skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This.
All social networks right now have the same problem, they don't know how to make money without scaring the user away.

They all have far too much advertisement / costs.
They all are afraid of becoming an app, which they are by design, due to providing only one service (a portal works by providing access to all services, it's the game facebook tries to get into).

I, for one, am looking forward to the solution to the advertisement crisis, to what's after "annoying your clients to make a few cents".
Sounds like what you are after is buddycloud (https://beta.buddycloud.org), lets list its win points:

- open-source
- open-standards
- free
- federated

Keep your own data, talk with whoever you wish.

Built on XMPP and actively contributed to by a great group of developers (admission: I am on of these developers).

When you join up you can find me at lloyd@evilprofessor.co.uk
Hmm, getting me to buy a mobile app for $1 is really hard. I consider most of them time wasting toys.

On the other hand I'm perfectly happy to pay $15/month for a useful web service.

And on the desktop I have no problem with paying $50+ for serious software.

I guess mobile has (to me at least) that shovel ware image.
> Twitter aren't stupid

Twitter is run by people, and sometimes people make decisions which are, either at the time or in hindsight, stupid. The argument that companies won't do something because it will damage them has been proved wrong so many times in the past.

I'm not saying that this particular decision is stupid, but the idea that companies always act in some kind of enlightened self-interest make the right decisions to do so is just plain wrong.
I don't really get the reaction here, and in general it feels like something of a mouth foaming rant rather than any reasonable discussion:

>In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking”

Some people believe those terms are bullshit, others less so. This argument looks more like shit slinging than anything else.

> So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, that’s OK.

Agreed, it is. Whilst correct, this doesn't prove a lot. I don't think the author is trying to claim they are allowed because they are 'vainglorious masturbatory nonsense', just pointing out that they are. If things you don't agree with can still exist after a new rule is enacted it doesn't make that rule wrong. If only things you don't like can exist because of that rule then maybe it's time to start worrying.

> But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good.

I took a look at these. I'd personally disagree that they are useful or fun. Just my opinion.

> And don’t even get me started on Twitter turning against client apps. For chrissake Twitter’s own app started life as a third-party client.

And this means they should allow third-party clients forever? At a point in their development they obviously weren't putting as much effort into client apps as third-party developers. They decided to focus on that, made some purchases and now are focussing on it. This is part of the risk for third-party developers on any platform, a point which has been made here a number of times.
[...] largest source of crap [...]
there, fixed it for you
There is also a sort of price inversion principle going on with software that doesn't happen with physical products.

Say I make great coffee, I get the beans myself, I ship them by sailboat from Indonesia, and do everything by hand. People would expect to pay a lot of money for coffee like that, more than at Starbucks.

Say I make great software, I have the best designers, work for weeks on user interface details, and make a great web site to go with it. Quite apart from the general expectation that my software should be cheap, or free, there is a logical conclusion that if my software is so great I must be selling millions of copies, and at $10 a copy I'm charging way to much. If I'm selling millions of copies I should be able to price at a volume level. In economic terms my marginal costs are near zero, and if the app is so great that it is selling well then my fixed costs should be divided by a very large number.

So for physical goods, the better the product, the more you can charge. For software the opposite is often true.

At the other end of the spectrum there is software that is not expected to sell in huge volumes, and for educated purchasers they understand that these apps cost more. Probably most apps in the app store that are priced over $20 are in this category. Apple does a really bad job of supporting these apps though, theres no mechanism for trying before you buy, so the risk factor is large. If you are in a market that is well connected though, then this risk is lowered by word of mouth feedback. If your market is not well connected then you have a problem convincing users of your value.

We were in the top paid iPad apps category briefly with an app that was priced at $49, but our market for that app is small. We choose that prices based on an estimate of selling only hundreds of copies, to a user base that had already paid thousands of dollars for the required hardware for the app. We were competing against a $3 app at that time, but our assumption was that price would not be a large deciding factor for our user base, and we were right. We could invest more in the product because our price was realistic (I think) whereas our competitors had very little money to reinvest. They had to sell 15 times the volume to make the same revenue, in a small market, and that didn't happen.

Actually, what happened for the most part was that customers bought both apps. We got $35.00 from each customer and our competitor got $2.50. Once the purchase was made the price was mostly forgotten, it was the reliability and features that mattered from then on. If you do have a high priced app you'd better make sure that it works well.
People who I assume know much better what they are talking about (space agencies, scientists) have already commented on these wild space mining fantasy you are referring about. It's a ridiculous idea that is nowhere near technical or economical viability, and there really is no horizon on which it will be. To mine asteroids you would first have to build a permanent moon base, and drive down the costs of space missions down to the point that a single payload brought to earth would be worth more than the required investments.

