skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right in that there's nothing inherently wrong with a monopoly. There's only things wrong with how you got it, and more importantly, how you use it. When you use collusion to build one (or a cartel), that's a problem. When you start using it to preclude people from turning to an alternative, that's a problem.

Right now Apple is the dominant player in the mobile phone space, but it's definitely not a monopoly, and AFAICT they aren't really doing anything that is preventing competitors from entering the market. iCloud is a step in that direction, but it's not very good right now so we'll have to wait and see. Android basically lets Apple do whatever they want, and is the credible competitor that Microsoft was lacking.

Where Apple was a monopoly was in mp3 players, and where they were abusing it was with their DRM, by also having the dominant music store, and not allowing other devices to get music from it, or to let other stores sell DRM music for the iPod. They removed it, and I don't think it had anything to do with consumers, it was simply an anti-trust target that was growing larger by the day. They were smart and fixed that.
It's worthwhile to pay attention to the story of 38 Studios; in many ways it parallels that of a typical startup, but has the less-common context of being in the gaming industry (which probably seems like the wild west to most people).

A few key tidbits:

Curt Schilling's inspiration to start 38 and work on Project Copernicus (the original title it was founded to develop) grew out of his passion for playing games like World of Warcraft alongside his active participation on game-focused forums like Fires of Heaven. Many people from that and other similar communities are observed moving into the industry when they demonstrate particular insight or skill through game design/balance discussions (aka 'theorycrafting') so it's not as unexpected as you might think for a random gamer to go from talking about a genre on forums to working on a game of his own. Curt is only unique there in that he had the cash on hand to get it rolling himself.

38 Studios started out working on Copernicus (under another name) for multiple years without much fuss in the press and (presumably) at a much smaller studio size than it has now. It wasn't until 2009 that it started making visible moves to expand and act more quickly.

In '09 they acquired Big Huge Games (actual developers of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning) and had them rebrand their game in order to have an Amalur title to ship soon and presumably bring their resources to bear on Copernicus. In '10 they made their now-infamous deal with the state of Rhode Island to relocate the studio and expand to 450 staff in exchange for a loan.

Curt publicly claimed to have invested a large chunk of his personal fortune (according to some sources as much as $30m - http://thebiglead.com/index.php/2012/05/18/curt-schillings-v... ) into the company alongside the loan from the state of Rhode Island and potentially other investors; more recent reports suggest that the amount he actually invested was closer to $4 million and was repaid out of the state of RI's loan (http://blogs.wpri.com/2012/05/14/38-studios-finances-under-s...).
YC ad startup seeks scaling expert
We're an unannounced YC company working on dynamic advertising. We're making it seamless and painless to show the right message to the right person. We're serving up several million impressions a month right now and are looking for a scalability expert to make sure we grow smoothly.

If you are passionate and experienced with scaling advertisement
impressions or extreme high-traffic web apps, this is a great
opportunity to join a small team and design a serving and impression
tracking solution to support extreme volumes.

------------------------------------------------

You will be:

- Designing and maintaining a scalable stack capable of delivering and
tracking millions of ad impressions daily.

- Design and implement analytics that go beyond impressions to
accurately capture all interactions with our ads.

- Work closely with other developers in implementing design choices
and refactoring the existing codebase.

- Monitor ongoing performance of our our application, as well as
caching and other hosted services

------------------------------------------------

You already have:

- At least a B.A. in Computer Science or related field

- Expertise in ads serving, ads tracking, or large-scale web applications

- Experience with fault tolerance, scalability, client-server communications

- Experience with cloud solutions, including Amazon Web Services
(CloudFront, EC2, S3), as well as other sys-admin type
responsibilities

- We work with Rails, Varnish, Redis and MongoDB - but we care more
about experience than languages

- A passion for efficiency, maintainability, scalability

------------------------------------------------

If this sounds like you, we'd love to talk. Please email us at
ads.can.be.rad@gmail.com with a little info about yourself.
For clarity - they should add logos of all supported browsers and versions too. I guess they don't support IE5.

On a side note: Netflix doesn't support Chrome on new video player. Yesterday I was watching movie on Chrome and I was dumbfounded when I was given notification that this is not supported browser.
Investors have always had Tim Cook's ear--that was part of his leadership role at Apple for many years. Now that he is CEO I don't see why that would change.

Tim Cook is a very talented business and operational manager. I don't think he should try to become a "product guy" CEO just because Steve Jobs was a product guy CEO. He should stick to spending his personal time on doing what he does best--operations.

Yeah, product development at Apple is going to suffer because Steve Jobs is gone. There's nothing anyone can do about that, including Tim Cook. The thing that Cook has to do is protect what remains of the great creative processes that are still going. If we hear that investors have Ives' ear, that's when it's time to panic.
Show HN: Friendscan.me - Social media QR code App
I was wondering if anyone would be willing to give me a little feed back on my new project?

