skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say the blame lies with Android since at the end of the day, the responsibility lies with the designer, but I would say credit goes to iOS for making more aesthetically pleasing UI's easier to make than on Android.
Your confidence continues to impress me. That being said, I believe its misguided here. The only time a serious investor is going to reach out to you is when you don't actually need their money (as the old adage goes).

...and I'm willing to make my pitch in person.

This comes off as, "you should be throwing money at me, but I'm a nice guy so I'll come and talk to you." I know that's not your intention, just trying to help. Good luck!
It would cost them time. There's no reason to suspect that just because they've dialed in the application that they aren't tuning the process.

Try to remember that sour grapes make good wine. Prove them wrong.
Excellent point. It reminded me of Clay Shirky's TED talk, on institutions vs. collaboration: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_on_institution...

I'd add another problem with this state where more ideas, movements, tribes, etc. find critical mass via better and better communication technologies, is the side-effect of these groups forming echo chambers of ideas leading to more divergent groups with less in common, thus creating harder to resolve differences.
You can make $50/hr tutoring rich but dumb high school kids.
Interesting blog, every entry appears to be a substantial jab at the platform itself... not really just "gripes" as I see them. I am impressed with how dedicated he is to the pursuit, not only does he have a blog solely for his android gripes, but he's also made an androidgripes gmail account as well as a twitter account and a facebook page to promote the blog. It doesn't seem to be possible to find the blogger's name, however, though as an anonymous figure he certainly is quite prolific [1].

I also note that the HN account that submitted this link was created immediately before submitting it, and that's their only activity.

I was considering responding to the flame bait in his closing paragraph ("Is it because iPhone developers are better at user interface design?" etc.) until I realized what I was looking seemed to have about a 99% chance of being corporate sponsored astroturfing. FTC disclosure, Apple?

[1] "Want to install "open" apps on Android? Think twice", "Is Samsung’s New Galaxy Tab Fibbing About Its Figure?", "J-P Teti: The iPad is 99% more open than any other computer", "'openness' considered harmful, said by Google on Honeycomb source code", "Everything that can go wrong with Motorola Android tablet does", "Android is sure a Wi-Fi connection dropper", etc.
I was told projects in Apple are generally endeavors by small teams. Five people write this app, four people write that subprocess. While feature staffing is similar at MS, the overhead of management, program management, and test often smothers any attempt to move fast at MS.
Or worst, don't make me click 15 times for the most usual task. Optimize for the most frequent use case.
iOS comes with a handy set of UI controls that look decent even without customization. You can use the default UITableView, for instance (looking at the Meebo screenshot) and get the nice look-and-feel out of the box. This especially helps a low-budget dev like myself.

Apple showcase of the controls that come out-of-the box and various ways to tweak them: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...

Default Android controls for some reason sport a more "circa-1990 MS DOS" look. The developers need to actually invest time to re-skin the components or make their own to get a modern look. This is made slightly more difficult if you want to support multiple screen sizes/resolutions. As such, many Android apps sadly seem to end up with the default look.

(I have written apps for both platforms.)
Your guys' support of the startup community and overall awesomeness continues to impress me! This is a great example of paying it forward with potential for future returns (some of those free accounts you give out will undoubtedly go on to succeed). Thanks for your contributions.
> The essence of Democracy is not that the majority wins.

You are defining democracy differently from how I would define it. The essence for me is majority rule.

> The essence of democracy [...] is the losers agree to go gracefully and wait for the next vote for their next chance at victory

I'd label that as constitutional government rather than democracy.
Right Click ==> View Source, obviously :D
http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/static/js/io.js

So, it looks to be built on the Box2DJS Javascript physics engine:
http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/

The author, Matt King, says he recently got into Javascript through Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts," and seems to be knocking it out of the park:
http://mking.me/
To me, it sounds like you're pitching a hobby rather than a start-up? If that's the case, I wouldn't recommend that you quit your day job.
There many, many, beautiful things about Allan and Steve. They are incredible contributors to the world. The event they've created has done many wonderful things for people.

If you don't care that the conference is exclusionary towards women, then fine. Have fun with that.

I think going to a Yet Another Conference Of Sexist White Dudes And The Absurdly Be-armored Women Who Tolerate Them sounds obscenely boring, no matter how interesting the white-dudeliness is. I'm just sick of it. But you have fun.
Only obsessive HN readers who see PG's post will get funded? :P
TI-Nspire OS 3.0 released, brings 3D graphing and photographs
Desired Features in a flight search site
> It's also a bit insulting...