Just because some nutters invest their excess money in some sci-fi fantasy doesn't make it real.
enterprise clients was one of the things in the 'good quadrants'. I'd assume hootsuite may well fit that description.
They get heat from the other side too, because of the non-free repository.
This is fraud, no contest. The real question is what's the best way to deal with it. 1. Social pressure to re-instate equivalent service (1.5gb for me) 2. numerous small claims court applications (full refund + migration costs/damages) 3. Class action (similar to above).

To make any of them work to full effect, we'd probably have to band together? Any argument as to which method is preferred? CCT
Cloud Computing Company Joyent Leaves Early Supporters Out In The Cold
> market sabotage by people selling apps at 99 cents

The real sabotage comes from Apple who are encouraging 99c ents applications. It fits well in their strategy to commoditize software so their hardware becomes more appealing.

The problem is that this strategy works: For every "homeless" developer who gives up there are waiting 10 in line to flood the market with their 99 cent apps.
Does anyone know if Chrome are planning to follow suit?
Surely, all alleged rapists get this attention by British police
https://buddycloud.org and https://buddycloud.org/wiki/Buddycloud_HTTP_API to get started.

Or jump into the https://beta.buddycloud.org/team@topics.buddycloud.org to ask any questions about dev issues.
Do you actually think this comment is intelligent or otherwise improves the discussion others are having about this topic? For one, I am pretty much completely lost in terms of what this article is saying, and inane commentary does not help in the process of understanding.
"grok" thing? It's in the OED
Do you know who the investors in Branch are? :-)
LOL - This is true in non recession times also...

It is also not because of the degree - It is because these individuals have a stronger work ethic and 'try harder' to succeed in life.
Well I think they would if you actually tried, but anyway, this is going nowhere. I was just making the point that gold has always had value, and has outlived every form of currency that has ever existed, and will continue to do so, just because there are no real alternatives for it.
You do realize that the git-* binaries by default hardlink to the "git" binary, right? Git is built as a single binary, and uses the program name to pick the right command.

My half-done AROS port of git (which admittedly does exclude some stuff) currently stands at 1.8MB, with the only external dependency so far being the C library. But the "git" binary has 104 links.

EDIT: Slight correction: There are certainly a number of additional binaries, e.g. for things like "git-instaweb", but the core functionality is held in the main "git" binary.
git is built as a multi-call binary. I wonder if he's perhaps not realizing that all those other "git-*" binaries are hard linked to "git". Depending on which boxes I check on, my git binary has in the region of 80-110 or so hard links (EDIT: admittedly not a statically linked version, but none of it dependencies are big enough that it should add up to anywhere remotely near 230MB)
I didn't know the Manifesto, but the Debian Social Contract[1] was definitively an important part in my choice to use Debian on all my systems.

[1]: http://www.debian.org/social_contract
Joyent ending “Lifetime” hosting accounts
New Market Research Report Published on Portable Vegetable Garden Kit
Coyote Tracks - TextDrive, R.I.P.
The only wrong thing about your post is your complain about getting downvoted.

Have an upvote anyway.
So as an investor, you'd prefer that the company you invested in continued offering a loss-making service until they went into bankruptcy? Rather than allowing them to just shut it down and concentrate on more sustainable business offerings?

That strikes me as the kind of investor a company wouldn't want.

Great, you bootstrapped a company, and they used those funds to grow. And in return all you got was a shared hosting account that's lasted about 8 years. You should have gone with the options - that's where the real money for investors comes from.

And VCs know the vast majority of startups fail. Some spectacularly fail or succeed, some run out of funds, some pivot, some change direction, and some just grow into sustainable businesses. This is one of the latter.

Blame both founders for their lack of vision - in not seeing shared-hosting as a dead-end business model, which was clearly evident round abou 2006. But don't blame the business for making the right decision to close down a non-performing service.
All CEOs Should Be An Outside Director For One Company
80+ team in this batch alone,more from the previous batches as well.News about YC companies and job postings in a seperate page would be awesome on Hackernews something like xxx.ycombinator.com.A seperate page for YC startups to share their news and job postings. Should be easy for everyone to take note on whats happening in the YC family :)
The two are not mutually exclusive. It is infrastructure, but it's also subject to network effects.
"This -- as much as it is security-through-obscurity -- is actually a great temporary fix."

