When talking about teenagers (the 15 to 19 year old crowd), they may not be the ones buying the Mac directly.

I also think this is an unnecessary and dumb idea.
Xcode has normally shipped with OS X install DVDs (though a lot of folks download it anyway, as this gets you the latest version). I'm wondering if they'll ship it with Lion. I'm guessing that they will not.
(and Canada)
I've found people on facebook and freenet using mine... and stealing somebody else's name is definitely not cool
What to pack, bring & wear to SXSW
These New York Startups Are Generating More Than $10 Million In Revenues
I definitely agree with you, having grown up on free tools, but $5 is a lot easier to ask a parent for than $99/year to get access to this kind of stuff.
The last time I saw this discussion go around the SF blogosphere, people close to the industry said that very little of the cost of a book is actually tied up in the marginal cost of paper and shipping; most of it is overhead associated with running a publishing company that can’t be economized away by switching to e-books.

On the other hand, Kristine Kathryn Rusch said that one reason the overhead is so high is that publishers locked themselves into long-term contracts for things like Manhattan editorial offices and printers’ services, so they can’t reduce their overheads until those contracts expire.
Updates have always been automatic through Software Update. I have never manually downloaded an update for Xcode.

I have been a staunch Apple supporter for years, but lately their anti-hacker stance has become more and more obvious. If you aren't making them money through their store, then fuck off. This token charge for Xcode isn't for profit; it's a message to a certain group saying "You aren't wanted here anymore."
Apple are really driving me to put Linux on both my machines.

I'm not happy about that, but it's seems ever more likely since Linux is getting a lot more usable and the Apple tax is getting a lot more expensive.
Visual Studio: $549.00

Flash Builder: $699.00

TextMate: $56.00

Coda: $99.00

BBedit: $99.99

Xcode 4: $4.99
Microsoft Makes Apple Refile "App Store" Brief Because the Font Is Too Small
I believe they have announced that they will allow it, in the sense that they won't impose any measures to prevent rooting. Given that, I would expect them to check in a year or so to see whether they need to change their mind.
I have never been to a retail store where I didn't see them available.
The way "full-duplex" fixed wireless gear often works is by splitting the spectrum in two halves (plus a sometimes small guard band: frequency division). Each end uses one half for TX. Alternatively, you use the full band but switch off which end is transmitting (time division). So it really does double (or even a little more, if eliminating a guard band) the amount each side can send.
Agreed that credibility / name recognition is important, but not sure this particular example shows that - I've had a couple of popular articles on HN and absolutely no credibility :) Think it's more a question of finding the right audience - there's stuff I've put on HN that has sunk with FB friends and vice versa.
Backbone.js beginners and underscore.js micro templating tutorial