skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"How could Dell, for example, possibly copy Apple’s operations when they currently classify “Design & Performance” and “Thin & Powerful” as separate laptop categories?"

The answer is pretty simple: the Powerful in "Thin & Powerful" is not as good as the "Performance" in "Design & Performance".

There are approximately three different categories for laptops: desktop replacements (powerful but very heavy, no battery life); netbooks (puny but very light, good battery life); and executive machines (a blend of power and weight with long battery life: Thinkpad, Portege). Before netbooks, there was another category: el-cheapo (weak and not very light, mediocre battery), but the hardware has advanced sufficiently that modern netbooks are viable web browser machines for many people who only use them for such, and it has mostly crowded out that segment. The PC laptop makers probably made most markup in the executive class segment.

Apple has similar categories, but it markets them better and even more precisely: the iPad is their netbook, the MBA their executive class, and the MBP their desktop replacement. But with the latest generations of the MBA, they've started to cut in towards the netbook market and eat into the margins PC laptop makers were getting in the executive segment.

But meanwhile, PC laptop makers were already getting burned by netbook-class machines getting more powerful. So what we're seeing is a slow disappearance of a segment of the market, and that's tripping up the marketing messages from the PC laptop manufacturers.

(FWIW, my relatively ancient Toshiba Portege is arguably a better machine than my fairly new MBA; it's considerably lighter, more fully featured, with Ethernet and DVD writer, and almost as fast. What it isn't is stylish: it compromises by being made of relatively flimsy plastic. If it were sold today, it could be made cheaply - a lot more cheaply than an MBA. But I don't think it's profitable for Toshiba to make and market it (and their later Porteges are much heavier as the market landscape shifts).
Not buying it. Programmers in our field could do worse than be up-to-date on the history of the major ideas in computer science, before they fire up their editor and start hacking stuff out. Obviously, you can do both, too.
Nike mercurial vapor
coffeescript is probably the next closest thing. I think I remember firefox and/or chrome will enable it soon.
In this instance you are in luck, since you can read the discussion about the article that John Gruber is summarizing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2963698
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive
It isn't cynicism to describe reality.
> It’s even worse if I just browse without searching. The options I get are just… meaningless. Yes, I want “Everyday Computing,” so I want an Inspiron. But hang on, I also want “Design & Performance,” so I want an XPS. Wait a second, I want “Thin & Powerful,” too.

This is the crux of the problem with all of Apple's competitors, in the PC business and in mobile. Why choose when you can have everything? Apple's lineup is consistently decreasing the trade-offs between models, which reduces the number of reasons that exist for buyer's remorse.

Yes, us geeks may want the ability to choose between WiFi chipsets, but asking my mom to choose a WiFi chipset will just scare her away. She might want to make the best decision but she doesn't have the time to research it (or doesn't know where to look), so she closes her browser and decides not to by a Dell today. Tomorrow, she's at the mall and stops by the Apple Store, sees that the only decisions she has to make are pretty clear cut (as in, amounts of storage/RAM) and goes home with a new MacBook. She was never given the ability to make the wrong decision and any barriers keeping her from buying a computer disappeared.
It's all dandy til it's not. And some companies really screw you over when it's not.

Price should be the LAST concern on something like a domain name. Considering the difference is a few dollars and most people don't register more than a couple, it SHOULD be a non issue.
Did you mean the "value of money is going up" in your last paragraph?
But that's a limited-time promotional discount. They are reporting the usual price.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2011/09/ultrabook-intel...
Additionally, most PE funds look to double their investments in 5 years. So using a 20% discount rate is somewhat conservative with this in mind.

PE funds tell themselves they can achieve a 20% return, but in reality they are on average no better than index funds. See:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

I stand by my claim that in assuming 20% returns for vendor finance, PE funds are tricking themselves by a greater magnitude than they are tricking founders.
So far there is no bashing of John in this thread

er yeah, I noticed that :) It was more of an "Ok, let's do it right this time" thought written in reaction to previous threads
I don't think Apple's wheels are necessarily going to fall off. The reason why they have tied up the worlds supply of touch screens and flash ram is because they realised the potential early on and made massive commitments to the manufacturers.

If Apple stops innovating then those people suggesting Apple will no longer have an advantage are correct. So long as Apple is innovating and requires newer and more modern technology that is going to cost millions of not billions to get set up and running they can continue to have an advantage mainly because they have that intense buying power required.

So long as Apple's competitors are always a step behind in seeking to make their computers smallers/faster or inventing the next new gadget that consumers want they will always have the first mover advantage.
Whew. I could have optimized and coped with the initially announced rates, but this is a hugely welcome set of changes.

