skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
on a related note, it feels like anything with a (YC S12) tag in the title gets an arbitrarily high number of upvotes (ViaCycle, for example, got like 40 upvotes in around 30 minutes.)

I don't mean to profane YC, but I seriously doubt an otherwise uninventive bikesharing company would get so much attention if it didn't have the S12 brand behind it.
Or users can be allowed to refund their apps
It seems to me that the kinds of applications they are trying to prevent from existing are precisely the ones that they could learn the most from and could provide them with the most new users.

I also don't see how this action actually wins them that many more eyes. Are there really that many third party Twitter apps out there?
Have you ever implemented GC or fibers? They can be pretty simple to implement, really.
Facebook could subvert that in an instant. Literally tomorrow, if they wanted to do so.
Tweets in a timeline, on the Twitter feed in the web client, all have the retweet/quote/reply/favourite actions per-tweet so I would expect that they mean each and every tweet displayed anywhere.
It certainly is time for an alternative, isn't it.
> Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies,

In New York, Swedish coffee (of all things) seems to be the up-and-coming thing:

http://www.fikanyc.com/about

http://www.konditorinyc.com/

No idea why. Scandinavia is exotic and hip these days, probably. Then again, a lot of new Swedish things are popping up, like Swedish pizza places (which, if you haven't had it, mostly revolves around unexpected toppings such as banana, cabbage and kebab meat).
If you are develop!ng for every s!ngle platform on th!s planet today, you are e!ther f!!ked or wa!t!ng to be f!!ked. Un!ted, developers!
Assuming you can't back in and out of wholesale ($275) versus retail (2.75%) pricing, it doesn't matter how volatile your earnings are - doing 0 for eleven months and x in month twelve is equivalent to doing x/12 for twelve months whether you pay 2.75% or $275 each month.
Advance VIM tips
> 3rd party apps means nothing to them as long as Bieber and Gaga are still on Twitter.

Truth.

> They use Twitter because they could get constant updates from Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.

Also true.

> The vast majority of Twitter users don't use Twitter because they like the 3rd party apps.

True again.

And entirely missing the point. New technologies are driven by early adopters. And Twitter is in the very unique position of having flipped a lever that alienates that precise population all at once.

So they'll move on to the next big thing, build up the network, and eventually Bieber will move over because it's actually not hard to build a better product than Twitter.

Their only insurance is network effects, and they've undermined that advantage by delivering the most perfect gift basket packed with early adopters to Dalton Caldwell.
It makes things harder for developers. But it doesn't affect end-user at all. Twitter already has eye balls, celebrity users. Average joe doesn't care if Twitter has 100k user cap for third party client. End-user experience is getting better day by day. Ask someone who is not tech savvy is on Twitter.
I am interested to know that people are starting bikesharing companies, for whatever that's worth.
"There's a sucker born every minute" -- usually attributed to P. T. Barnum. The people who got sucked into buying into this "Joyent ending ‘lifetime’ hosting accounts" hustle probably got the greatest bargain of their lives. I'll bet they were mostly young folks, ever chasing after that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (although some never quit). Hoping for endless service with no further incentive for the provider. What a priceless lesson at such a small cost! This company has actually taught one of life's great lessons for a truly paltry sum!

Anyway, here's what I do: I register my domains at nearlyfreespeech.net. They have a somewhat limited number of different TLDs available, and at about $9 per year, are not cheap (or "free"), but certainly not exorbitant. But their integrity is rock-solid. One time I let my domain expire for a couple weeks, an alarming circumstance. But they restored it for free after I simply payed the fee (this can only work for a limited time, of course). My old (and reliable) previous host and registrar would have charged me about $200 to get it back! So the $9 is like cheap insurance.

I use asmallorange.com as my host. They charge as little as $35 per YEAR, with $0.50 per GB per month for additional bandwidth. (Both of these hosts are "pay as you go.") So if I ever have a disagreement with my host, they cannot mess with my domain name! Also, my registrar uses FreeBSD servers, while my host uses Linux, and I don’t want to deal with FreeBSD (it’s probably more stable than Linux, but I know nothing about how to use it). The smallorange service (running on Linux) is chock-full of great features, including Cpanel. They have a feature inside their Cpanel that one-click installs things like WordPress, and I used it. But I chose a one-click install password that it allowed, but that the rest of Cpanel would not allow, and that lead to problems. But their customer service was right there for me, and they immediately cleared it up. Hope this doesn't sound spammy. The main point is, if you really want service, pay as you go is the way to get it. It worked great for me.
I could have written this same post almost exactly. started on Slackware, moved to Red Hat 5 then to Debian around when hamm (2.0) came out. Still have the bumper sticker I got from buying an official slink CD set. I even flirted around with helping a bit and thinking of becoming a DD but never went through with it.