Thanks in advance.

Friendscan.me is the New way to Add friends to your social networks in the real world with you own custom QR code.
Simplify your real world life contacts by translating your social networks into a QR code.

Others can scan your QR code and add you as a friend instantly! No more fumbling with email addresses or spelling names, just scan, confirm, and you're done! http://friendscan.me
Interactively watch how your C++ gets compiled.
Geography of Incarceration in the USA
Eh, sport cars are cheap. If you can't buy that Gulfstream on the spot, you are not rich.
It's not a knee-jerk, he's just using a very well known term that has a specific meaning. It means to cease all work. All. He hasn't. He even admits it in the linked article but justifies it because it's doing what he wants. Retired means not working. He works.

If you're working for money you're not retired. There's even a whole spiel in the link above about how they tried to become property developers which failed when the market collapsed, which is actually a lot of work.

I'd buy semi-retired. Or he works part-time. But retired has a very specific meaning that he is ignoring. He just seems to be confusing 'I enjoy my new job' with 'I don't work' just because he didn't like working 9-5 as a programmer or whatever it was he did.
Let's just hope it doesn't taste good.
Behind the Scenes look at Avengers UI Design (S.H.I.E.L.D and Iron Man stuff)
While we're adding new TLD's, how about a .yc domain? Or maybe it should be .hn?
Google told Motorola if they used Skyhook then their devices wouldn't be android compatible. [1] And from emails:

one email quotes an Android manager saying it was obvious to
phone manufacturers that "we are using compatibility as a club
to make them do things we want." [1]

I'm sure you can come up with some way this wasn't Google shutting someone out of their channels... but please. Because everyone involved believes that was the case:

Motorola flat-out told Skyhook that Android devices are "approved
essentially at Google's discretion," and that Moto couldn't afford
to risk its relationship with Google. Motorola also told Skyhook that
its carrier agreements require Google's apps be preloaded on its
phones, so Google's compatibility decision was doubly important --
if Motorola shipped software that didn't have Google's blessing (and
apps), it would immediately violate its contracts with carriers. [2]

So Motorola can't use Skyhook's software because google used their control over Motorola's ability to include other google apps to screw Skyhook. Now, the lawsuit will decide whether this was legal, but it sure as hell was "Google shutting someone out of their channels."

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/10/internal-emails-reveal-go...

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...
Not the high speed robot I was expecting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk but just as clever
Yea, but leaving out the #1 browser seems a little... intentional.
I don't think it's ever been feasible; most countries won't let you open a bank account unless you have an address in the country, unless you're in some kind of special situation, like a "high net-worth individual" interested in private banking services.
It creeped me out at first. lol
This is a simple 'black and white' ethical case. He didn't have approval for the services and resources he consumed, he knew it was wrong (he purposefully avoided security), and he could have resolved any "gray area" at any time by simply asking permission. QED.

There's quite a bit of debate and philosophy on moral relativism, too. Which is the rhetorical baseball bat you're trying to apply here.
Entrepreneurship as a last resort
Very useful data. Do you have anything more comprehensive about your experience?
CPI-Cost Per Install (iOS): price ranges anyone?
It's not the same at all - an equivalence would be if facebook didn't support Chrome at all and made people choose another browser.
Welcome to the belly of the beast
Wait, how is this related to software patents?
SearchLove San Francisco – We are sorry but we have failed
"combining self-interest with empathy for others" is basically the real-deal Adam Smith brand of capitalism. Not the hollywood/cliffs-notes version we're living in now...
Although the scheme involved legos, the fact that they are legos had nothing to do with how the scheme worked.

It would be more proper to say this is a "fake barcode" scheme.
"really pathetic"?

I'm going to assume you've never done anything so pathetic in your life as to leave a web page with something less than the latest, greatest, most open sourcey, freedom-loving information.
That's out of date. Chrome is now the top browser, IIRC.
I voted in favour of your response, because the sort of snark that you presented resonates with me, however, two things:

1. This kind of response (along with the kind that I am giving now) is often just as much a problem as the initial non-useful post in terms of "useless thread clutter". Things could go either way on whether it's really useful to point out the situation to a user "for their benefit" -- the voting system exists partly to let us wash unproductive responses out of sight.

2. You particularly noted "next time you post on HN", and that made me feel a bit sick. There's little more elitist than saying to a newbie that they need to change their behaviour "around here", or "to hang out with us". It shows a greater concern for our little clique than for the ideal of argumentation, or for the dissemination of knowledge to people who could use it.

All that said, I'm clearly not following my own advice here -- in my defense, I'm making the bet based on your post that you're someone willing to consider your actions and either respectfully disagree or change, but I could be wrong. My response likely ought to be voted down as further useless junk.
I'm not sure they did that deck in-house. In the footer it says "Designed by Moxy Creative House" and that level of visual polish isn't present on the main Piccsy site.