Perhaps true, but if the community doesn't acknowledge offensive behavior, it comes off as tacit acceptance. If the speaker is invited back without question or actively defended by the community, a person couldn't be blamed for getting the impression that the speaker's views reflect the views of the community as a whole, or at least of those responsible for the event.

> There needs to be a serious education effort to remove that mistaken idea from people's minds.

I'd argue that that's difficult to do without acknowledging the behavior as undesired/detrimental when it happens, for the reason above.
Excellent. This is the kind of stuff that I'd love to see return to HN more often. Take a look at the rest of his blog, it's excellent too: http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/
With respect to only having to "worry about one resolution", I disagree. Android does give you a set of tools for working with multiple screen types, but it's a bit more complicated than "2 sets of art assets". This only addresses one aspect of different screens: pixel density. This still leaves out different screen sizes. Even then, a "normal hdpi" screen can still be different from another "normal hdpi" screen.

It certainly does not help that Google's dashboard for screen and density figures has not been updated in over half a year.

As far as your second point goes, I think that companies' attitudes to Android development will change to reflect the evolving marketplace. A year or two ago, Android just did not have the market share to justify a lot of work. Now that Android is commanding significant market share, I think Android development will begin to be seen to be as important as iOS development.
Ask HN: Didn't get in YC S11? Are you going to charge forwards anyway?
I know I AM !! :) Who's with me? You'll face many rejections throughout the lifetime of the company, if you stop at the first rejection, you've already lost.

Please describe in 1-3 sentences what you're building.
In regards to the last paragraph, I agree, I think that you're more likely to see bad reviews for 'app is ugly' on the IOS app store than you are on Android. If the users really want applications to look good they need to negatively review poorly polished applications. Most of the time if the app functions correctly, reviews will be positive.
"The laws that allow them to do what they do were not enacted in a democratic fashion."

Which laws specifically have been passed by Congress despite the fact that, say, 60%+ of the people would greatly disagree with it, and empower Sony to do these things?

I consider the DMCA a great mistake. I've spent way more time than the average Internet denizen thinking so, thinking about it, writing about it [1]. I have some very refined opinions on how bad an idea it is.

I do not delude myself into thinking that I have the support of the people.

Most people don't care, shading into supporting the basic functionality of the DMCA, at least come vote time. Sorry. It's the truth. It has even perhaps been passed via some dubious methods, but, again, certainly not above the will of the people.

I think a lot of people use "subverted Democracy" as a code word for "enacted something I don't like". But that's not a subversion of democracy; that's when you enact something a lot of people don't like.

Yes, there's a time and a place for writing the system off and taking justice into your own hands. This isn't even close to it. That's not something to be taken lightly.

[1]: http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics
Can you email your contact info srini -at- sanetax.com

If you are already signed up at sanetax.com our support person should be contacting you soon.
I mostly agree with you. The exception is the last paragraph.

To me, the last paragraph reads along the lines of "Silly person, engineers can't design. Only a designer can add polish to something. Go back to your coding hole and don't even bother trying." Which is bullshit.

// edit: To clarify, a good app should most definitely have a designer, and a UI framework on the scale of Android's should have many, for sure. I'm just objecting to how the tone of the last paragraph felt.
get feedback from yc alum. They'll be able to tell you.
Microsoft releases 64 fixes on April's bumper Patch Tuesday
Thanks. Selecting the vital functions was difficult. But actually not as difficult as a "proper" development process. We didn't have to consult a big team of people with divergent interests, we didn't have any research on customer preference to analyze. There were just two people, 24 hours (greatly limits what you can do) and a relatively clear view of the end product (a map that shows the location of people whose FB status is single).

Sure, we could have gone over the 24hr limit and do a few more "nice to have" functions. After all, this is not a commercial contracts where the time constraint is real. But we stuck to our plan, put our pride aside and just accepted that the product will look a bit bit crusty (and people will tell us).

So far, no regrets - while we feel a bit embarrassed when people give us negative feedback, at least the app is out there and criticisms will only make it better.
First, JetBrain IDEs that I've used are lightyears ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans in terms of performance. Secondly, they have a lot of established code written in Java. Thirdly, their other IDEs are cross platform.

I'll wait and see how this turns out, but their other offerings are excellent.
51% rule does not work if 49% pick up the guns when they lose and start shooting. If you are fortunate enough to live in a well-civilized country, you are fortunate enough to live in a society that has internalized the fact that it's ultimately not good for anybody to do that. A casual glance around the world will show how not-inevitable that is. It's not two different definitions; it's the engineering mechanics whereby "majority rule" actually works, actually occurs, instead of... something else. (Multiple different sorts of something elses... I don't mean that I have one particular one in mind. But presumably some sort of something else that doesn't involve majority rule.)
While I agree with his overall thought, he chose some terrible examples to illustrate it.
I think democracy gets conflated with justice too many times. There is absolutely nothing good or bad about democracy....it is merely a way of representation and governance.