I don't understand how the Torx screw and cover solution is security through obscurity. They're being very open about it. It may be a weak solution, but it's not being hidden.
Nice editorializing.

But yes: I would expect the Met Police to not let off someone they want to arrest just because they're hiding in an embassy, and further to sanction that embassy if they let a non-diplomatic person take refuge there.

Presumably you have not the slightest whiff of evidence to prove otherwise.
Couldn't Twitter just arrange a price for "business" usage of their API? The main people getting affected by this are other clients or other intensive uses of their API, but those very people are most probably trying to make a profit themselves (HootSuite for example) so why not just charge for the API and so leave the restricted API for free use. Or am I missing the point?
I was all ready to say "What the hell are people still talking about 3D web browsers for?", but that's actually kind of neat.
"Use cases ... it looks awesome". Heh.
Perhaps its just the accredited investor limits then? $1MM in assets (less primary residence) or $200k per year in individual income... I know lots of savvy investors below those caps.[1] Why should they be denied access to investment vehicles where they (arguably) know as much as incumbents?

My suggestion: treat it like options trading. At many brokerages, getting options enabled (esp. uncovered options) requires proof of investment acumen and specific forms to be filled out. Can you seriously make the case that small-scale angel investing is more risky that options investing?

[1] Many of them chose to work at lower-paying positions (eg. startups or research-type positions), or just in relatively lower-earning areas (aka, the MidWest).
A short video clip would probably go viral on YouTube
Fair enough, I could've used a better phrase here. I just wanted to drill in the fact that it doesn't help the underlying issues.
Hi,

I am on the other side of the ODesk. I am a fairly good coder with 7+ years of experience under my belt. I have worked mostly on enterprise side of coding. So I dont have much to show to the clients.

Hence clients dont give me projects. In my regular day to day job, I communicate with the folks on the other side of the planet.

I am not able to resolve this problem and hence stopped visiting odesk.
Correct, I don't get it. You bought into a vision that clearly makes no sense today, but didn't make much sense back in 2004. The reward for that investment was a shared-hosting account, which has kept running for 8 years.

There seems to be a confusion about whether you lifers have paid up-front for a long term shared-hosting account or whether you are investors into the business. If you are investors, you should probably have taken options, rather than a free shared-hosting account.

"Imagine what will happen if in a few years Dalton decides to stick ads all over App.net and send threatening letters to developers in the name of "curating the user experience". That's where the righteous indignation is coming from."

Then I don't renew my $100 a year developer account and walk away. I'm not investing in the company, I'm paying for a service that's on offer. When I'm not happy with the service I decide to no longer spend any more money there.
YC probably prefers they help you with the process vs you doing it yourself. The problem is most people do it incorrectly and shoot themselves in the foot. Not to mention it can be a costly thing to fix. If you must do it, as PG says, do it properly. I recommend finding an attorney who is familiar with startups to do it right. Some attorneys can mess you up to.
I could use a lightweigt and fast perl version of SED. There are incompatibilities between sed versions, especially between linux and mac. Therefor a small sed utility that you can ship with every release would be useful.
Suspicious death of Black sophomore in San Jose State frat house
Wow. This all seems very micro-manager-y.

Now I'm curious how Twitter will respond: some open souce developers are working on integrating Twitter posts to buddycloud. That means Tweets will be displayed in a buddycloud channel. How exactly does twitter expect someone running a twitter-buddycloud gateway on their domain. Additionally buddycloud channels (containing tweets) can be displayed in a text client ala https://github.com/Schnouki/bccc#screenshot Are we expected to <blockquote> our VTs? :)
"This content covers features introduced in Firefox 11"

We're now on Firefox 14. It's reasonably old.
> Why not build a replacement "API"?

Because what you're suggesting is entirely illegal, and playing with Twitter is not worth going to court and bankrupting yourself over.

It's not just civil either. Remember the woman that made a fake MySpace profile to instigate a girl to commit suicide? She was successfully convicted under the federal computer crimes laws; once you violate a site's terms, your use becomes unauthorized access to a computer system.
It's been around as an addon for a while, I think it was put into FF at version 11 (March 2012). I really think it should have remained as an extension, it looks neat but is pretty useless.
First thing that came to my mind was someone has too much time on their hands...
> I am from the south where is it tradition to give a person their first firearm on their 10th birthday

How's that working out for yah?

