skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I was almost going to make a similar argument a few days ago, but ultimately decided not to because the masses have effectively redefined what that term means. At this point, "Ponzi Scheme" has become a general term for financial sketchiness.

The challenge becomes how to how to denounce the Ponzi term without also denying the presence of financial engineering. Your argument does this as well as possible IMO.

When a pundit claims that Groupon is a Ponzi scheme, he really means "Groupon is raising money and using the money to buy more revenue at more than face value". We don't really have a classification for what this is, and the proposed scheme seems somewhat scam-ish, so the Ponzi term is being used.

I'm not claiming that Groupon is simply raising money and buying revenue. But I do believe that's what the pundits mean to say when they call Groupon a Ponzi scheme.
As far as building a moat goes, I'm skeptical about whether there's any profitable field that Apple wouldn't, eventually, venture into. I'd agree that it would give you a longer runway, but I don't think it's enough to altogether discourage Apple. Look at where they've gone already: music (in a big way); phones (in a big way); eBooks (in a more failed way); heck, they couldn't even leave well enough alone with the iPad, they decided to market directly to the medical profession and compete one-on-one with startups in that field too.

I betcha that, somewhere on one of Apple's campuses, there are individuals using Pro/E (or similar), and that makes Steve Jobs grind his teeth at night. And, they've got more money than god at this point; like the Eye of Sauron, all they need to do is move their gaze into another market, and they can compete in it.

You're right about the effort required to build a thing, though. I was thinking more along the lines of longtime independent Mac software brands, like Panic.
In some public NATO reports, they said that during the Kosovo thing, NATO hackers took out specific Serbian radar installations to cover for the strike planes. I guess the Serbians didn't get the memo about putting critical infrastructure on a routable network...
That is the wrong question to be asking. A better question is: why do most developers let themselves work on software that is not defensible and/or not disruptive?
The point of Tina Fey making fun of Palin in that way was to point out how absurd it is to suggest that being able to see Russia from Alaska is related to competency in foreign politics.

It seems like this has escaped pretty much nobody but Palin supporters.
Relevant: http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-artis...

EDIT: I should clarify it's relevant because of the Kodak case at the bottom. Kodak got away with suing Sun because it was so "small" in the software industry Sun couldn't use any of its own patents defensively to prevent the suit from going to court.

Conversely, Apple and Sun never got into a slug-fest because each side infringed on so many of the other's patents that neither side could get an advantage.

To get back to my original point, getting a patent will make you an acquisition target. Not because you can sue Apple when it copies you. But because Apple has the pockets to sue Google when it copies you.
Watch E3 2011 Live Coverage
"This is similar to the Orwellian incident where Palin made a true and factual comment about the fact that you can see Russia from an island in Alaska, Tina Fey made fun of it by changing the words to say that you could see Alaska from her house or office, then people started promoting the Tina Fey comedy routine as if it was reality."

Hm, I really saw that as an analog of Bush's "you forgot Poland" incident--it's not so much that the statement itself is wrong, so much as the fact that it's a hilarious non-sequitur to the question at hand. Being able to see Russia from an island in Alaska does not magically grant the governor of Alaska with foreign policy experience, just as Poland joining the US, UK, and Australia in the initial invasion of Iraq doesn't turn a handful of countries into a strong multilateral force.
You may want to look at Apple's design, which uses a lock-like mechanism for interacting with the notifications as well (e.g. slide-to-play voicemail, slide-to-view text message). There doesn't seem to be an option for clearing the notification while the screen is locked, so your concern is in this case moot.
You do realize you're the exception, right?
I'm not going to say I disagree with you, I'm just quite stumped as to why such a large portion of web developers don't like static typing. These days a static language with good type inference honestly gets rid of most of the burden and the ugly verbosity while still giving you compile time checking.
The biggest problem for Marco is that adding articles to Instapaper on your iOS devices is difficult. Adding a bookmarklet on iOS takes 3 or more steps that were difficult even for a grizzled nerd like me. Reading List has absolutely no such friction on any Apple platform.
It would be like presuming guilt, you don't have to prove those mp3s are legal they have to prove that you stole them. Also having mp3s isn't the same as distributing mp3s. tptacek is right I believe. As far as I understand it, every p2p case has been about distribution or suspicion of distribution (make available argument). And they have to have a reason to come scan your computer. Hence why I won't be using this "scan and buy" service, the scan part is dumb.

