skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The two explanations (low price point, new distribution model) are not mutually exclusive. Baen Books, for example, has offered free sample books for a dozen years now, with good results for some authors. But there's obviously a difference in promotion on the Internet at large and a more targeted conduit like Kindle -- I don't think the Baen Free Library has been responsible for an author appearing on the NY Times bestseller list. And I'm pretty sure the rapid success of people like Amanda Hocking and John Locke is unprecedented.

edit: typo
2010 Startup Rate is the Highest in 15 Years
This is nice, but please: release a feature that lets you add notes to messages already!

I have so many threads in which I've left open drafts to be able to add a few comments.
Grasshopper Group, Wufoo & MailChimp Unite for Entrepreneurial Adventure
my favorites so far have been: gourmaniac, barbequephoria, and japanimal
Its an event page on Facebook. For a public event description go here - http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scqxk/
8 Lessons From HubSpot’s $32 Million Round with Salesforce, Google & Sequoia
It sure does look like very petty nickel and diming. My guess is they put a nominal price so they keep out the undesirable riff-raff.
My guess is that the real reason for this is that Windows 8 will add a native spellcheck API (technically Vista already did, as part of WPF, but that generally isn't used by consumer applications for various reasons), and in the meantime to avoid future confusion they don't want to implement it separately in IE.
I'm kind of wondering what drove this move to a paid app. Driving away pathological customers? Increasing app quality? Somehow tying every OS X and iOS app--for sale or otherwise--to an identity/credit card? If it's a signed app, they could in theory attach some signature to everything you build, even for Cydia or the like.
crosswauction is pretty good too, though i couldn't imagine a user figuring out how to spell that...
I started as Steve (don't we all?) but I've recently been complimented on my patience. Wonder if it comes from years of maintaining my own code, but I've really grown to appreciate infrastructure work and making code aesthetically pleasing.
The update appears to be available to Canadian customers as well. I'm looking forward to trying the personal WiFi zone.

Update: Nay-nay! The update is available for my iPad but not for my iPhone 3G. Bah.
Giant QR code made from thousands of paint cans
Travelanche is perfectly plausible as something you'd come across on TechCrunch.
In my experience, Apple's gcc is still the recommended version.

Hopefully solid non-apple gcc packages come out. I don't like the idea of paying $5 to apple to develop generic unix applications on OS X.
Once the old free Xcode 3 has vanished, this neatly puts an end to stuff like Homebrew or MacPorts. I really don't care about paying the $4, but for many people without credit cards or unwilling to use iTunes/the app store, OSX just has become a lot less useful.
Buy low is contingent on sell high. Reaching sell high requires funding to live long enough for an exit. Constantly saying "there is no bubble" helps investors feel better about a three month old company claiming a $10MM+ valuation. "No bubble" also helps acquirers justify paying > $20MM for three guys sitting in their underwear typing on a computer for a few years.

(disclaimer tags: conspiracy, not aligned with reality, condescending, wrong numbers.)
Xcode 3 is still available for free download.

Though I really don't think it's a good idea to make Xcode 4 non-free.
Terrain Generation in MineCraft, Part 1
The question in my mind is what they will do with Xcode for OSX Lion. I don't use Xcode itself, but I always install it to get the tools and libraries I need to compile other software.

If Lion requires users to pay $5 to get the necessary dependencies to build other free software tools, this will be a step back from the status quo.
Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my roommate was working on a commercial app that was a music composition and sequencing tool. One night I heard some unusual music coming from his room, and a few moments later he ran out all excited. It turns out that he'd had a bug in his code, and the music we'd been hearing was the program playing itself: interpreting its own code as music data.

What was surprising, though, was how coherent it actually sounded as music. There was, for example, a perceptible beat. We always wondered whether this was due to the structure of the executable code, or because of the way the program interpreted its data. Unfortunately he was never able to reproduce the bug in quite the same way.