For a solo technical founder running multiple businesses, AppEngine is an incredible product. Thank you Google, for doing all my sysadmin and scaling for me at an incredible price. I'm really looking forward to scaling up and paying more.
Reminds me of this classic XKCD

http://xkcd.com/932/
Will I be able to use Coffeescript with frameworks like Node.js? If yes, then how so?
You should read sci-fi because the authors question fundamental assumptions about the world, the same way good entrepreneurs do. For example, Arthur C. Clarke invented the idea of satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
Those are definitely all very good points. Everyone's situation is so different, I'm always hesitate to give any advice as a "prescription" and more of "here's what we did and why we did it so you can decide for yourself".

I'm definitely aware of how easily the new services enable you to entirely avoid the PCI issues. Personally, I'd say that their cut is probably well worth it relative to the time and effort that it takes to build it from scratch. However, that's driven in large part because I'd much rather invest time in the product than worry about the billing details. It's not that it's all that difficult, it's just that it's not the core of what makes Sifter unique.

With regards to promotions and stuff, I'm not a big fan of that. I'm a strong believer in keeping things simple and people either like it enough to pay for it or they don't. I feel that promotions might attract people for the wrong reasons. The more complex the pricing is, the more painful it is to deal with, and it can quickly become a distraction from simply crafting a better product.

Of course, plenty of companies have had great success with promotions, but it's not for us. To each their own, right? Either way, I hope the info helps. Best of luck which ever way ends up working out for you.
From what I understand, a company which allows employees to accumulate large pools of timeoff tend to have very unpleasant liabilities on their balance sheet. It is, I believe, a very serious liability (regardless of where you live, all places have very strict rules about it).

It's a lot like reward points. The initial programs didn't have expiry...after years, auditors warned them that they had billions in liabilities in unclaimed points.

In my experience, any company that gets a serious CFO or some outside accounting/auditing, is going to rectify their vacation problem pretty quickly
I finished up a job search a month and a half ago, and there were several places I didn't bother to apply to because I found their job posts annoying.

Pretty much anything than mentioned being a "ninja" or a "rockstar" was ignored immediately, and there were a few others I discarded out of hand, too for similar reasons.

Other than that, I'd just like to echo the point about responsiveness. There was one company I'd have loved to have worked whose job description I fit very well, but they took almost three weeks to respond to my application, and by then I'd already had an offer I really liked and I'd already written them off completely. There were a couple of others that said to bug them if I hadn't heard back in a while, and I mostly just stopped paying attention to those too.
Ha ha! This is the second time in as many hours I've thought: "I am such a dope..."
So that seems to boil down to: interns are non-exempt.
Pretty sure most large banks start at 4 weeks. But I just quit one, and I'd take 0 vacation days not to work there again (aka, surely this can't be the only thing you care about).
I'm upvoting your first three sentences: It's true, Apple has indeed been vertically integrated for decades.

My upvote does not extend to the last two sentences, however. This article is not merely about "have a good design and a low price". It's about focus: By building a smaller number of products with a much smaller variety of configurations and tightly controlled interfaces, Apple gets economies of scale that allow it to reach a previously unreachable plateau of quality-for-cost.
If you just want to limit the scope you can just enclose your code in braces without the try. A try without the catch or finally is meaningless.
I wrote a similar thing a few months ago.

https://github.com/stefanpenner/rebinder/blob/master/lib/reb...

My syntax was far more sarcastic and less legitimate, however. eg:

add = Fixnum.☃.+
add3 = add.∂(3)
assert_equal 7, add3.☏(4)

The fun bit is that this implementation doesn't actually use lambdas, but rather (Unbound)Method instances.
We haven't really done much with freelancers. Some of the design work and a little bit of development was outsourced to friends that we already had relationships with. These days we have a sys admin and bookkeeper on retainer so they help a little bit every month, but for the most part, we keep all of the work in house.

I don't really have any tips or advice beyond making sure that you meet people and build the relationships long before you need them. Then, you have people that you trust that you can turn to when you're ready.
I've ranted about this previously (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1419896).

Most manufacturers have vast and bewildering product lines. Treat yourself to the Asus line-up: http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/AllProducts/

Most manufacturers have half-hearted and short lived attempts at introducing premium lines or models (e.g. Dell's Adamo). Buying an expensive product only to have the manufacturer discontinue the line soon after destroys faith in consumers.

Most manufacturers have terribly designed products: hinges that wear out after a few months, useless trimmings that simply fall off, air vents that are blocked when the screen is open (yes, this actually was the case on my old Dell).
Well there's alot of paid services out there where you can get some pretty accurate statistics of game outcomes as well as player stats.
I was thinking more along the lines of how users actually playing the games.
it's one thing to see lulz make example of unsecured sites, but tasteless acts like this make my blood boil.
That's not quite fair either - adding to the complexity of pc purchases is the dizzying array of weekly specials. It's entirely normal for a vendor to mark stuff down from week to week.
Well, Reagan does get some of the blame. He made changes to tax policy in 1986 which caused companies to replace non-wage compensation (e.g., company cars) with taxable income.

