skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is all interesting but it has nothing at all to do with the point I'm making. What I'm saying is, Square could come up with an encrypted obsfuscated reader-to-iPhone protocol that, like Skype, would take the better part of a year to fully reverse. Verifone would then say: "yeah, but how does anyone who looks at the reader know that it isn't a fake Square dongle that doesn't really run that protocol?"

In that respect we are saying the same thing: the entire platform is, by Verifone's standards, unsuitable for accepting cards.

But that's not what Verifone is actually saying. They picked a much more specific argument against Square. There are two reasons that makes sense for them:

(1) because there will be another 57 similar arguments they can make if Square does something to mitigate that first concern, and

(2) because if they made the intellectually honest argument ("It's not safe to accept cards with any iPhone app, Square's or otherwise") the competitive issue driving this complaint would be too transparent.
I was told that most wineries don't make a lot of money from selling their higher-end wines; they produce them because they establish the reputation of the winery in the eyes of influencers (wine critics, restaurant wine buyers, snobs, etc.) -- those who know wine well. So, while the sommelier might think poorly of, say, Mondavi's "Costal" label, he could still offer it as the budget selection on the by-the-glass list and feel good about it due to the quality of Mondavi's higher-end offerings (ignore Opus One as most consider it an over-priced way to impress clients at business dinners). Also, when a consumer who just wants something white and fruity sees the lower-end Mondavi labels, he can recall what his wine snob friend had to say about the brand's better stuff. Perhaps publishing houses and newspapers act similarly?
The thing to note is that implementation of browser prefetching is further putting DNS requests out of the control of the publishers. 10 billion queries was something like 5000 dns req/s and that is considerable resources of some dns service. I wish dns was not per query costs, but it would seem that is the metric that resources would be based on.
The point of the article is to let people know that if you fall into this dns pattern, it maybe a result of the recent prefetching done by browsers, and you may have a way to resolve the issue.
will be interesting. Still interesting to know 12% of people use IE6!!! http://ie6countdown.com/ Not sure if it will better FireFox/Chrome
It's not about making money. It's about detering those that have no interest in downloading 4-5GB in software they'll never use. There are LOADS of people out there that do that. I know many people like this. The kind that download every Ubuntu release in ISO format, yet run Windows.

Anyone that is revenue potential for Apple is going to pay. Actually, many of them are already paying $99/year anyway, so they get it gratis.

And you're mistaken about the assumption that anyone who downloads this, at any price, represents greater potential revenue. Charging a tiny nominal sum for something of value is common practice to deter time-wasters. Not just in the software industry, either. There is a psychological effect as well - if you pay for something, you are more likely to ascribe value to it, and more likely to investment time into it.

What's the bet that this comes free on the Lion disc, anyway.
My iPhone 4 is updated (via iTunes), but so far there's nothing newer than 4.2 available for my iPad (according to iTunes).
> The Audio API's .play() method is now always disabled.

Well… yeah, when would you want to enable it in order for the user to always have control over the sound?
Based on the general sentiment in this thread, I guess the HN community doesn't want people to be able to charge money for software.

For some reason I am experiencing cognitive dissonance...
$0.99 is too cheap to convince a regulator that it's the true value of the software?
I strongly disagree with this.

I've been reading HN for years, and often don't pay much attention to who has written or posted the articles. I just scan down, click on whatever catches my attention, and read.

I'd hesitate to say that social factors never come into play, but generally I don't think I pre-judge material based on the credentials of the author. If an author makes a good point, then I will recognise that, whether it's a celebrated blogger or somebody I've never heard of.

My own, rather limited, blogging experience backs this up. I've had a number of my own blog posts rank highly on HN and Reddit, but I don't doubt that 99% of the people who read and up-voted them had never heard of me.

A couple of things which could have affected it:

* the title was much snappier 2nd time around

* sometimes just simple timing/luck plays a big part, e.g. getting those 4-5 early votes which gets an article on the front page
I assumed they were UI elements. I haven't actually seen MS Paint in ten or more years, but I'm guessing it has many widgets that are square buttons with something inside, so the image data would appear as repeating patterns of identical length and have at least somewhat similar content (because everything is in a bordered box, and there's probably an "up" and "depressed" version of each, leading to nearly identical sounds being side-by-side in the data).

