skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they believed that, I'm not sure they would have gone to the trouble of building their own app distribution channel.

I would posit that they believe people care about apps a great deal, and that Amazon would like to be positioned to make some money from that demand, either through a cut of sales or by making their hardware more attractive since it "has apps."

They're the original kings of one-click buying, before Apple even sold apps. They'll make a killing and so will any developers who hitch their wagon to Amazon's strategy.
Trust you?

You've failed to take into account the opportunity cost of your time spent working on the business. Lets assume your labor costs $120,000 a year and the company is not paying you. So it's costing you $120,000 a year.

Sell that "property" as you call it, to someone else and it'll cost them $120k a year to replace you or pay you.

The investment isn't paying for itself, there is no capital gain and the reality is that you would have to pay a buyer to take it off your hands so they could lose money at a rate of $120k a year.

At this point in a businesses evolution you're losing money at a terrifying rate and unable to feed your family because you're working for free, but hey you are profitable because you've managed to pay your $20 a month Linode hosting bill.

Dude, I don't want to crap all over your parade or the OP's. But unless we know what we're all working towards and what the definition of success is, we're lying to ourselves and each other and there's no way to measure whether we're making true progress towards meaningful goals or not.

A dire misunderstanding of business cashflow like this poster has demonstrated makes me worry for all the starry eyed kids on HN starting businesses. They read shit like this and gobble it up as gospel. Then they dedicate years of their lives to working their asses off for very little pay, thinking they've achieved meaningful milestones on the way to generating wealth and creating jobs, but the reality is they're wasting their time, wasting investment capital and are a distraction from truly productive endeavors and truly talented entrepreneurs.

What perpetuates this cluster fuck is the monthly talent acquisitions that Google, Facebook and other heavyweights make getting conflated with job creation, innovation and the creation of new cashflow. Building an entity that attracts top talent into a single room and selling that room full of new-hires to google for $2 million an engineer has nothing to do with entrepreneurship. Are you hearing me Levchin?
You're right that it's certainly a step forward for consumption.

What I meant is that it's a step backward for what I saw as the trend toward a world in which the power to create things is more evenly distributed.

Don't get me wrong, I have a kindle, and I love it. But it's not just optimized for reading, it's optimized for reading content that's distributed through a centrally maintained distribution channel. (And while Amazon is trying to wrest control of that channel from the traditional publishers, it's a transfer of power from one central authority to another.) Which is why I appreciate tools like Readability's 'send to kindle' bookmarklet so much: it lets me read content from the bazaar more easily. But. Even then, I had to jump through hoops and the formatting isn't great. In short, it's not optimized.

Furthermore, while on the web on a PC I can read a blog post and then immediately comment, share, or respond in a blog post of my own, on my kindle I can't do any of that. I have to put my own system in place to even remember to do it later. In other words, the Kindle optimizes my consumption experience at the expense of my production experience in a way that's sort of profound in a way that I acutely feel is a step backward.
Withdrawn. That was the old article.
In my experience, the biggest problem is that "one size fits all" IT rules don't make sense for many organizations that employ them.

For example, I've worked for two ISPs in which engineers are responsible for larger networks than the IT department is, yet the engineers are still not allowed to, say, install a new version of Java on their own machines.
Rob Pike (2001): Presentation looking back on 1 billion seconds of Unix. [pdf]
Sony's debut Android tablet to launch in September
No time to research this myself, but are those dates around the wrong way?
Here is a Google cached version. Sorry about this guys.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I think Scala is a wonderful language, however it is one of many.

Data structure and collections support in scala is equivalent to any functional language. I would be interested in hearing where you think Scala offers more.

F# is another functional language that balances OOP in a way that works well. It is different to but homomorphic with Scala's OOP functional synthesis. Both allow a very unique style with algebraic types, matching objects, structural recursion and monad syntax.
if only we could get better time resolution ;)
The-Tech-Eye: Just Facebook
"It was working yesterday, I swear"
It's impossible to read a non-e-ink screen in bright sunlight. I love my iPad, but I'm considering buying a Kindle just so I can read at the beach at my next vacation.
I doubt it's due to reluctance, but licensing issues.
Perhaps I'm assuming too much, but it looks like you might be confusing notification with queueing. As you found with SQS, queueing systems can make for poor notification mechanisms. Did you try using AWS SNS (http://aws.amazon.com/sns/) for your first two use cases? We have similar notification use-cases internally, and SNS has worked great.
Amazon Kindle Tablet
since I didn't know it is one of:

OUT OF MY FACE
OUT OF MY FOLLOWERS

I post it so you don't have to google ;p
This Guy Walked Away From The Genius Bar With A Drive Full Of Apple’s Secrets
No problems here in New England
Site text can be read here: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://baydin.com/blog/2011/...
Wow. Love the project
I think you could have used the same argument for the media distribution model that existed before PCs were widely accessible: look, everyone is sitting on the couch, watching television, clearly that's what they want. But once we gave a lot of people access to PCs, we saw an explosion of interaction, content creation, communication, participation.