[1] "RealTime" for the Atari ST, see http://tamw.atari-users.net/realtime.htm
Fortunately Homebrew and MacPorts can just ship a gcc and get on with things.
Steve (Apple) did... in Akamai.

http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/1999/press_0...

It was at one point worth about 2 billion dollars, but I'm guessing it all got washed out after the dot-com bust because word of it was never mentioned again. :-)

Anyways, they aren't doing this because of CDN costs, it's negligible -- they are Akamai's largest customer and are also building their own network as well.
Openfeint and The9 offer US$100 Million to lure iOS game developers to Android
And Facebook Notifications, perhaps?
Agreed. You don't need to value your time very highly for this to be an excellent value proposition. Apple's developer site is an absolute nightmare to use, hopefully this means I'll never need to figure it out again.
Still less than Xcode.
Good point. I'm not too worried. I'm rather curious as to if I start prioritizing important things that need to be done vs things that can be postponed at work, am I going to suffer? I'm guessing the answer is yes.
Why would it put an end to macports? And why would that be neat?
You can still download XCode 3.2 free. Think of it as the equivalent of the Express Edition for VS.
It is the difference between free and not free.

They are trying to drive developers to use the App Store? Sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth.

They are trying to kill off OSX hobbyist experimentation in favor of iOS? I think I'm getting warmer.
Yes, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. Putting it on the App Store seems perfectly normal, but charging money for something that used to be free, even a token amount, is a really stupid thing to do.

$5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher.

Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?
One difference is that MS also has a free command-line compiler.
Won't Apple recoup their costs through selling a platform strengthened by everything Xcode-using developers create?
Debian has been doing nice updates and upgrades over the network for 15 years. It's not that difficult.
8 Stupid Mistakes Smart People Make
Probably joined Facebook :)
OS X without Xcode installed doesn't have a compiler - if you can't compile, you can't use macports or homebrew.

It would be "neat" as in clean. No drama on Apple's behalf. Just put a price tag on the only real compiler, and it's over. Unless someone solves that issue.
This is really interesting. How much did it cost? What was the experience like?
Actually, Xcode has cost a minimum of $700 for a while now (cost of a Mac Mini).

I'm ok with a 0.7% price increase (if I wasn't a registered developer, that is).
"Discovered SPAM filtering algorithm" ?
You can buy an iTunes card at most pharmacies.
And what if they are actually hiring for one of those positions? Go through Google's recruiting process!? No thanks!! :)
Oh, I'm sure they will. The only reason Apple's gcc is still the recommended version is that nobody cared enough before to make an alternative one. Now that saving five bucks is involved, people will move mountains to make it happen. :)
I also ran across this, and on the error page, neither of the links for Apple support worked. It sometimes amazes me that a company that's generally as polished as Apple can still suffer from bugs like this one.
It seems to be a common opinion on Hacker News that you shouldn't write a comment just saying "I agree"; that's what the upvote arrow is for.
I'm with you. When you give software away instead of charging for it, while simultaneously making your money off an associated product, you are required to do all sorts of backflips over how you account for revenue.

This is why certain updates for the iPod Touch cost money while they are free for iPhones: It is entirely driven by how Apple writes up iPod Touch vs. iPhone revenue.
Ask HN: What should I do? My launch pad list
I'm finishing up college at Babson (in Boston) right now and am pushing my new product out soon. We've (two of us) got some interest so far from consumers/investors and obviously, I'm pretty excited about it. I will try to start raising a round of seed funding next week (currently funded off of our consulting work).

We're looking for either reputable SV/tech angels or going the incubator route. Having run a web design firm for 3 years now, we've built 8+ web applications for clients and a lot of websites/microsites. We've done work for other prominent/up and coming startups. We've also previously done a presentation at DEMOFall (where we our first product failed). I've been to Le Web and am heading to SXSW next week [psyched]. So we have a tiny bit of experience under our belt.