I've always preferred Debian's package management over all others and was happy to see Ubuntu take the approach and try to take it to a wider audience.
How App.net Won't Change Anything
I have a feeling you might get quite a few upvotes, that made me chuckle.

I'm trying to imagine a society where this is in reverse and it's all the "jocks" who are into Linux and the nerds who watch sports. That would certainly be interesting.
> What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

As I said in the linked post: choosing not to use Facebook is currently a high-cost/impractical choice for many people. That means we're almost obliged to accept how they use our data.

You called Diaspora's original aims "a trivial problem". That sounds like the opposite of "important" to me.
The real question is whether HN and YC have outgrown each other yet - I don't think HN is going to scale to many more seasons of YC, it's become the next in line on slashdot / digg / reddit and I think that balance has already tipped the scales against people here out of a deep interest in YC.

And of course at the same time YC are huge now, there's probably 80+ startups in this batch and enough alumni a site like TC could be created that exclusively reports YC news.
@amirnathoo: Do i still get to keep my free plan? I registered during the free plan before this whole Reload.
Ask HN: Xcode 4 Instructions?
Does Xcode 4 have any documentation or instructions available? I've looked, but can only find tutorials for Xcode 3.
Maybe they just hate the crazed Bieber, Glee, and Twilight fans out there with over 20k tweets to their name like the rest of us. :)

It could suck for live-tweeting events, though.
I'm an Ubuntu user (though if I keep having to use Unity I don't know for how much longer). Where would Ubuntu be (except the vast Unity mistake crap bs which has nothing to do with Debian), Ubuntu (except for Unity) rocks! That means Debian must also rock, happy birthday Debian!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

The goal is to make it not worth the oppressor's effort to rip you off.
Honest question: could the wooden box license be intended to slow the transport of pests via wood? Moving firewood that hasn't been heat treated has been responsible for a lot of pest plagues in forests.
Techdirt and the value of the velvet rope approach to media
There are people here with much better scientific data to argue from, but my sense is that this is exactly the wrong strategy: the biggest hump is from "free" to "pay", and most points on the spectrum from 0.01 to "whatever a DVD movie costs" are similarly hard to sell at, all else being equal (market sabotage by people selling apps at 99 cents notwithstanding; don't build apps that will compete at 99 cents).
Thanks for the response.

Side question: what I'm seeing appears to be a wire frame model with flat shading of a model with very few vertices. I know nothing of the STL format. The only time I've dealt with it in the past was having an ME send me models of parts when doing circuit board design work. To get to the point, why on earth is it so large? 10MB is a lot of data for what I would assume would be some polygon vertex coordinates and some texture instructions(which should be minimal given this is flat shaded).
FYI: Flights are on-time if they are within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival. Arriving 16 minutes early is not an on-time flight.
Users will care then their favorite application no longer works.
> New technologies are driven by early adopters.

This is why you're missing the point.

Twitter isn't "new technology". It's not even a technology company. It is a way for people to get their celebrity fix.

Sure early adopters would move to whatever Dalton Caldwell is building. That's a non-event to 99.9% of Twitter users.

Followers of Lady Gaga don't care what new service Robert Scoble is jumping to.
My understanding is that it's the "cause", insofar as plaque buildup interferes with the normal operation of brain cells.

Of course, I am neither a neuroscientist nor a neurologist.
Uck.

Starbucks sucks.

If you're in New York or San Francisco it's true that Starbucks has chased away the independent coffee shop and you might think it's a good cup of coffee.

It ~was~ a good cup of coffee 15 years ago, but now every population center with 50,000 or so people has an espresso bar that puts Starbucks to shame.

The exception is a few big cities that Starbucks put up a store every half block or so, probably to make Wall Street investors think that every site from Cinncinnati to Omaha is stuffed with them.
Why?

I don't mean that to be condescending; I really just don't get it. All of the bikeshare programs to which I've been exposed are more expensive than a bike purchase by two years of membership, and none of them (ViaCycle included) seem to mitigate the biggest issue; bike parts are theft-prone.
Funny, I wish Jack's other company would say the same thing right now.
Facebook has been trying to so for ages with their "subscribe" button.
> Twitter isn't "new technology".

Its competition will be.

If the world worked the way you're describing, Yahoo would still be king, MySpace would reign supreme and and I'd be using a Blackberry.

In the short term, Twitter will be fine, of course you're right there. I'm not proposing an instantaneous timescale.

In five years, they're fucked.
I'm still reading the essay -- I had to stop and comment about the following paragraph:

"This results in folks that think adding more developers to a project at the beginning will allow them to hit an arbitrary date by spreading out the workload. Unfortunately new software doesn’t work this way, either, as the same exponential communication overhead occurs in the beginning, too. You merely end up with a giant mass of incoherent code. And you waste a lot of money employing people who don’t add much value, sitting on the bench waiting for their part of the project to begin."