I don't think it's an overt conspiracy, it's just self-interest and centralized resources and power.

I believe that PCs did change the way people are, and the way they think. Not everyone, maybe not even a majority, at least not overtly. But I think it had a profound effect on the culture. I believe the Web made a difference. I believe the ways we have to access the Web make a difference.

You can point to dumb people continuing to be dumb and say there is no problem. I see a problem, and my solution is to talk about it, to try to get influential people to think about it, and think about making tools to empower creation by the technically lay (like me).
isnt't it all about glucose levels?

http://finalmile.in/show_article.php?aid=6
Just because fraud in court didn't swing a case doesn't mean it wasn't fraud.
Well, as for the 'posing as police', If you spent your life on the force, after you retire it might sometimes be difficult to refrain from "impersonating an officer".
I had the same struggle and originally used viper-mode + vimpulse to ease the transition. Recently I've switched to Evil, which is excellent and requires very little configuration to give you vim-like navigation with all the other good things in emacs: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil
I don't know that this is quite what I'm looking for, a worthwhile read though. Never ceases to amaze me how many things Amazon can prefix with Simple.
Personally, I hope the book is thrown by someone impersonating a judge.
A lot of people questioned whether or not there was a market for a CrunchPad, or a cheap entry tablet.

Looks like this will validate that. Now, if only webOS could chime in and make this an interesting battle. That would be special.
You're lucky. Our corporate email is Lotus Notes. The only reliable way to search it is using Google Desktop, which is what my coworker uses. I, on the other hand, copy the occasional email I need to reference into a text file
I disagree completely. I find my tablet a killer productivity tool, and only wish it had been available for use in filmmaking years ago. The only reason that I didn't build my production sound recording rig around a tablet computer was that the cost was so high; the only tablets powerful enough to run an operating system and record multi-channel audio were also built and priced for military or industrial use and severely limited by battery capacity. a 6-channel hard-disk based digital recorder cost close to $10,000 a few years ago. That same functionality (and much much more) will be available via tablet+USB audio interface within a year for $1000.

People said the exact same thing when the mouse and GUI came along - it was eye-candy, a substitute designed to distract the credulous from the fact that we had hit the limits of productivity and that it was all downhill from here on. They said the same thing about microcomputers and minicomputers as substitute for mainframe terminals.
Why throw good money after bad? If Aardvark is not part of Google's (evolving) vision, why continue it? If I make a wrong turn on the highway, I would turn around, even if I've drive in that (wrong) direction for an hour. :)
sometimes you get this illusion, but

the case is always the same - it wasn't working properly yesterday ;p
Bezos-Funded Spaceship Misfires
Other cities?
Do the games have to be pure chance to be legal. I thought you couldn't mix games of skill and chance?

Aren't there all kinds of quite specific laws about how odds are presented and stuff like that? How do you plan to police that stuff?

I assume because you hold the licence, you are the one hosting the games and you are essentially just paying us a commission to find your players?
Thanks a lot! It was a bit unexpected, but we plan on building out the features a lot once judging is over.
Where do you draw the line? I think everyone starts with something of their own before getting investor money, eg: clothes, a computer, travel expenses. What's the cutoff? $100? $1000? etc
I said "claims" because, for reasons too tedious to list, I don't think they do know or can know a very exact percentage (even to +/- 10%).

And note, they're talking about "number of items" (not "amount of debris" as you say -- that would imply mass, a different thing).

But if it's anywhere near half of the "number of items", then these two crashes alone are a highly significant source of junk. I did not know that, and that seemed worth a link.
Easily deploy web applications with Strobe [screencast]
Google shuts down 10 side companies and projects
from http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/09/iphone_5_apple_p...

> San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man's home.

The SFPD says they were there.
DotCloud is not cheap if your application is database intensive.
Faced similar situation.

My thoughts (based on my very limited experience) are that East Coast VCs seem to be more risk-averse.

Which makes sense. It's easier to be more risky when you know investors down the street who have made 1000x with the who's who of the Internet.
A small meta-comment:

xdissent[1], the author of this package, is a HN user, but he has negative karma because his fourth comment was snarky and got heavily downvoted. Even though he's aware of the ban he clings to this handle and continues to post messages seen by almost no one (he posted twice on this comment page [2,3]). The rest of the messages eversince the incident have been fine (enable "showdead" in the user control pannel if you want to read them).