We have enough to fund ourselves to live off of for about 5 months or so and can always take on minor UI/web work for cash to feed ourselves. It is possible that we could use some cash injection to hire college students or other reps from cities (we are doing a local thing as our product). But again, for the most part, we're just trying to find the right type of investors and launch space for this summer. I'm pretty open to moving anywhere but I'm gravitating towards SF/SV (and would only go somewhere else if. Do you think that we should do one of these incubators, raise a seed round, just move West or do something else completely?

So far here's what I have as far as reputable places to start (in order of attractiveness):

Accelerators
1)Ycombinator
2)TechStars (NYC or Boulder)
3)io Ventures
4)Excelerate Labs
5)500 Ventures
6)Summer@Highland Capital
7)~DreamIt Ventures
8)~Capital Factory

Others
1)Start@Spark
2)Dogpatch Labs
3)Plug and Play (Startup Camp or Workspace)
4)Foundry Group
5)~MassChallenge Incubator

Anyway, I'd love to hear feedback on what we should do etc. I'm sure a lot of people are in a similar boat right now.
Judge eviscerates P2P lawyer: "I accepted you at your word"
Apples GCC is available for free, or llvm/clang. The $5 is for the IDE. And this is for the preview only so far, as far as I can tell.
Now I'm baffled. I downloaded Xcode yesterday, and today I was going to start mac programming for the first time, and now Xcode is 5 dollars or join? Do I need to join now? I seem to have access already to their documentation so I'm completely baffled. I think I'll try development for all three, iphone, ipad and mac apps. I think you also need a license to develop iphone apps? Ugh, Help!

Am I going to lose access to this page soon? Or is there more I need?

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/navigation/

EDIT: found this

"Basically, $99 gets you access to beta software, 2 tech support incidents, and access to developers resources - videos and forums."

So I guess the docs will still be free at that link.

Also, you seem to be able to develop iphone apps and run on the simulator, but to transfer to a actual iphone, you need a type of license, which I assume is included in the ios developer program.
Has anyone managed to make the audio tag work reliably with streaming? icecast server with ogg vorbis stream comes to mind. Tried konqueror (works), firefox 3.6 (doesn't work properly), chrome 9.x (doesn't work properly).
Haha yeah discovered that one with the app but just checked and it's already squatted :(

Integrating with whois would probably be a good v2.0 feature...
I wonder if the price is motivated by the cost of bandwidth. A free, multi-gigabyte Xcode that can be downloaded easily off the App Store would bring in many downloads from people with no use for it. Maybe the $5 price is just enough to cut back on the quantity demanded and impulse downloads.
I don't follow ...
Like I said, I was merely responding to the parent comment's assertion that you couldn't have a car that was mostly trash at 50-100k miles if it has a 100k powertrain warranty.
Xcode is an IDE, you can still get the compilers as both of them are open source.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5646/

http://llvm.org/releases/download.html
Yes, that is what I meant by * but even more so lately since he "retired" from HN and isn't doing nearly as much posting here.
An Apple representative told us after the iPad 2
announcement that iOS 4.3 won't be coming to the Verizon
iPhone anytime soon because it had just launched, but that
the OS versions will likely converge sometime in the future.

=(
I can understand how the cost of a Happy Meal might deter someone who wants to try their hand at coding.

I mean seriously, you're going to spend at least 10 times that amount on programming books, or thousands of times that amount on college classes.
With this and the huge margins apple are already taking over the developers' revenue I really feel like we as developers are getting less and less respect from Apple.

I really think that what made OSX great was the fact that Xcode was completely free. We are the ones that make a platform a great one because of the app ecosystem that comes with it.

Putting prices -- however small they are -- on these dev tools put a barrier on the accessibility of the platform as a application dev environment.