Just uninformed guessing, but interesting if it's true.
I was going to post how they should do a clearer job of describing the challenge (i.e. using bullet points, headers) and main rules, but I guess there's a separate webpage devoted to the challenge:

http://www.scribd.com/jobs/botrace_rules
Practice Better
Read the team bios. They are Moxy.
Man, HN is slacking. This story has been beat to death on Mefi and Reddit over the last two days.
FWIW, I haven't been able to load my facebook newsfeed on Chrome for the last 3-4 days.
I don't think the story says so explicitly, but he was also probably using their network, power, etc. to do his work. I'm guessing they must have a guest wifi network or the like where a non-corporate computer connecting wouldn't raise any flags.
Same.

That says something about the portability and consistency of Java, rather than the ability of c#.

The reverse is not possible due to the platform lock in.
Something they (understandably) didn't address in the video was fault tolerance on the Postgres side. What do people like these days for that?
Well... This is getting very entertaining.

Normally, I'd condemn Motorola's attitude, but Microsoft has been patent-extorting every Android manufacturer they can intimidate. I really hope Motorola can beat some sense into Microsoft.
What are the differences in the types of jobs that you can get. Are there more privileges involved or working on higher level projects?
Thank you for pointing this out! I tend to read comments before the article to get a feel for the cultural context and perceived value of an article (it filters a lot of linkbait), and then I jumped the gun here. I've added a note to my original comment.

After having read it, the article's title really doesn't fit the reality. If you want to develop traditional win32 apps, you can keep using VS2010. VS2011 has all the latest and greatest tech for them, but that's similar to the present divide between Express and Ultimate. This article appears to be trying very hard to frame the debate or sensationalize things.

It's fair to point out that if this trend continues into the next generation so that VS2010 becomes a sort of ghetto-compiler it's very bad, but we have no reason to believe right now that it will. Microsoft probably isn't stupid enough to shoot themselves that hard.
Almost more interesting than the omission of a browser from a vehemently self-declared rival is the omission of Flock & RockMelt, in my opinion. (They are, of course, browsers with “built-in social” & Facebook integration.)
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. The core idea is that you can live a decent life in America for much less than most people do. By doing so you free up enough money that even simple, fairly conservative investments can generate enough passive income to cover your reduced living expenses in short order. After that you can do whatever you want: sit on a beach, learn metalworking, pile up a huge mountain of redundant cash, anything. That's all he's really saying, and he's got numbers to back it up.
BBC adds opt-out statement for cookies
Apple's developer model for iOS is sharecropping. Wanting to develop for iOS is like wanting to farm in Mississippi in 1913. You can't buy title to the land, only rent it for whatever cut of the profits the landlord thinks the market will bear.

Historically, Apple has never pursued a B2B model for relationships and this translates into the current iOS environment. Apple treats iOS developers like any other consumers - it provides a small range of products, a single set of terms, and customer service commensurate with the price. It's a sound business model and leverages their core competencies.

Developers are a necessary evil in the pursuit of selling more hardware, not something about which top management is passionate - Cook is focused on logistics not making happy hackers.
I always thought that the ICO cookie law stuff was opt in, rather than opt-out like the BBC were doing.
Um… Internet Explorer 6 users, whom are almost certainly the intended audience.
I don't think this page wasn't updated for long time. It has IE logo of IE9+. So it was updated at least after IE9 release and by that time Chrome was major browser.

IE9 was released April Last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_9
"The Company is experiencing an economic downturn."

Um. No. You mismanaged your finances and chose not to give your employees any warning that they will be without pay or health care.

A word to all you startup founders out there - don't toy with your employees' lives. If you are running out of money, let them know so they can plan.
Its sad that this was my first thought too, that it would become some 'potent ingredient' in some dish like shark fin or rhino horn.

The last time I was in Hawaii we saw feeding whales as we crossed islands on the ferry. These are massive creatures that deserve our protection.
Why do you think that Facebook and Apple are rivals?
Google Releases New Copyright Transparency Report
Recruiters will be hunting the folks who got laid off, I hope they find work quickly.

I thought it was interesting that they were given such a large loan by the government. But they had big ideas, and behind it was Curt Schilling, Todd McFarlane, R. A. Salvatore and lots of incredibly talented folks.

I applied when they had a job in my area of expertise, and I had another (better) gig by the time they got back to me with my application. Not surprisingly, two months later they contacted me about the same gig, independent from my application.

There's got to be some lesson in there somewhere, specifically about how to judge a startup that takes a month to get back about a job inquiry.
There is one part of the idea that I'd like to salvage, though, and that's having some clear documentation right there in the code about what kinds of exceptions I can expect to see a procedure throw.

