skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few corrections.

Dreamhost isn't and wasn't ever cPanel. It got hot back in '01 / '02. The outages in 2004 weren't lengthy, were mostly DoS and got blown way out of proportion by people who thought $10/month was a kingly sum that entitled them to dedicated-server quality. The quality of Dreamhost's shared hosting hasn't really diminished over the years and it's still perfectly adequate for low traffic PHP or even Rails sites.

TextDrive by contrast was founded on the principle of combatting the race to the bottom by charging a fair price and offering unparalleled power and flexibility. This vision was sold to us by Dean Allen who had an enormously positive reputation as one of the very best early bloggers. Funding TextDrive with these lifetime accounts was not just us chumps buying into some bottom-feeders marketing scam. There was real intention and integrity behind this.

The problem was that they couldn't actually deliver this quality service despite charging a lot more for it. I mean there was flexibility (webmin instead of cpanel, etc), and TextDrive was the first shared host supporting Ruby on Rails (in fact it was the "official" rails host for a while), and they were always working on awesome new tech (huge Solaris boxes, ZFS, bla bla bla). But in the end, Jason Hoffman did not know how to build a stable hosting service.

Eventually after the Joyent acquisition/merger I think they figured out how to run a business, but it was our money that allowed them the time to learn how to do that. The actual experience of hosting with TextDrive was always shit, and it never cease to amaze me how many hours Jason Hoffman spent posting in the forums when there was obviously a lot of urgent work that needed to be done.

At some point in the early history, Dean Allen went dark and largely disappeared from public view. You'll notice that now Jason Hoffman is the Founder and there's no mention of Dean Allen, but if I recall, it was definitely a partnership, with Dean bringing the name recognition and web experience, and Jason providing the system architecture (business/technical co-founders if you will). I don't have any inside information about what happened there, but I do know that Jason Hoffman and Joyent burnt their bridge with me and I'll never trust anything they do.

If there's a class action lawsuit I'm in.
Horrifying.

The point about the coffee cup comparison isn't that cups of coffee are the benchmark experience for product pricing; if that were the case, my next root canal would cost $0.20.

The point of the coffee cup comparison is marginal utility: the money you spend on an expensive cup of coffee almost certainly has very little utility at the margin, because you are happy to chuck it away for a bad cup of coffee.

Oh, you really like Starbucks coffee? That's unfortunate, because it's pretty bad, but more importantly: you militantly miss the point of the comparison when you benchmark the experience of installing a new app against the enjoyment you get from a cup of coffee.

This place has an enormous problem with pricing and economics. Unlike Patrick, who really does sweat the fact that developers are making small fractions of their overall worth due to underpricing their offerings, I should be overjoyed at the fact that the biggest collection of new software entrepreneurs on the Internet hangs out at a meme generation engine for exploitable market inefficiencies. But unfortunately, I'm an obnoxious nerd, so all I can think to do about this is yell. ARGH.

A dollar at the margin for a person with a $600 phone on a $50/mo data contract is not an enormous gamble. It is a pittance too trivial for that person to even contextualize. The problem isn't that people are unwilling to give up $1 for apps; it's that they're hesitant to give up $0.25 for anything online. When you start with the understanding that there's huge impedance at "anything above free", it's clear why "$1" is not a particularly great price point, and why "better strategies to motivate people to part with $1" is a terrible meme to propagate.
How does this apply in an agency context? I would like to see if this can be applied to my company, but I am a little fuzzy on how this theory can work with paying customers who want to get an idea of cost up front.
The important part:

Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.

We will not be shutting down client applications that use those endpoints and are currently over those token limits. If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.

So Tweetbot et al will work until they have twice as many users as today. And then what? Surely Twitter won't give them permission to continue after that, given that the entire point of this update was to get rid of 3rd-party clients.

To be fair, they've made the restrictions pretty liberal for the long tail of applications. But this still rubs me the wrong way.

I actually use and love the official Twitter iPhone app. But I don't want to live in a world where 3rd-party apps, which often introduce and popularize new features, cease to exist.
No More Internet
The failure of that model are the apps which provide only short-term functionality. e.g., I'll probably only need my offline map of Brussels or that puzzle game for a few days. But my being through with them within 96 hours doesn't mean I'm entitled for a refund-- in fact, they probably served their purpose! Such a refund model would rob developers of that niche.
I added a pointers to pointers section. :)
Really? 6 month from turning it on to disabling 1.0 is really not that long a time at all. In that time, every client needs to migrate to 1.1 and QA that, and then all the distribution channels (distros, app stores, etc.) all need to get updated versions, and then users all need to upgrade. 6 months is extremely optimistic for that to all happen.
Dolphin Browser Beta Passes Ringmark’s Ring 1
You're the one who seems to still be incapable of understanding what I'm saying. I don't deny that discrimination has occurred in US. I never have.