These must be folks who stopped reading The Mythical Man-Month after chapter 2? I would think the following chapter about The Surgical Team would counter such thinking. Unless people are only taking away the lesson about the programmer productivity gap?
Hence Dalton Caldwell's "Audacious Proposal" and the birth of App.net.

https://join.app.net/
I guess twitter thinks it is big enough to stop worrying about pissing third party developers off. In the short term it probably won't hurt them much.
AngelList launches talent recruiting portal
If Sweden is capable of doing this (renditioning people for the US to torture) I'm pretty sure it's not going to have too much of a problem handing over Assange!
http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-b...
Now (because of their blind obeisance to the US) three countries ... the UK, Sweden and Australia have all made themselves look like pathetic US lap-dogs, in the eyes of any reasonably-minded person in the world.
I would say review systems and internet research negates most of the 'gamble' involved with most app purchases. But I guess most users are just mindless consumer zombies.

There are a few instances where you "wont know till ya try it yourself"... but they're few and far between with proper research.

I think it really speaks to the expectation of developers here that users are expected to "gamble" on app purchases without knowing whether the app is good or not by reading reviews, and general consensus. Thats a really exploitative purchasing pattern to expect from your users...

Not saying there arent plenty of dumb people to pray on, but... yea.. wow. A lot of app store developers here on HN just expect their users to be dumb ill informed "johns" to exploit for a dollar on a gamble... That really says something.
What's stopping you now?
It looks like Twitter won't be happy until the only Twitter developers are the ones that work at Twitter.
I have quite a few static sites on them right now (personal, friends and family). Looking for a reasonable host that won't cost a bunch. Any recommendations?
I see myself using Twitter a lot less if I had to use their mobile app, rather than a third-party one that doesn't suck (I use TweetBot exclusively).

Conversely, I use no third-party Facebook applications, unless you count FB Connect as a more than a SSO mechanism (i.e., I'm not actually using FB or its network benefits on any site/app using FBC).
Can you smell that? It's the smell of victory, the smell of Dalton Caldwell lighting a Cuban cigar in celebration of Twitter driving basically every single 3rd party developer over to App.net.
Just think to yourself, what would make them look like a freelancer/consultant/contractor. For example, they work from their own location (obviously the case in your situation), have their own pty ltd company, if they have other clients, they do marketing/advertising, they use their own equipment (even if you reimburse them, which is normal for consultants), don't pay benefits or superannuation etc. Obviously not all of these are feasible but the more the better. Most of these things have to be done by the contractor.

I think you will be fine, it certainly seems reasonable to contract with a local consultant rather than hire someone. I am definitely not an expert. Yes I would recommend some advice from a lawyer. I can give you the details of my Australian lawyer if you like, they are used to working with startups.
Remember the Great Twitter Strategy Document Leak of 2009?

http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-...

What happened to those plans? They seemed so smart...
I would agree. The Firefox/Iceweasel thing is probably the best example of this.[1] It seems silly on the surface (who cares right?) but Debian is very strict on the idea of freely redistributable software, even to minute levels other distros might not care about. The presence of debian-legal for so long is another testament to this fact (the mailing list archives go back to 1998). [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...

[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/
That's a very misleading title.
Go Go Gadget, Go in production at Bitly
Messages for Mac: From Beta to Primetime
Situation in Apple App Store is actually much better then selling it via web. You could actually convince some people to buy your app for $1.

Convincing people to pay for anything on the web is much much harder. A know few real-estate agents which have all their data in Dropbox but they don't want to pay for Dropbox storage and constantly terrorise colleges with Dropbox invitations so they can get some more storage. Go figure.
> Jobs only to a small niche.

This is what annoys me the most, especially if it's a 'stealth' idea or it's a YC company that posts once a month instead of using the "Who's Hiring?" thread.
The blockchain servers are what I'd call future banks. Hopefully in the future they would create 'unused output trees' periodically that clients would download and verify the validity by asking multiple independent banks.
Stop the text overflow madness.
I'd say feel free to replace "Starbucks" with any other purveyor of a product you enjoy at around this price point.

When I say craftsmanship what I'm really referring to is the overall brand that Starbucks (or other coffee shops) have built. A brand that says "what you get here will meet your expectations".
Never write another vendor prefix again: All about -prefix-free
On the other hand, if people all made such rational comparisons about marginal utility, not many people would be paying $100/month for TV channels that only allow them to watch certain shows at certain times and are full of interruption based advertising and not many people would be flushing $15 down the drain to go see a 90 minute movie instead of buying a month's membership to World of Warcraft and getting tens or even 100+ hours of enjoyment out of it.