At the very least it'd be useful for when I'm wearing my "DLL author" hat, since it'd give me an easy way to look through the public interface and make sure exceptions won't be causing unrighteous leakage of implementation details for the end-user. I'd rather not put users in a situation where they have to look at the framework source in order to interpret an exception. It's kind of irritating when that happens.

I think it's really not something that should require special language statements, though. A static analyzer should be able to automatically figure it out.
Almost exactly what I came here to say. As long as Tim and Jon have a good relationship (or at worst, big decisions that aren't plainly suicidal defer to the design team) they'll be in good shape.
hacker news is jumping the shark.
>Second, to clarify that I don’t think there’s anything nefarious or ill-intentioned going on here. Just that Kickstarter has made an interesting design decision when it comes to how it displays (or doesn’t display) “failed” projects.

Oh please. If you're going to do a writeup like this, fucking own it. I'm so tired of someone putting out something that bears down on what can only be described as "shady" behavior, but then doesn't have the balls to call a spade a spade.

If Kickstarter is darkening the portions of their site that would undermine their product, that's shady. Plain and simple.
Ahah yeah. That's true.

All in all this is bad for the open web (both ways).

At least, there's no Facebook browser yet. But hey, it might happen as well.

They both want control over the net. Complete control. Client, servers, data.
For laughs go to piccsy.com and try to click any of the links in the footer (e.g. "About").

edit: They appear to have now disabled infinite scrolling.
Interesting. I develop C++ on windows, linux, and mac OS X, and I find visual studio better than any of the alternatives. Obviously visual studio only excells for those languages it has support for, but for those it is best.
Add to that a licensing fee payable to the treasury for commercial use of tax payer funded research, e.g., prescription drug patents.
Retired as meaning not working at all is not a universal definition. Most people in the financial independence circles define it as not having to work for a living. As long as you can choose whether or not to work, you can say you're retired.
Good point. Still, I argue that FB doesn't have any sort of ulterior motive with not showing a webkit-based browser or what-have-you.
Another reasons is that Congress, observing that patents and inventions are correlated, has made very effort to encourage patents so as to cause more inventions.
Findings, June 2012
Is there anything that says they were not warned in advance?
I think a lot of the CS push is coming from node users. They can make use of it full stack.
Apple has innovated not just in hardware and software, but also in supply channel management, and the latter was definitely Tim Cook's doing.

If you compare the Jobs 2.0 Apple to the 1990s Apple, improved operational execution (supply channel management, demand forecasting, etc) made a huge impact on the bottom line.
Most of the browser vendors care about standards groups and are highly influenced by what they say. Certainly that's true for WebKit-based browsers, where I have some first-hand knowledge.

One dysfunction in this case is that the <picture> proposal was developed in a splinter group that didn't include browser vendor representatives and thus was somewhat disconnected from the larger conversation.

I will also add that both browser vendors and standards groups care more about people's use cases than their concrete syntax ideas, and ideally people making proposals should learn to think that way as well.
I don't sign petitions, because that type of feel-good inaction is one of the major problems in America today. Instead, I support the efforts of Carl Malamud at public.resource.org and am trying to figure out a way to crowdsource PACER. Admittedly, these efforts differ substantively from the petition's goal of 'liberating' publicly-funded research from the shackles of for-profit corporations, but many of the issues are analogous.

The most serious problem with PACER (which is the online docket system for federal courts) is that each 'page' costs the user $0.10, which precludes any meaningful search or analysis of data. I fear that if the government were to provide access to research articles and the like, they may institute similar measures to profit from the availability of this information. I realize that this is an unsubstantiated fear, but it's extremely important to consider how to implement such policies.

Remember, these publishers' very existence depends on profiting from access to journal articles. As such, they will literally fight to the death over this issue.
disable your extensions. It's working just fine in chrome for me.
I don't work at Kiip. :)
Congrats Wes on this Early Release milestone!

As a very early reader of some of Wes's first chapters, I'm eagerly awaiting the final product. It's some fine work, and Wes is not one to cut corners in his exposition or skim over important things to know.

I hope this book will advance recognition of a great set of standard tools that will make working with imperfect data as painless as possible, in a tech stack that is very amenable to 'productionization'.

Kudos, sir.
Miles per Gallon versus Liters per 100 Kilometers
On ONE stat site. On all others its 2 or 3.

It's certainly an important browser market share wise tho.
I think there needs to be some way to give companies an opportunity to recoup their investment in new ideas. I'm just not sure what we have now is working.
You clearly don't understand the significance of FRAND at all. And your last statement is pure and utter nonsense.

Please list an example.
Ah, the new generation of the "design contest."

Thanks, but no thanks. Hire better developers if you need your algorithm.
Dish’s “Auto-Hop” ad skipping device in legal showdown with TV networks