That's just a guess though. One would probably need to disassemble it and roam around a bit to be sure.
As do I. It is my main work computer. It cost me $1200 for parts, and an equivalent Mac would be ~ $4000
Seriously. If one of my kids asked me for 5 bucks to buy Xcode, I wouldn't hesitate for a second. I wouldn't even make them do the dishes first.
> Lock-in is the holy grail for the software vendor.

Apple is not a software vendor.
Show HN: Bookmark and share any moment inside any movie or music
Would you ask the barber if you need a haircut?
Clickable: http://dayri.me

I'm not really your target audience, but I just wanted to say that, on an iPad, that tap-to-scroll-down is extremely satisfying. :)
Hello HN,

I would like to introduce you to a service that is now ready for a broad audience. It allows you to bookmark and share any moment inside any movie or music, online (Youtube/Vimeo/Dailymotion) or on your computer. You can also organize and share those bookmarks to collaborate with your team or clients.

http://www.everytimehq.com/

It mainly targets people whose job involves dealing with a lot of video or audio material, such as filmmakers, writers, journalists, music composers and visual effect artists.

This is a scratch my itch case, and while developing it only for myself at first, I quickly realized that many people could find a use for it.
You can try it for free for as long as you like, the free plan is only limited in the number of bookmarks you can create and you can increase your quota by doing simple things such as completing the interactive tutorial or inviting people.

I am very happy to introduce it to a such a high profile community here and I am looking forward to read your comments and critics.
How did you get on the bus? Sign up process?
im going on vacation to kangaruba
We shall see. But this $5 is a lot higher than what they charged for in the past (though the 802.11n drivers were $3 I believe)
Sigh. I click on comments and the top comment is two line DH2 responding to the title of the post. Not HN at its best.

Actually I did say that valuations are high, and they'll probably fall in the future. But there is a difference between the ordinary rise and fall of prices and a bubble.
The whole using a credit card online adds a lot of hesitation for parents, even if it's $5. It did for mine.
Let's rage about things that haven't happened yet.
Cool. The first Java program I ever wrote was actually to solve this problem (name my envisioned website/company), but your execution yields much better results.
It's required that you buy a new Mac? That's news. I thought you could pick one up used on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks.

Oh wait, you can.
> Xcode 4 is available for free download [1], just like the versions before it. For those who don't want to go through the fuss of registering (for free!) as an Apple developer, they can buy Xcode 4 via the Mac App Store.

Alas, this is incorrect. Try to log in with a free developer account and it will tell you to go buy it on the AppStore you dirty hippie.
So, never used Xcode for any length of time, then?
Those programs are $99/year, though.
Nice implementation, but your worries are justified.
Try a high impact landing page, and redeploy this in an 'about' context. Maybe work a seamless sign-up, or some other 'action' into every slide as well.

If you are really keen on what you've got, compare it to this one...

http://thehagency.com/
http://thehagency.com/start.html
Don't underestimate the value of having a partner-in-crime with a different skill set than your own, e.g. Woz and Jobs, Allen and Gates.

There can be a tremendous synergy when you find someone you can work well with, who has a different perspective than your own, who you still like even while they are nagging you to finish feature X so that you can finally ship product Y so as to be paid dollars Z.
Won't developers recoup their costs by selling software through a platform strengthened by Apple's massive infrastructure and marketing?
Depends if they are paying you to prioritize. If they're paying you to do what you're told and you don't, that doesn't usually end well. If you're responsible for priorities, you just have to never screw up, that's all.
The error page had a code, and I asking if that code was P1 for you too. I accepted the new license on behalf of my company and it went away, so it's a moot point now.
I used to listen to RAM dumps from an HDTV tuner card I was reverse engineering to try to find its audio buffers. Naturally the image buffers always sounded interesting. I eventually wrote a rudimentary ALSA driver for it.

You can get sounds that sound like an alien machine by taking some super-noisy image or executable data and slowing it down several times using a high-quality resampling algorithm.
Personal hotspot works perfectly. Actually, even better than perfectly since it's activated on my iphone without me paying anything extra for it. Very nice.
As administrator of a Google Apps account, will my messages get marked as bulk mailings if I send out something to everyone in my organization? I suppose I could ask the same about the priority inbox. Because there are certain classes of messages I may have to send out that everyone needs to read.