The real question should be about justice. What is actually right and wrong? It does not matter if the people being denied a voice are a majority or minority...the only thing that matters is what they have to say, and if it has merit.
This has been on HN numerous times already.
That doesn't excuse the apps that actually write an entire UI from scratch. As I mentioned before, the CNBC app is all custom UI, beautiful and mostly entirely self-contained. However, the android version is a POS thats essentially just a mobile webpage.

Built in OS UI is not a factor here. I suspect budget isn't either.

Edit: Here's the link to their Android app. The screen you see is basically the whole app. Click on anything and you're sent to their mobile web http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/

Here's the iPhone app http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt... It's hard to believe the same company released both apps.

Even their official "Apps" page has little mention of the Android app http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961 It's just a tiny link at the bottom that I didn't notice the first time.
Perhaps I was unclear. Performance is critical. They just shouldn't worry about the kinds of performance issues that can be optimized later. These include things like language choice and other micro-optimizations like zero-copy, etc.

Getting the abstraction right is making something that can perform well once it's optimized. That is, you worry about the high level performance properties -- things like how it will perform asymptotically -- when figuring out the abstraction.

For this project especially, the really difficult part is figuring out what those abstractions look like. Even having to do a complete rewrite later on in a faster language isn't that big of a deal cost-wise.
Background color really hurt my eyes, also it asks for too much data access. Normally I'd never authorize an app to do that but I let it slip this time to give you a feedback.

At first,to test this app I basically switched to monkey mode and started clicking on links and buttons to list some chics' profiles. Nothing happened.

Then I switched to manual mode and clicked on 'matches' tab. I only had 2 parameters in my interests list, so no result was returned.

Then I clicked on 'you' tab, started rating the things that the app threw at me, after about 15 votes or so, I started to have some results in matches section.

If I were a regular user who was using the app for the first time you'd probably lose me after the 'clicking around and not getting any chic profiles' part. So directing newcomers using visible (shiny, bouncy) tooltips is crucial.

I was getting a limited number of profiles in results, so I tried to play with sliders. I was expecting to get different profiles but instead I just got the same profiles, but fewer of them. I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but I'd love to see different people based on the search criteria. Do you keep showing the same results until a member pays you money?
We received a rejection letter as well, we aren't disappointed, the whole process has been a great learning experience for us, filling out the application and recording the video got us thinking about things we hadn't.

I've also learned to get more feedback and to go to great new places, like wompt and convore to get that feedback.

When we submitted our application we thought that our service was the only service like it out there and we had a hard time explaining our service. But we were wrong just yesterday (1 day before the rejection letter), I found out that there is a similar service and that it was even funded by YC. That service being Songkick. Our lack of research is our own mistake, a mistake we'll learn and grow from.

Today our description is:

Subscriby is like Songkick but for any interest you decide on and like Topspin, it allows brands to connect directly to it's fans to promote and sell.

Yesterday it was:

A service that is like twitter/facebook but provides filtered
updates for relative interests.

And on our website it's:

Subscriby is a User-submitted Micro-news Aggregator. Users subscribe to interests and receive filtered updates of user's selected types.

So I'm not surprised, that out of the very talented people that applied, we got rejected.

Thanks and we'll see you next batch!
If it doesn't work out with PagerDuty, drop me a line.
Nope, Already doing it. A user driven embed-able music polling platform / app. Its partially developed right now and will be rocking the music industry very soon. We also hold huge ground with existing social networks and launching already developed apps very soon. Looking forward to being the one that got away... and never looking back!

What are you building?
The token in cookie stored by browser is portable, either. How can web apps prevent the attackers exploiting the system from stealing the cookie token?
Fixed. I was attempting to make that text unobtrusive, but apparently succeeded a little too well. The landing page is currently the "minimum viable experience" - I will redo it soon.
Ask HN: Beautiful and Innovative Windows Apps?
Lately it seems, more than ever, that there is almost nothing new on Windows PCs. Almost all new apps are mobile or Mac. There really seems to be a genuine lack of interest in creting beautiful and innovative new programs for PCs.

That's not to say there aren't any, it's just that they're rarer. So, have you seen any new Windows programs that are beautifully designed, innovative, and simple to use? Something you'd be excited to use?