Also as far as I know all my Amazon MP3 are identical to other users Amazon MP3 I don't think they have watermarks. How could you tell if they were mine or taken from someone.
A new innovative, low-cost college that encourages practical skills
It's possible that Jobs' Apple has always wanted to be this way, but it's only in the last decade or so that they've been able to gather the momentum to pull it off. With the prospect of the Mac App store taking over all software delivery in the near future, it's now enough deterrent for me.
The occasional security release breaks that. I have had to install updates, and then it found more after a reboot. Though I haven't done that on a base 10.6 to current.
Agreed. I bought QuickCal in the Appstore that lets me add iCal entries without a mouse. Seems like Apple has build there own "QuickCal" now, though they say "just click on +".

Personally, I don't care. At first, this is good for users. But I wonder why they are willing to hurt the ecosystem longterm with such actions. And that would be bad for users, too.
The slogan is more tongue-in-cheek than any sort of commentary on sports viewing. We like watching real sports in the office Justin.tv too.

I don't think any sports viewers are going to show up on TwitchTV and then cry themselves to sleep because they saw the slogan.
If you would like to develop cross-platform games, I would recommend checking out Ansca Mobile's "Corona", a Lua SDK for iOS and Android. Corona is mostly focused on game development, with libraries for things like animation, physics, and in-app purchases. The Lua is a popular scripting language in the commercial game industry (e.g. WoW extensions are written in Lua).
It’s Yesterday Once More
Find Rails Hosting solutions by server location
I'm a happy (paid) Instapaper user and hope it prospers, but I'm old enough to remember what happened when IBM brought out its original PC back in the early 1980s.

Apple claimed that IBM's entry into the space was a good thing because it validated the concept of personal computing, of which Apple had been a pioneer.

Then IBM proceeded to eat Apple's lunch, even though (in the opinion of many) Apple had the superior machine.

(Edited slightly for style.)
For the DP releases the downloaded package simply contains a DMG which can be restored to a USB drive or DVD easily or you could do a network install from another Mac using disk sharing.
She was making a joke. Calm down.
Welcome to the rest of your career.

I use the "divide and conquer" strategy. I look for others who have similar management authority and get them to see a mock of what I'm suggesting. If they won't listen to you, they will often listen to someone else.
Instapaper's killer-est feature for me is "Send to my kindle." I don't think Apple could get away with that anytime in the near future without some legal troubles with Amazon. Features like that are things that will continue to make apps like instapaper better than the baked in stuff. And it takes Marco a lot less turnaround time to deliver them than it would somebody like Apple, so I think there's still a lot of room to grow there.
Have you compared this visualization with the one for 495 and with the two digit numbers?
Completely agree - in fact, Remember The Milk is likely benefiting from the extra publicity the NYT and others are giving them today.
Indeed, Marco's initial reaction seems to have been http://twitter.com/#!/marcoarment/status/77796293510037504

He's clearly thought of this possibility, as evidenced by his post in late April about the potential impact of Reading List on Instapaper.
I think part of the difference was that M$ was intentionally putting up roadblocks on their platform with no other purpose than to block potential competition (e.g. Netscape vs IE). Apple will be guilty of the same thing if they in turn start using the AppStore guidelines of 'no duplicate OS functionality' to boot all of these players off of the platform rather than letting them continue to compete and differentiate their offers from Apple's.
I don't understand your last point:

"if you have to give a fixed date for delivery - it's very, very difficult to be agile"

An agile project delivers continuously. So you can deliver every time, especially at a fixed date. The fact is, that if you have to be feature complete at a fixed date, you can't be agile. Hence, you can't be feature complete at a fixed date in an agile project.
Well, on the other hand, nVidias drivers were responsible for 30% of Vista crashes..
Indeed!

That's one thing a lot of non-experts don't appreciate about these sorts of attacks. They are not terribly sophisticated, nor are they terribly malicious. This is why I put so much blame on Sony and Gizmodo, because they're not being attacked by some elite team of super hackers with an elaborate plot to destroy the company. Rather, they're being attacked by bored teens who are using crude techniques that no public facing website should be vulnerable to in 2011 and they are just dumping what data they gain access to on the internet. Compared to the sort of mischief a talented and dedicated hacker could achieve this is nothing.
No, please just ask and I will remove this comment, I am not here to try and cause agitation, I was just pointing out the changing landscape and how a release such as Lion, no longer has the impact that such a release would have had perhaps 4-5 years ago.