The thing is that some people want what they want and they don't care about the long term investment angle. So they're willing spend $8 on a beer at a bar instead of having something healthier and cheaper like water. A lot of those same people won't spend $8 in a year on apps, no matter how rational a case the author might make. In general, food, alcohol, caffeine and cigarettes are more effective than software for generating these kinds of poorly-planned impulse buys (though a lot of Chinese gaming companies have been doing well with free-to-play games and micro-purchases for the past 6 years or so).

In retrospect, I think I've only bought three apps in my nearly 4 years of having an iPod touch, one of which cost 99 dollars. It's a heck of an app, though, and has been in development for longer than the iTunes store has existed.
Well that's where I originally looked. The commenter mentioned the composing experience, but I didn't find any details. If you coud point me to a UI demo or info, I'd appreciate it. I must be missing something. Thanks.
> Its competition will be.

Good luck trying to compete on technology when the users don't care about technology

> If the world worked the way you're describing, Yahoo would still be king, MySpace would reign supreme and and I'd be using a Blackberry.

...and Craigslist would still be king in local marketplace.

Oh wait, Craigslist IS still king in local marketplace. What happened to all those CL competitors who touted their superior technologies and APIs?

That's right, they all failed because the users don't care about the technologies and the APIs.
Excuse my ignorance, but what made square look bad? I was expecting something, uhh, embarrassing, and found... A twitter feed?
> Managing multiple accounts already seems to deviate from that qualifier.

I wonder what would happen if Twitter built this capability into their own app.

Or, if they just said "yeah, well, fuck you."
Would the last Twitter developer out please turn off the lights when you leave.

Lol this is the beginning of the end for twitter and third party developers. Ever since MyTwitterButler received its first cease and desist it has been a game of footsies with third party developers but with these new rules why would you bother.
Whether through politics, skill, or home ground advantage, the Scandinavians have been doing all right in the World Barista Championships.

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

So they can at least make a decent cup.
Wow, these boxes are tiny. A Packstation is about 3 to 6 times as big.
How would you feel if Google announced that you could only access their services using Chrome? What does it take to activate the antitrust lawyers?
It might work for you but it's a horrible way to manage people in general.

Motivation by arbitrary imposed deadline is a standard dev nightmare isn't it? I've watched two companies destroy themselves with this tactic.

Personal motivation and goal setting and even team based motivation and goal setting is important, sure, but you better have other motivation techniques ready when your "hard deadline with almost no regard for difficulty" gets completely missed and the team is depressed and bitter about missing it even after all the effort that was put in.

Also, your team isn't stupid (hopefully). So when they bust their asses to hit that deadline and the next day nothing happens, because it was arbitrary, they learn not to listen to your deadlines.
'Real people' use the Internet, and you spend almost as much time online as you do in the "real world." You're right - not everyone will use this or need this, but it's our way of making the Internet - the place we now spend so much time - a better place, in a different way.
Twitter is making it very unappealing to build on their platform, since developers have to effectively give up a large chunk of autonomy and trust that Twitter's business model won't change again, and that Twitter won't suddenly start competing with them. And anyone who's paying attention knows that that's exactly what Twitter will do, since they don't have a clear, believable business model, and they've done it(destroyed their 'developers') before.
Paul, have you considered making a formal staggered launch schedule? All of them launching at the same time makes every launch that much less remarkable.
I agree. I wish I could unsubscribe from the job postings.
I'd feel pretty shitty if Microsoft said I could only access Windows Update using Internet Explorer.
> I wonder what would happen if Twitter built this capability into their own app.

This is built in to the official iPhone Twitter app.
The big reason the cup of coffee vs app analogy doesn't hold is that my iPhone really only has space for about 30 apps.

I'm a big music/podcast listener so I only afford enough space for about 30 apps. For a $0.99 app to be useful it has to has to beat out apps like Shazam, kindle book reader, bloomberg anywhere, evernote, etc.

The likely hood of an app at any price doing this is pretty low.

For me this is why the analogy doesn't hold. Price has nothing to do with it.
Interesting. Would you be willing to have a short chat? I am working on something similar. Email in my profile.
You took the words out of me.

Even if there are no external customers waiting for the release, a business' other departments have to plan their activities. When will marketing start their pre-release activities without engineering's estimates? When will sales start talking to customers about the new release? There is just too many things that need engineering's estimates.
On the one hand, assembly developers are just assembler end users. If you don't directly manipulate the silicon, you're only a plumber.

On the other hand, ifttt and excel are both programs for crunching information, same as a compiler. They're not as powerful or expressive, but that's no more of a constraint than a limited kitchen is to an enterprising chef. Just because you don't use the same tools they had in the past doesn't make you a poser.

Programmers make machines out of logic. You can tackle hard problems or easy problems at any level of abstraction. Whether you're good or bad doesn't depend on what tools you use, but what you create.
I'm working on something similar and we are looking for an Android dev to lead the Android implementation. Would you be interested in having a brief phone call? My contact info is in my profile.