Since taxable income is included in inequality statistics, but company cars are excluded, this caused a big spike in inequality in 1986.

http://www.scottwinship.com/1/post/2011/03/what-would-it-mea...
"It’s the Jobs side of the equation that Apple’s rivals — phone, tablet, laptop, whatever — are able to copy. Thus the patents and the lawsuits. Design is copyable. But the Cook side of things — Apple’s economy of scale advantage — cannot be copied by any company with a complex product lineup."

OK but there is a huge lag in time between Apple's delivery and the competitor's copy. Android did a good job copying iOS but Apple had a two year head start before an Android phone was on level ground with an iPhone. iPad will probably be a year out before a decent competitor comes along. Dell came out with an (ugly) MBP-like laptop a months ago.

They can copy Apple's designs, but if they only play catch-up, Apple will stay way ahead.
The next flight out probably was more than a few hours later. "Why are you still here" could have easily meant " Why aren't you at home packing to leave as soon as you can?"
Another way to put this, Apple loosely abides to the "Good, Better, Best" lineup for their product offerings. They don't follow it exactly, but in general, they keep selection simple. This doesn't confuse customers, and allows them to easily compare one thing to another.

If you've ever eaten at Panera Bread, you'll usually see people staring at the menu on the wall for a few minutes. Their menu is huge and all over the place. Hot sandwiches, cold sandwiches, salads, specialty salads, bagels, breakfast items, pastries, plus much more including ingredients. What's inside a Strawberry Poppyseed & Chicken salad? Read the fine print under it. Do you want apple, chips, or bread on the side? What type of bread do you want on your sandwich? We have 20 different types. Cheese OK? Mayo OK? Fountain drink, one of the 8 different bottled drinks in front of you you've never heard of, or freshly squeezed OJ? Complex, like Dell/HP/Lenovo.

What about McDonalds? You order by number associated with a picture. At 10:30, the breakfast pictures are replaced with the lunch/dinner pictures. Cheese or no cheese? Coke, diet coke, sprite? Large, medium, small? Quick, easy decisions. You know what a Big Mac is. And if you want to know what's in it, you're out of luck! There are 10 pictures; pick one of them. Simple, like Apple.
I think you should look at StorSimple too: http://www.storsimple.com as well; there are indeed already fairly mature products in the market that tackle this market opportunity with pretty compelling solutions.
It's also his most tautly plotted novel because of the detective noir framework. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan and the earlier Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust also used detective noir conventions to great effect. It's a writer's crutch, but so many fantasy and science fiction writers suck at plotting and pacing that I'd prefer they lean on crutches occasionally rather than bore their readers to death.

Egan's two most recent books, Incandesence and The Clockwork Rocket, are great if you're a math and physics guy.
I prefer designing desktop and mobile in parallel rather than one before the other. Cycling between the two seems to bring up the constraints on the ui and compromises that need to be made more quickly than proceeding one to the other. Wrote more here: http://tldr.person.sh/resource-limited-responsive-design
In Chrome by mid 2011, I guess it's a bit behind schedule..
This is also one of the benefits of Apple's huge cash reserve. They can easily make these commitments and investments as they see fit.
Name.com bought about 5 domains and will move my other domains there from godaddy and 1and1, network solutions as they expire.
Really great point. Maybe load the low res version initially and then predictively load higher resolutions as the gesture proceeds and fade between them to compensate for the latency.
Dictatorship 101: killing the Internet plays into the hands of revolutionaries
"Overall compensation" refers to salary plus bonus and options, rarely does it include things like health insurance, employer payroll taxes and the like. If it did, the lower numbers would be much higher than they are, IIRC.
Maybe rather than a new language, we should work towards browser "assembly" code. Lots of modern JavaScript development is in the direction of: write in language X, compile to JS. Would be nice if there was a lower-level target than JS
Huge Defunct Satellite to Plunge to Earth Soon, NASA Says
Fair point. I sometimes ship bugs too.
Dead NASA Satellite Falling From Space, But When & Where?
Is that really the comparison you want to be using here? Panera versus McDonalds, where Apple is McDonalds? Seems more like an insult.
This would be one of the situations where a BigLaw lawyer is a benefit and not just a horrible waste of money. (BigLaw = 500+ lawyer law firms, like Skadden, Cravath, Wilson Sonsini, etc). Those lawyers will personally have the experience handling these situations, or at least they'll have access to someone in the firm who has had that sort of experience.