I guess this could be mitigated by some sort of an urgent notification from your admin feature on the Google Apps dashboard. I suspect I might send some mailings I'm content to let Gmail mark as bulk.
C++ seems full of missed opportunities. I fear a lot of them are due to the slavish backward compatibility to C.
You can get the (release) iOS SDK for free, but can only run your code in the simulator.

When you pony up $99, Apple will sign your code-signing certificate so that your code can run on unmodified devices, and they will also allow you to submit apps to the App Store.
The author addresses that in the post:

"I've heard some arguments that it is crippled on purpose, because you don't want a website to start blaring music at you as soon as you open it. Fine, I understand that argument. But why not ask the user for permission to play audio and then do it right? It's already been done with Geo Location and Storage."
If this ships with gcc or other GPL software, somebody will obtain the tools it legally, ask Apple for the sources to that GPL software so that he can build a copy of gcc and put it on a website.

If Apple does not distribute the sources (and probably also if they do) we will soon see a response from Richard Stallman.
According to the LLVM lead dev (Chris Lattner on IRC), this is due to Apple's accountant's interpretation of SOX (Xcode 4 is too different from Xcode 3 to be considered an update, they see it as a new product):

> it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh

Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.
iTunes cards are available in most supermarkets and electronic stores in Switzerland.
Why don't you just say "HTML"
There are third party tools like sharpdevelop which are generally better than the express tools.
Actually you could download Xcode (and the iOS SDKs) for free from Apple's website. It would only run on your $129/$29 OS, but technically you didn't have to use the shipped copy ever.
Its a form of receipt that is typically used between individuals when buying and selling relatively expensive items. It has the names and signature of both parties, a serial number and description of the goods sold, the form of payment, the date of the sale, whether the seller is providing any warranty, whether the transaction was witnessed and by whom, etc.

IANAL, but the purpose of it is to provide some protection to the buyer from fraud. (E.G. the computer/vehicle/aircraft you sold me doesn't match what you advertised). It can also protect the seller from potentially frivolous claims and provides some proof of non-ownership should the goods you sold be used in a crime.

[Edit:] There are lots of examples available online, and you might try looking for something from Nolo Press, my favorite source for easy to understand law reference materials.
You can't promote something that sucks.

Perhaps, but I think 'patio11's point was that even if the product is great, it could be worthless without the right marketing/promotion/SEO/etc.

So you could be anywhere from 0% to 100% of the way there with just a great product.
not shipped with mac book airs
That might have had a ;) with it, but (if that was supposed to be a joke) you might want to read some of the fodder from last year:

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/05/hp-introducing-...

HP did appear to be (per Mr Hurd's comments back around the time of the Palm acquisition) considering using WebOS in their printers.
I've asked many doctors about this. They insist that they are not effected by sleep deprivation. They claim it is safer to have the same doctor for 24-48 hours rather than hand off a patient to a new, fresh doctor.
Exactly. Saying there's no bubble is a far cry from saying that valuations are high and will go down/correct/whatever.

The digital media industry is a bit more mature now and the likelihood of a bubble is much less now. I imagine it will have it's ups and downs (as you said) just like any other industry. Also, a big difference between now and the late 90s is that companies are actually making money! The promise is starting to pay off.
They wing it or use a convertible note. It really is that simple.
Apple believes software is worth money.

I guess a lot of people here don't. Which I find odd.
> are people bitching about $5?

Yes. Because Xcode has been free for 10 years it's taken for granted that Xcode is free, and because OSX's base install does contain any C compilers, it's in the Xcode install.
"they wouldn't spearheads CSS animations and transitions and all the stuff that can make web applications snazzier and cleaner, they wouldn't have the engine with the best HTML5 support by far."

Firefox 4 has better HTML5 support than iOS, for one.

http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=firefox|4&b2=ios_sa...
I know its on Github, but a hosted demo would've been nice.
I finally understood what backbone.js is. Seen posts all over HN not knowing what it is. Guess i had to understand what MVC is first(!) . Can you tell im new to programming? ;-)
I think we are going to see Xcode 4 bundled with Lion, at that point it will become available to everyone at developer.apple.com, and that the current Xcode 4 stuff is based upon Tax laws just like it was before with the iOS updates.
Apple believes software is worth money.