One I can add is OmmWriter. It's a beautiful writing app that finally found it's way to the PC over from Macs, and I really enjoy it on my PC. Any others you know of, please share!
And that's also a pretty old version of Android FB. The current version includes Places, Chat and replaces Requests with Groups, creating a balanced 3x3 grid of icons.
Do you know how your friend feels about the two current interested VC's? Does friend not agree to their terms, are the VC's open to negotiations, does friend want to go after larger funding? If you can gauge friend's response to these questions, then you should be able to answer Q(1) and be comfortable doing Q(2) without burning bridges.

Friend should also give VC's more credit than to play them against each other or use them as bait. VC's are in their business because they know their stuff and can smell a good/bad idea a mile a way... when they don't understand an idea, it's because we as entrepreneurs have failed to help them understand.
Might take you up on that :)
Wow. I've already found some cool places in my area. Thanks
You might want to read up on the laws regarding digging through trash. If the trash is on your property - it's illegal. Even if its in your driveway waiting for pickup, it's still illegal to go through. Also, In most states dumpster diving at any business is considered a felony.
Home - AREA23 COMPUTER & CELLULAR
Thanks, we certainly will.
Why Gogle's Chrome OS Sucks
I don't know either. I couldn't believe it. Apparently knockoff medicine exists, too: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/world/asia/31chemical.html...
I'm creating an ebook and software combo for computer/technology educators. Hoping to market it to school districts, but individual teachers as well.
A shell function to add directories to ~/.pow:

function pow {
if [ -d "`cd $1; pwd`" ]; then
ln -s "`cd $1; pwd`" ~/.pow/
fi
}
At the seed round, your friend should be focussed on getting whatever money they need to move forward with the business, while giving up an acceptably small part of it in return.

After those conditions are satisfied, a good relationship and shared vision with an investor is worth more than extra cash or lower dilution. These people will be your business partners until the sale, IPO, or death of your company, and so you should put almost as much care into choosing them as you do your cofounder(s).

A bidding war is fine, but huge weight should be given to the VCs themselves, and not necessarily their offers.
At first, I thought it was pretty ballsy of them to open this all up, but then I realized that this isn't really where their competitive advantage lies. Plus, I think they probably felt that there was still plenty of room for improvement since it had just been a small team working on it (whereas I have a feeling that Google has a much larger team working on these things). In the end, the community wins by getting to see their designs, and Facebook wins by continuing to iterate on them as the community discussion leads to improvements.
No. You're right. What you should definitely try to do is use coercion against people who can outspend you $1,000,000,000 to $1, or against people who employ hundreds of people authorized to discharge firearms.
I would argue that often VC's can't smell a good or bad idea "a mile away". If they could, they would be seeing much better returns. That, I think, is why expanding the VC search once you have a few interested parties makes sense. Sometimes they want a piece of the pie, because everyone else says it tastes good.

Regarding the terms, it's just like anything else. If you can get better terms (terms that won't hinder you if you need to raise a series A) or get a deal with a firm that is more involved in your niche, through competition, you shouldn't settle for "agree"-ing, you should do the best for yourself that you can.
Doodling In Math Class
He seemed to miss the fact that there is a newer version of Fluid out there: https://github.com/downloads/itod/fluidium/Fluid_Fluidium.zi...
Your customers/clients don't care how much you work

This is one of the most important parts of this discussion, and I regret not mentioning it in the post. Your company is a black box which exposes a limited interface to the rest of the world, namely "What you make and what you say." If it doesn't impact making or saying, nothing matters.

The vast majority of efforts in most companies don't matter. It is painful to contemplate how much total waste goes on, and changing even a wee bit of it (like, say, the Lean Startup movement is doing with regards to waste building things that no one actually wants) is a mammoth undertaking.
I'm pretty sure the FBI and most likely CIA are already tracking these guys and building cases on them as we speak. They've broken enough laws in enough countries to go after them. You'd be pretty surprised how much money is available to these agencies and task forces to infiltrate, track and bring down these guys. I figure its only a matter of time before they get at them.
Hmm, sounds like what I said with "unless you're doing some crazy reflection stuff ", and it sounds like a solution that reduces the readability and maintainability. But maybe I'd need to see a good example to appreciate it.
I think that if getting a rejection from YC is enough to stop someone, then that was probably one of the reasons they were rejected.
Well, we've still got LIGO carefully looking for gravity waves. So far we haven't detected any. Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument.

There's no real hurry. Gravity waves will still be there in twenty years time if we feel like building LISA.
My former employer did these types of surveys a couple times in the last few years I was there. Supposedly 100% anonymous but the survey link mailed to each employee had a hashed (unique) query string. People not taking part in the survey got follow up notices till they complied.

No one believed any of it was anonymous. The results were worthless, but quoted regularly. It was that type of place.