Since he seems attached to the handle, it would be nice if he could be upvoted back to the positive side so that he can once again participate.

He's got three upvotable posts in history (before the ban). His karma is currently at -32. This means that he needs 11 brave souls to break even. You know what to do :).

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xdissent, comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xdissent

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955430

3. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955411

.

Edit: 58 minutes later: -10. Thanks to the upvoters.
No, that's the #2 cause.

Doing it at all gives you much better odds than not doing it, even if you make mistakes.
Creating something doesn’t get harder because consumption gets easier.

You're absolutely right that there's no necessary dichotomy, but in practice that's what's happening. The iPad could be an awesome platform for a Squeak-like development environment where you create and program a bunch of objects and have them interact with each other. But Apple won't allow such an app in their store which makes it unavailable to the large majority of users, and if they had their way jailbreaking your iPad to run it would be a federal crime.

Oh, and our tools for creation still are rapidly improving. Prices for computers have gone nothing but down. People are today able to buy a great PC and a tablet for the same price of a PC ten years ago.

That's true, today. But if tablets replace PCs for most people as many are predicting, PC prices will go up substantially: partly due to reduced economies of scale, and partly because reducing the market to professionals and geeks will allow more price discrimination.
I'll give this a shot. I have a couple of companies in mind and I'm looking for my things that interest me, so that should lead to a few more ideas as well.
How to Improve Your Google Ranking: Myths and Reality [ppt]
Show HN: readfa.st - learn to read faster
A non-technical trick I learned was to try to send emails 10am local time of the recipient, Tuesday thru Thursday. I found this was the time I was most likely to get a response because most people don't like responding on the weekends to non-personal messages. On Monday they are digging out from the pile of messages from the weekend, on Friday they just want to get thru the day.
Yo
wassap
How we got featured in the App Store in less than a week
Let's try to clarify a little. There are two pillars to your argument, from what I can tell.

1) Content on post-PC devices is mediated through a central authority. You argue this is bad because presumably you cannot read whatever you want, but only what the central authority allows through. But reading whatever content you want is not enough, you also would have expected that any content you find out there that is optimized for a desktop browser be re-optimized by the tablet device for reading on it.

Response: A valid criticism of the Kindle, though in practice it seems that you are asking for an extension of what is already offered, implying a superset, not a sibling set of functionality. For example, the Kindle has always offered a browser but the technology didn't seem good enough to render a website quickly. Considering that Amazon had its pick of web-to-e-ink and books-to-e-ink, I can't immediately fault them for what they chose to throw their weight behind first--purely from the standpoint of practicality.

You criticized the iPad in your original post, but I don't see any of the iPad's existing functionality being at odds with choice of content provider or lack of optimization for reading web content (see Instapaper, Flipboard, built-in Readablility in iOS 5).

2) Your ability to "produce content" on these tablet devices is hindered.

Response: I addressed this point in my original post. This by and large is a result of the technology available for a holdable computer, not a nefarious choice on the part of the manufacturers. I think the ability to write blog posts on a plastic Kindle is asking a lot (would that even be enjoyable?), and that ability exists on an iPad today, in fact, since it was introduced.
Shame Heinlein didn't tag along.
Good to see he hasn't let it get to his head. Still eating ramen suggests they're scrappy, and his post is about customers rather than an exit.
It's a much higher fraction of the vertical space available though, which is terribly underprovisioned on modern displays. We're all trying to scroll vertical text content on a screen intended for watching movies, and it sucks.

I haven't had a chance to actually try this yet, but it looks great from the shots. Gnome 3 is doing similar things with hot corners and I like that too.
A step backward is hardly the way I'd put it. Consumption-related technology as well as production related technologies are improving dramatically; we perceive the pace of consumption technology as being faster because consumption technology is far more applicable, and affects more users, and so it's more on the news. This is not a problem, there have always been more readers than writers, movie watchers than movie producers, software users than software creators.

There isn't too much discussion when there's a new version of Photoshop, or VIM, or Django, or Wordpress, or countless other technologies (e.g. http://www.asciiflow.com/) and platforms that help with content creation. One reason I read HN is that these items usually make it here. It's easier to create content now than at any time in the past.

How many people built software before iOS and Android? A few folks scattered across huge companies that either built consumer products or provided services for those companies. Today, iOS has half a million apps -- somebody produced them. Arguably the 'consumption-only' device that you think has taken us a step backward has given tens of thousands of people incentive to produce something. Amazon's vision is for authors to be able to self-publish without going through the hassle of publishers, giving more incentive for people to produce. Whereas making movies was once a task for multibillion dollar studios, Youtube has enabled something like the Khan Academy to start earning money by producing content.