I'm honestly really happy to have focussed my efforts towards web based apps instead... If its the future of computing -- iOS apps, and on device apps instead of web based -- it sure doesn't look so bright.
UI Learnings from peeing on a fly
Some pirated software and cracking patches rely on gdb. So a user has to have xcode installed in order for the cracks to work. At least, it's often a requirement.

This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.
An iPhone App Helps the Blind Identify Currency
i'm still partial to stupidestrian.
"I don't see the price tag having any impact in the iOS/OSX software ecosystem, so, why are they bothering to charge for it?"

My guess is that the price is low as a way to introduce people to the idea of paying at all. The small price precludes an outcry. Once everyone is used to paying, they can slowly increase the price over time.

If they started by charging $50 or $100 or more, I suspect there would have been a huge outcry. But I also suspect the price will get to that point sooner or later.

Also, now that the platform has been strongly established, Apple can charge a price for the development tools without fear that developers will abandon them.
So now we have to get our devtools chain somewhere else? I couldn't care about Xcode itself, the only reason I download it is the chain.

With that in mind, they've replaced gcc with clang in XCode 4, didn't they?
I have to wonder if the cost isn't somehow related to the ginormous file size. I have to imagine that millions of people downloading a file this big constantly is expensive in terms of bandwidth.

Maybe they want those downloading to truly have an interest in doing something with the toolkit and not just downloading it to look at/tinker with. A $4.99 hurdle is probably just enough to cull out a significant amount of downloads by people who probably wouldn't actually use it anyways.
But what's keeping them from pirating Xcode?
I have seen the event description, my question still stands.

Why not just remove the RSVP panel and still display the information?
i think a cspanda is a type of japanimal
should be noted: Logging in is a pain. Cookie and FF default auth details are saved using the same underlying mail.google.com domain, it doesn't bind the correct saved authentication detail with the correct account. CNAMES have no effect on this.
I know lisp better than Haskell, and so I'm more familiar with macros than with monads. From what you describe, it seems to me that the use cases for monads and macros have some overlap.

Take the OP's example for the Writer monad, in which several functions needed to return a debug string "<function name> was called" in addition to their main return value. If I had these two functions+:

(def sine (x)
[(Math.sin x) "sine was called"])

(def cube (x)
[(* x x x) "cube was called"])

I might write a macro like the following (rather than a monad) to abstract away their common pattern:

(mac defWriter (name parms body...)
`(def ,name ,parms
[,@body (+ ,name " was called.")]))

And then each function's definition could be written more concisely:

(defWriter sine (x)
(Math.sin x))

(defWriter cube (x)
(* x x x))

---

+ Forgive me for indulging in the syntactic sugar from my own lisp->javascript project in these examples, but since we're dealing in JavaScript I couldn't resist. https://github.com/evanrmurphy/lava-script
WSJ's Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies
I was surprised by that. I wonder what portions are actual machine code, and what parts are embedded data blobs ("resources" in Windows terminology). I also can't explain the crescendo at the start.
What? You would not only pay for that convenience, but pay, per app?

Linux distros could have been making money for a decade now.
I liked 10.04 better than 10.10. The new side menu doesn't really do it for me. I ended up switching to standard Gnome on 10.04, whereas UNR was fine previously.
How do you have <audio> working in the Android browser? Last I checked (2.2) the tag was supported but there was no format support (kind of like an airplane without wings). This was filed as a defect in June 2010 and a fix was promised, but not delivered for Android 2.2:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9372
Sarbanes-Oxley?

http://www.google.com/search?q=Sarbanes+Oxley+Apple
My opinion is that it's just another "hidden fee" for OS X development. (A fee I'm happy to pay, for what it's worth.)

For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone.

After all that, $5 doesn't sound so bad.
haven't had a better fast food burger than In-n-Out.