Wilson Sonsini is pretty popular up in the SF Bay Area. Goodwin Proctor for NY-area startups.
Well done. Love the kinetic typography effect. Guessing that you guys do promo/about videos?
Certainly I was literally filling in boxes on physical paper with a physical pen, but there was no giant steam whistle involved. California has revved the laws a few times, and I'm not an employment lawyer, but all I know is I worked two weeks on salary before I was told there'd been a mistake. That was 2004, not long after CA went around to a bunch of businesses and explained that "college degree === exempt professional" was no longer going to be the order of the day. Made me happy, it meant more money. The hours were as flexible as ever.
NFS: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
Not if you look at their balance sheets, it isn't.

McDonalds is one hell of a highly optimized operation, and nobody in business would object to being compared to them. Meanwhile, Panera's food is probably less healthy if you actually look at the numbers.
inequality is freedom. equality is not! So... if you believe in a free society and open markets then inequality is neither good or bad, it is what happens.
The mobile site is slower than newtwitter for me.

And way worse.
You must already be exempt for that test to apply. It doesn't mean anyone making $16/hr becomes exempt.
That's because heavyweight clientside applications are only a more recent thing and JavaScript engines have improved alot.

JavaScript is great for event based programmming because of it's scoping rules. Python can't offer that.

That's why a few langang
What I take away is these people are part of something bigger than themselves, they understand that, and they care deeply about that thing.

Why does this matter? Anecdotes like this are simply the tip of the iceberg. In my experience, it's also (counter-intuitively) good for morale. You feel good about the sacrifices you make, rather than stressed or bitter.
One of the lessons of the mortgage crisis is that a rating service whose paying clients benefit from inaccurate ratings will become worthless. I wouldn't trust a bozo filter that takes money from bozos rather than me.
There's no loss in aggregate demand from savings and investment...investment is still spent, just on factories and equipment and research instead of consumer goods.
I don't see how that could be true. productivity gains have been experienced across all levels of the income scale so surely that growth is attributable to more than just the top 10%.

This statement betrays a misunderstanding of how productivity is defined. There is no macro-level measure of individual productivity, so it's simply not possible to determine which levels of the income scale experienced productivity growth.

Productivity is only measured, in the most granular cases, at the organizational level. The data available simply cannot determine which workers are more productive.

I'll give you an example. My startup involves a lot of categorization - we get a data feed full of poorly labelled fashion items, and we have a team of 6 girls categorizing them (item 1 -> "Handbags", item 2 -> "Dresses", etc). At the macro level, my organization recently increased categorizing productivity by 1000% (i.e., we categorize 10x more items than before).

This didn't happen because my girls suddenly started clicking 10x faster. This happened because I wrote a program which can parse item names ("Marc by Marc Jacobs sleeveless shift dress" -> "Dresses") with about 90% accuracy [1].

Macroeconomic statistics have no way of knowing which worker to attribute this productivity gain to.

[1] Categorizing natural language is surprisingly hard - stuff like "dress shoes" and "swimwear top" confuses the matter tremendously. Some items also get names like "Cherry Pie"...
Probably because most employees don't know their rights, nor would they be particularly interested in flexing them if they did. Not long ago you might have said that most long term contractors get invited to the company picnic. Not anymore.
I disagree with you. All the programmers I know have plenty of coding/reviews in their day-to-day. A much smaller amount of time is dedicated to reading papers - after all, it's not their job. If we can agree that both are valuable, why is the author wrong for pointing people to things that they likely focus less on?
I have a simple theory, which is well.. simple:
- Most people look for paid work when they need the money. This puts them in a position where they are unable to negotiate a market wage. This adds tremendous downward pressure on wages and keeps the middle-class down.
GlobalSign Acknowledges System Breach
Electric car range anxiety evaporates after 3 months
Good point. You may not care for Apple's prices, but you know they will be exactly the same between all outlets almost all the time. There are obvious windows of exception, like just before a keynote, but those are pretty well marked.
I know everyone likes to think Steve Jobs came up with the idea of focusing on a few very good products, but it's actually an old idea.

"Indeed, the basic problem of U.S. competitive strength in the world economy today may well be product clutter." - Peter Drucker, Managing for Business Effectiveness, 1963

Sorry I don't have a link to the original article, I had to look it up in a book
Supra Skytop High Black Shoes
Great, another interesting way to put the post into perspective. Also cool for anyone wanting to explain what YC is to non startup folk.
Rands mentions this in his blog (rands in repose) as being part of the DNA of the culture of the company. My take away is that this is Company Myth; these are the myths we tell each other over lunch, the stories that say, "This is who we are, this is what we do, these are the people to follow". These are the myths that we think about when a hard choice comes, so that we know we know what the Company would do.

I don't mean this as a bad thing. It's like the myth of Stallman coding alone to write emacs. Maybe it is 100% true. Maybe it is 50% true. But it's part of the Hacker Mythology, and hackers take their cues from that mythology.

And Apple has the Apple Mythology.
Also, Apple buys a lot more of that panel than any panel that Lenovo buys. If Lenovo ordered millions of 4:3 panels, they would suddenly become available.