You cannot have better and better consumption oriented devices in a vacuum. Someone has to produce what the masses are consuming.
You do know Napster? You do know The Pirate Bay? People want access to mainstream music, mainstream videos and mainstream books, no matter the device. If the big companies don’t give it to them people will go to great lengths to get said access. That’s just how it is, always has been, always will be. You are again and again creating false dichotomies.

The media distribution model of all the mainstream stuff is not different between PCs and tablets. Tablets might be a bit more convenient when it comes to buying stuff (probably not even that) but that’s it. You can get mainstream stuff on both. People want mainstream stuff on both. Napster and all the later filesharing is a testament to that.

But that’s not the whole story. Far from it. All the other content out there is perfectly accessible with tablets. They are just as good at accessing non-mainstream content as PCs. They are not limited in that respect. They all have awesome browsers (the most modern stuff you can get), they allow you to download podcasts or to subscribe to RSS feeds. It’s all possible.

Tablets are the content consumption Yin to the content creation Yang.

I just don’t understand how one could see that any other way.
Against the baseline of an existing Kindle, email, web browsing, music, movies and Angry Birds are all apps.
I'm not familiar with this stuff. Would someone please explain what types of information public companies can't share with their employees, and the thinking behind these regulations?
From our homepage (http://artefactual.com):
"How our open-source business works...
Artefactual Systems is not a software vendor. We do not sell software licenses. Artefactual Systems is a technical service provider specializing in open-source software and technology strategies for archives and libraries. We sell our time to develop, enhance, fix, install, integrate, host or provide training for free and open-source software. Any software or documentation that Artefactual creates as part of any of our technical services are released under free and open-source license. Artefactual has an established and well-respected reputation for promoting the use of open-source in the archives and library community as a way to reduce costs, facilitate collaboration, improve standards adoption, and raise professional capacity."

In short, we pay the bills using the bounty model. Firstly, to develop the core apps (http://ica-atom.org and http://archivematica.org). Secondly, to enhance, integrate, host them, etc. Early on I based much of our business model and community building philosophy on Drupal service providers.

This is a relatively small niche market. We're not getting rich but managing to pay the bills on a break-even basis and being a positive influence in the archives and library community. Since 2006 we've gone from 1 full-time to 8 full-time staff.

As for challenges, our projects are taking off worldwide right now so one of our main issues is juggling a growing demand for free community technical support with putting in the time necessary to hit deliverable milestones on paid client contracts. It's also difficult (impossible?) for us to get external private or public funding to accelerate development/marketing/training because "you don't have any intellectual property. What's to stop a former employee or competitor from stealing your business?" (the answer, of course, is 'our reputation and expertise')

One of our other main challenges is that we usually get organizations to sponsor new features but it is very difficult to get funding for bug fixes, enhancements and any critical core re-factoring. We bite the bullet on those because we need to stay competitive. The leap of faith you make with implementing an open-source business model is that the goodwill is paid forward. If 100 organizations download our software and five come back to us for support services we continue to move forward. This is working for us. For the past 4 years we have solid contract work booked at least 6 months in advance.
With respect to app development, which has been incredible in how widespread it's become, it's possible it's just an extension of what the Web started: incredible democratisation of creation.
Apple is not the only company in the world.

Tablets will improve.

You predictions of doom are way overblown.
Yeah to me this decision is either an admission that the idea of hosted apps is a failure or that the people making the decisions at google don't understand app engine.
Agreed. Why the hell buy it in the first place? Maybe they wanted some of the IP to use somewhere else or something? It doesn't smell good to me. Are we still saying 'Do no evil?'
Can anyone tell me how the new and old prices compare to running a similar app on AWS, Heroku or other competitors?

ie was GAE ridiculously cheap before compared to other options, and now comparable? Or was it somewhat cheaper than competitors before, and now somewhat more expensive?

I realise it's never that simple, but nearly everyone's complaints seem to be (understandably) given in relative terms of before vs. after. I'd be interested to know how it stacks up before vs. after vs. if-we'd-taken-another-route.
Why I think Chrome OS is ready for Prime Time
"But I’m sure as anything that somebody is gonna sell a buttload of tablets at that size. [7-inch]"

He's right! That'll be Amazon with their forthcoming 7-inch color Kindle: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/02/amazon-kindle-tablet/
Thanks for pointing this out, you're right that the example is now outdated, though it's probably not too difficult to find more browser specific code to pick on :) I'll change that.