I have. Also, the only places serving burgers I've been to that aren't fast food are the few gourmet burger restaurants. The problem may be that you're in the Bay Area (the burrito capital of the world, IMO).
Unless you're on a Hackintosh
Scalable and Available, Patterns for Success
Teenagers are a special subset of the sleep problem. In recent years, there have been studies that suggest teens tend to naturally stay up late, which clashes with the hours of compulsory education. Some districts have altered hours for these students, where classes start later in the morning, and the results have supposedly been very positive with respect to both grades and student retention.
This is probably due to Apple's interpretation of tax laws or at least that tends to be what comes out when Apple charges a token amount for something.
To clarify I wouldn't say I'm advising people reverse engineer and clone past hit apps, it's more trying to figure out some recurring traits that tend to pop up again and again in almost every successful hit app, and testing against these traits with your ideas.

Once you get in the habit of running through this list, or your own that hits up your idea from a lot of different angles, you can just focus on coming up with lots of random ideas, mostly terrible, some of them pretty good to great, and save the quality ones. It's good to have some consistent system I think for judging the quality of app ideas, always really nice understanding exactly why you have that great gut feeling (or a terrible one).

"I think talent, luck and frequency are the biggest factors."

I would replace frequency with experience and maybe 'resources' can be thrown into that group, but I'd pretty much agree with that.
Why We Need the Charlie Sheen Meme
Seeing this reminded me of a Microsoft focus group I was invited to be a part of a few years ago. As a CTO who had decided to build everyone on top of free software, they wanted to know what it take to make me to switch to a Microsoft stack. I told them they were 10 years too late. You see, I made the decision to use LAMP stack not because it was cheaper, but because it's what I knew. And the reason I knew LAMP stack was because that's all I could afford when I was 15. The question for Apple isn't whether businesses or experienced developers can afford their development tools, it's the teenagers they should care about. And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free. This decision seems short sighted to me even if the effects of it aren't immediately apparent.
Well then spend a few bucks out of the hundreds of dollars you saved on hardware.
This is getting ridiculous - the power of an ingenious landing page (connect.me)
link: http://connect.me/
This is completely true.

At a certain stage in your career as a "developer" you realise that your time is better spent sketching out solutions for others to follow than it is in seeing through all the work yourself.

Some people naturally gravitate towards seeing the whole solution (at the cost of being impatient about the details) and some people gravitate towards diligent completion of defined goals.

Projects tend to need both kinds of people.
It all adds up. As you say, there are a zillion of things you need. Not the least a Mac (>= 1000 bucks).

If all you want is to learn programming, there are free alternatives to XCode.

How much have you spent on iPhone apps so far? I have friends who spent several hundred €, one Happy Meal at a time.
It is a puzzle. At one time, developer tools were priced to extract money from developers. Then, when third-party free tools came along, platform owners realized that market share and lock-in was much more valuable and started giving their tools away for free. But now Apple is neither charging to recoup development costs nor giving tools away. It is strange that the cost should be so close to free yet not actually be free.

My working assumption is that Apple is charging to ensure that each developer must experience the App Store purchasing process at least once, thereby encouraging them to write apps for it.
“If you leave items in your working memory, they'll make it harder to fall asleep, and you'll end up ruminating about them if you should wake up during the night.”

Avoiding thinking about things when you go to bed is something I am struggling quite a bit with. I will sure try out to write down my thoughts.

Any other advice to avoid your mind thinking too much when it should be winding down?
Citation? Sorry, doesn't ring true.
The entire thing is built on open source. I certainly won't be paying and this shift in culture at apple is turning me off. I probably won't be buying another product from them for a while.
I was wondering about this; why does it matter that it just launched...
PyCon 2011: Advanced Python 1 Tutorial
I'm disappointed how they solved this problem. I was hoping they would use clustering to figure out what label to apply based on whats already been labelled. I thought that was the next logical step from 'Priority Inbox'.
Can anyone remember how they first heard about and started using Google?
I made a confusing mistake when I wrote that - the start of the third paragraph should say '15 different factors in their financial loss.' Economic loss is something quite different. I shouldn't have posted right before sleep!