I'm not sure why that surprises people. What does surprise me is that people here don't.
"... I can't help but laught [sic] when I see my clasmates use Visual studio. ..."

Stupid tax for both platforms.
There is no way that Cybersource + Wells Fargo is charging 1.45% for non-qual transactions. More likely they are doing something called Marking Up the Downgrades http://feefighters.com/blog/marking-up-the-downgrades/ where they quote a low "qualified" rate that only applies to a small minority of transactions.

The wholesale rates for credit card processing (called interchange rates) are available online at visa and mastercard's websites (search for "visa interchange rates"). Without getting into details, all card-not-present transactions, regardless of card type, are more than 1.45%.

Braintree's pricing is not the lowest, but I bet if you looked carefully at your statement from Wells you would find that it is worse than Braintree - some of the worst processing deals I have ever seen are from Wells Fargo.

If you want to make sure that your processor is not pulling funny business with downgrades, insist on Interchange Plus pricing (http://feefighters.com/blog/interchange-plus/). Or just a completely flat rate with no downgrades.

And then monitor it closely, this is one of the most crooked industries on the planet.
the application process was on startupbus.com ... you had to get a referral or an invite first, and then write a short application.
Thank you for the feedback, illdave. We hadn't tested it on an iPad yet. Thanks. :)
One reason to do per-user domains is to prevent cookie leakage caused by user-specified content. A few years ago LiveJournal got bitten by a firefox bug that allowed JS execution inside CSS. Since they allowed each user to style their own page that meant that a malicious user could make the CSS at "www.livejournal.com/~evil_user" capture the viewer's www.livejournal.com cookies. That's why they moved everybody to username.livejournal.com, which previously had been a pay-only feature.

I think the really perplexing about this article is why browsers are so aggressive with DNS prefetching. If there are links on the page to 300 different domains, is there much benefit to precaching ALL of them? It seems clear that very few of the domains are likely to be clicked on. If anything they're probably hurting performance by bombarding the local nameserver with a flood of requests.

It sounds like browsers need a better precaching heuristic.
Yay. Free coasters!
I love emacs and use it every day. And I'm glad that it's free software. But if Apple offered to keep my Mac's emacs install up to date for $4.99 I would pay in a heartbeat.

I have to periodically check whether my version is out of date. When it is, I have to find the download URL, click on it, remember to come back when the package has downloaded, and run the installer. I have to do this on all of my machines.

Sure, this isn't all that much work. But $4.99 isn't that much money, either.
Please review our new album notification app - TuneViper
I find that listening to interesting music helps. This stimulates my brain just enough to prevent my mind from wandering. Otherwise, yeah, I end up thinking about my unfinished business, or think of "one more thing to try real quick" and then lose hours.

Contrary to some advice, I fall asleep pretty well with the TV on or something. If there is nothing stimulating at all, I just toss and turn and think about what else I'd rather be doing. I need a "light distraction" to put myself on idle, or I will start to actively invent my own.
Services make sense when you add value on an ongoing basis. Since it's not only possible but pretty simple to build this as an app, it makes much more sense to sell it as an app.

More importantly, anything that depends on having active service is much less reliable, and an alarm clock should be reliable above almost all other factors.
This is ridiculous! It is a travesty! How dare Apple to expect me to pay $0.99 for Facetime and $4.99 for Xcode! Combined, those cost almost as much as this Venti Frappuccino I'm drinking right now! It's absurd!

;-)
The more you think about it the harder it becomes.
I am well aware of that, having been a member of the iOS program from the beginning. The point is, for those of us developing for iOS or for the Mac App Store, there is no change.
Ask HN: How are you changing the world with your startup?
Just curious. Feeling kind of disillusioned with all these headlines about things that don't really matter for the sake of human progress. Anyone can answer this question, even if you are just at the idea stage.

BTW: I'm not saying startups don't do anything for progress, just seeing so many startups doing something just to make a buck before the 'bubble' that everyone is concerned about.
I don't know, but I can't see even Apple killing off two hardware generations in one go. This is the official end of the 2nd gen just now. (Although the iOS 4.0 update made that obvious) .

Iirc, the betas supported the third gen so the only reason to kill it off is to avoid the complications of the lower specced 8gb third gen.