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

Yay dead people! You don't give unsophisticated people access to firearms - they get dead. Same with most investment options - do not allow people to trade derivatives, over lever their houses or borrow for stocks.

> believe that it is okay given the terrible odds?

No I don't - but its regulated and small stable losses in comparison to unsophisticated losses that destroy lives in housing, equities and bonds. This will expand those losses.

> how are the poor ever going to escape poverty?

Have you ever been poor?

Here is how you escape poverty - you don't. I'm not kidding.

There is no such thing as social mobility - it's false to argue that the poor can in any way benefit from this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...
Authorize this app to:
* See who you follow, and follow new people.
* Update your profile.
* Post Tweets for you.

No thank you.
Well then. If Dalton stated it, I'm sure it'll stay that way forever and he'll never change his mind. Let's give him money!
HD Mars curiosity landing
i use something similar for WPF called Snoop. these types of things are also useful when you're trying to see the complexity or optimize the nesting levels of your controls.
Report about the Asus Transformer Pad
That's why RMS always said that charging for the
act of software development is right. But charging
for copies of the same stuff (and not providing its
source) is not.

While I understand the rationale behind this statement, it never felt right.

When designing a new car, a lot of money goes into research and development, money that cannot be recovered (sunken costs). However, once that's over and the assembly line is put together, the cost of creating new copies (while never zero) it definitely converges to the cost of the raw materials involved. The more items the assembly line produces, the cheaper it gets. And when buying a car, you're paying a lot more than that, because you're in fact buying a brand, not just some pieces of metal put together.

I also disagree on a car being "open-source". Assuming you can make copies of your car and give those to other people, you'll be obliterated by trademark, copyright and patent lawsuits. Also many car manufacturers are voiding your warranty if you go to unauthorized car repair shops. And if you can look under the hood, that's only because of strong consumer protectionism laws.

Apple has more than 50% profit margins on iPhones. Is that moral? Well, they need to earn a profit (otherwise they wouldn't be in this business) and they also need to pay the research and development costs for newer versions or for other products. And after all, this is capitalism - if you don't like it, buy from somebody else.

So why can't this rationale also work for pure software? After all, the developer needs the profit to develop newer versions, improvements or other applications from which you may also benefit. And again, this is capitalism. If you don't like it, search for something cheaper, or create your own.

RMS's principle (being paid only for creation of software, not for delivery of copies) does not work because it doesn't scale. You cannot put together an assembly line for software, like you can for physical products. This effectively means that you end up selling your time, which makes a good living, but it won't make you rich and it won't allow you to work on lots of silly things that may or may not pay off.

Also, only simple apps can be cloned easily. No software can currently match Adobe Photoshop, which still deserves every penny, and it wasn't for a lack of trying. I use Gimp because the price of Photoshop is too high for my amateurish needs, but I would shell out the cash for Photoshop in a heartbeat if I would be a professional photographer or designer.

The $.99 price tags is common just because the app stores are filled with crap, with most apps not even deserving $.99 - but create an app that enriches people's lives and even allows them to make some money, and you'll have no problem selling it for $90 or even $900.
But it was. Back then, you had "online services" - Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie, and AOL. And for the most part, users on one of those services could only mail other users on the same service.

Email and the Internet won because the sector was competitive enough that no one service had enough market clout to not offer e-mail. Once some people got e-mail accounts, other people wanted to e-mail them, and threatened to move off the services that didn't support it in favor of services that did. That scared the online services, so rather than lose, they all started offering e-mail themselves, until they lost anyway.

If you want open social-networking platforms, the solution is to make the market competitive enough that no company can afford not to be open. Usually that'd involve choosing to use the smaller players until they're big enough that no one company is gigantic.
Both demos are the same for me. Chrome, Windows 7 64bit.
Agreed, when I first landed on the page first thing I thought was "why don't they just let you enter an @name?". Avoiding this service like the plague, seems like total oauth malware.
How to stay updated as a developer
We founded a new Tech and Lifstyle Blog. Please Visit and maybe Follow us :)
Exactly, developers seem to flock to platforms like Apple, Facebook and Twitter based on the fact that they have a large and growing user base without giving thought to this issue of commoditization of complements and how it ultimately destroy the business or livelihood of these developers.

Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but when spread out or divided among the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. You won't hear Apple give you the breakdown as that will expose them and destroy the wrong picture they want to paint to developers. Neither will they tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut, off your work and yet countless app developers are not making enough to live on.

They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lo...

http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-fail...

I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without making your business model entirely dependent on them and that is the way to go.

Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...