I am not here to declare that Linux on the desktop is beyond these offerings, I am far more realistic and believe more in the fact that its prevalence in other markets (embedded among others) is where the true potential is.
People also need to remember that a major use-case for Instapaper is the user saving an article from their desktop browser to be read later, and Safari has a piddling share of desktop browsers.
The phrase you're looking for is "good chance"
For the curious, here's Apple's famous ad: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kengz/198041571/sizes/o/
Marco is in a tough position because he depends on revenue from only one app available on only iOS.

It's a tough break, I'm sure he didn't expect anything like this before the Lion preview. I hope his business can survive.
I like Marco's current perspective:

http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper

"If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve their needs better. And they’ll quickly find Instapaper in the App Store."

Basically: Reading List validates the deferred-reading market.
I have to disagree here, as Japanese culture is generally quite strict about rules and processes. An average japanese company is very far from what you would even dream to call agile. Rules and conventions about face-time, not being able to disagree with your superiors (basically anyone who entered the company before you) and valuing facade over results seriously hinders efficiency and trying out new and brave things.

However, I'm constantly surprised by the great ideas the Japanese get despite all that stiffness in the society.
It will work on a PC, but they'll never add Android support. Why would they? What's the benefit?
The interesting thing here is the subtle shot that Apple is taking at Google with iOS. Readability like functionality removes advertisements. In the talk they said that safari represents 2/3rds of mobile web browsing. And that web browser is about to be equipped with technology that can turn those ads off.

I think down the road, there's going to be a couple different aspects to content on the web. Advertising based content that you get from google, and for-pay content that you'll get from Apple's News Stand and iBook store.
I don't think iTunes is that simple to use. It's very easy to make a mistake and lose all your contacts. I know two people that happened to, and to be honest I cross my fingers and hope when I upgrade my iPhone. Dropbox is very easy to understand in comparison.
Thanks to Safari's reading list, I'll likely stop using the Instapaper bookmarklet on my iPad. But the most common use case I have for Intapaper is when I see an article on my laptop in Chrome and want to read it later on my Kindle 3. So I expect I'll be using Instapaper for a while longer.

This is a generalizable pattern for survival for all the other apps Apple "killed" today - you can still compete for any users that don't live 100% in the Apple ecosystem.
It does. It has less to do with Apple implementing it or not, and more to do with Apple's lack of acknowledgement of where their inspiration came from. At least in my mind.

It's sort of like the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.
This is known to be the case. Every now and then there are spats about it. One of the most recent occurrences was when the Add-Ons team decided to revamp policy to block add-ons with poor performance. <http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.governance/browse_thr...;
Andrew Malcolm is about as accurate and unbiased here as usual.

There is no possible way -- no, scratch that, no possible honest way -- to interpret what Palin said about Revere as referring to what he did after he was captured by the British. She said he warned the British "by ringing those bells ... as he's riding his horse through town". She talked about his "warning shots and bells". Does Andrew Malcolm seriously want his readers to believe that this is referring to anything Paul Revere did after being captured by the British army?

The reason why Palin was laughed at for her remark about Russia and Alaska wasn't that the remark was false. It was that it was stupidly irrelevant. Palin tried to claim that the physical proximity of Alaska to Russia gave her some kind of special understanding of foreign policy. She was asked how it did that: "What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?". Her response was to say that you can see Russia from one place in Alaska.
Well, you can still out-execute them or build apps better than they can. I don't think fear of competing with Apple should stop you from building products. If anything, it can server as motivation and spur better products for users.
There are other reasons for using lossless audio files, such as archiving, and avoiding degradation through re-encoding.
Actually I can't figure that out either, but my PC seems to be too slow to use this app in a normal way. Gonna try tomorrow at work...
Your music is already legal. Not sure what you don't like about the "legalizing" aspect, as it doesn't pertain to you.

iTunes Match sounds like a way for the labels to get finally get income from the music pirates who torrent stuff off of Pirate Bay. A share of the $25/year is better than the $0/year they're currently seeing.
I tried a few of the most popular ones last year, none were satisfactory.
C#:
var obj = new
{ propA = 1
, propB = "meh"
};

JavaScript:
var obj =
{ propA: 1
, propB: "meh"
};

I admit that's about as close as they get syntactically, but with type inference, higher order functions, and anonymous types they really kind of "feel" similar in some cases. Oh, and C# has optional dynamic typing, so it can ~really~ feel similar if you want.
I've got my entire music collection (100 Gigs) in folders (mostly genre/artist/album) and have never felt "fucked". Sure there are strange things I can't do (give me all music recorded in 1986, that isn't jazz and that I haven't listened to in more than 6 month), but I've honestly never felt a desire to do that. So while folders may be extremely limited in some sense I've never run into those limits and can't really think of any realistic limits I might run into.
I don't have anything against recreational math; I rather like it myself. But, IMHO, the fact that something is tied to the representation of numbers removes it from the realm of "math".
I don't think you are off the track, from what i understand of this market (and maybe i'm completely wrong) , you are right, no one can think about solving his life with one single phone/pad app, and if you have success with one i like to think that even before that you are preparing another one. It would be like being "one single hit song" band or singer, you can get a lot of money but if you want to live you need more than that, and i think software market is harder than music. There's no magic but i can understand that people can risk a lot of work to give a step so they can make a second one and so on. But i think no one can say that if the land lord fires you from his land is a big surprise, you are the servant and have to pay your tithe while he's interested in you.
Photo editor online / free image editing direct in your browser - Pixlr.com
> I remember Apple's response when IBM brought out its original PC back in the early 1980s: Apple claimed that IBM's entry into the personal computing space was a good thing, because it validated the concept. Then IBM proceeded to eat Apple's lunch.

It seems to me you're stopping the story in kind of a weird place, there.

Apple's market cap is currently something like half-again as much as IBM's. Apple became a better company for the competition, and it's impossible to understate how much their current success benefits from the vast explosion in personal computer adoption that IBM's entry into the market brought about.

Competition makes products better. Increased awareness brings a lot more people and money into the market. Marco is a smart, talented guy who is well-poised to benefit, here.
The Worst Run Team In Pro Sports
To answer your question literally: Congressmen like credit card companies because of their large campaign contributions. Anyone hoping to disrupt will have to overcome the fact that the rules of the game are being written against them. Paypal and Square seem to be doing alright though. Google wants to get into the market as well.
I wonder how much of the increase can be attributed to Redis' Lua scripting.
The illegal technology is so ubiquitous you don't even notice it. As far as I know the DVD player in VLC is illegal.
Does anyone remember when the blueray key was released? Without that I just don't think opensource playback would be possible, and it remains illegal to distribute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
Apple is betting that they have chosen those limits such that most of their customers will not bump into them.

Customers legitimately owning more than 10 devices is a problem Apple would love to deal with.

They are betting that most people only look at the last 1,000 photos they've taken on their phone, most of the time.

They are betting you will use all of the devices where you might want to look at photos within 30 days.

$25 a year to upload any music and listen to it anywhere, is a pretty simple value proposition. The free iTunes caveat is more of an edge case, I think.

5GB...well, yeah, I can see a lot of people hitting that one. Will be interesting to see if they quietly increase this over time to keep most users under the limit, like Gmail.

We will see if Apple's bets turn out to be correct.
This is a bit off-topic, but I have the exact same most common use case, and I just switched in the last few days to using the Readability add-on to Chrome, which has a "send to Kindle" button. I was previously using Wordcycler to sync my Kindle with Instapaper by plugging it into my laptop, but this allows me to skip that step. Now I can just hit the sync button on the Kindle directly and it downloads the saved articles.

Readability seems to render articles slightly better, too, and more often keeps the byline, which was the most annoying part about Instapaper for me.

https://www.readability.com/addons
The competitive advantage for Instapaper is the ability to iterate quickly. If Apple delivers a growing band of people interested in reading the web later, Instapaper is better positioned to find out what tweaks and features will work best for them by risking changes to the core product.
This conversation reminds me of the discussions we've had about software patents. We're all against those, of course.

Yet we're taking umbrage with Apple integrating functionality from existing apps into iOS/OSX.

Aren't these conversations fundamentally about the same concept, the protection (or lack thereof) afforded to the owner of an executed idea?

It seems like it's the same conversation with the only difference being our role in the vignette. If it's the story of Lodsys, we're accused of infringement. If it's the story of iOS5, we're the infringed.
Except that foreseeably, there will be no way for Instapaper to have the same intuitive interface that Reading List benefits from. The only possible future for Instapaper is as a functionally superior app with a inferior interface. There's no way that Apple's going to lend the same degree of control over the functionality of Safari to any third-party app developer.

A pessimistic response is logical and probably the only rational response. There's simply no way to compete with Apple's Reading List because Apple's made it that way.

Instapaper, which is really a wonderful app has this weird workflow for use: Install the app, and to install the bookmarklet (some rudimentary Safari integration), you have to go to a page, create a empty bookmark, go back and edit the bookmark with a copied-and-pasted javascript: url. I'm sure Marco has tried his best to improve the interface, but Apple's restrictions on the platform forbids it.