The difference is that significant steps have been taken to combat discrimination in America, whereas there is a general apathy towards that in India (and most of the developing world). Trying to equate the two is completely nonsensical, as is trying to equate the level of poverty in America, even on a reservation, with that in India.

> having lived in India and the US for equal parts of my life, I see the same patterns.

As an Indian who has managed to make it to America, I don't think you're in any place to comment on what life is like for poor Indians, particularly those facing endemic caste-based discrimination. Their experiences are completely foreign to you, just as I wouldn't claim that I understand what African Americans or Native Americans go through.
Yep, newhouseb is right -- it's Solarized. It came with Octopress, which I'm using for this blog. If it's useful at all, the blog source is on github: https://github.com/ratchetio/blog
See also the Jaipur Foot, a $35 prosthetic leg used by hundreds of thousands of people:

http://www.jaipurfoot.org/03_Technology_history.asp
Worked fine for me on iPad Safari.
Are these numbers truly non-negotiable? If that's the case, what's the incentive for a company like Costco to have exclusivity with American Express (who normally charges a higher than average fee)?

I've always assumed (maybe erroneously) that Costco received a lower processing fee in exchange for the exclusivity which pushes more transactions.
Kickstarted? Now What?
There are a few more stumbling blocks to purchase as well:

- What of my billing information / what billing hassles am I opening myself up for? Considering that app purchases are frequently tied to both credit cards and your comms/telco vendor (and often other integrated services), you're putting a lot at risk.

- What respect (or lack) does this app have for my privacy? I'm very conscious of what closed-source resources I use, and even the fact that every time I'm inputting a PIN on a purchase screen (rarely, preferring cash) I'm opening myself to identity theft / fraud risk.

- What effect is this app going to have on my device stability/integrity? Again, phones, tablets, and laptops are complex devices with extensive user state. Losing this is a real PITA.

- What learning investment must I make for this tool? Will it be worth it?

Coffee, or food, or other concrete, discrete, simple, tangible goods offer a vastly simpler experience and generally (food poisoning aside) pretty minimal downside risk potential.

To throw in a contrasting physical-goods analogy: I'm adverse to trying out new wines. Why?

- I'm very aware that much of the perceived difference in wines is highly subjective, and largely market-driven.

- I don't get all that much from the experience myself. Really, Two Buck Chuck is pretty decent, though there are a few others I occasionally buy.

- The unit-cost is relatively expensive compared with alternatives (forgoing consumption, cheaper sufficing alternatives) -- $15-$25 for a moderately priced bottle, and up into the tens or hundreds if you like.

- Option overload. Too many brands and varieties, far more than I can keep track of. Even if I find something I like, odds are I'm not going to remember what it was next time I'm shopping (not just conjecture, this happens routinely).

- And a bad choice can be ... if not toxic, just really unappealing.

Upshot: I'm not swayed by the hype, I'm risk averse, the good is expensive for the utility provided. I purchase rarely, and conservatively when I do so.

I viewed the one-off small app market for PCs as pretty limiting, in the 1990s and 2000s. I see the market for PDA / mobile apps as similarly limiting.

On the computer side, Free Software utilities and a modicum of scripting / application engineering provide me with virtually all of my needs. In large part because the FS utilities aren't silos, but (often) nodes on a processing pipeline. The extensibility tools aren't yet present on mobile, though Free Software is beginning to make inroads.

While I don't think it will eliminate the paid app market, and for a large portion of the population may not (as was the case with the PC market), I suspect FS will supplant a fairly large share of paid-app opportunities. Perhaps moreso than in the PC market of the past couple of decades as FS has garnered far wider acceptance (it was freaky even in the late 1990s, it's mainstream today).

Edit: wine analog.
Twitter sets max user caps for 3rd party clients and limits rates
I've been downvoted, so could someone set me straight on the etiquette for pointing out errors here please?

The original article gives only a Twitter account for contact info, the submitter of this HN post is the same as the author of the original piece, and my comment above is 251 characters.
This is the best article on software I've ever read.
The flip side of lie-based estimation is arbitrary deadlines.

I'm not the first to notice that work expands to fill the time allotted. There can be real value in setting a hard deadline with almost no regard for difficulty. This eliminates the 'process' overhead and often produces amazing amounts of work in a shorter period of time than anyone would have estimated. I really like working to deadlines because my motivation is inversely correlated to the time till deadline.
Actual reddit IAmA: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ybmmh/we_are_engineers...
You don't get it. TextDrive was founded and sold on a vision.

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.
Ya I dripped a little tear.
Have we really gotten to the point where we can assume readers on HN are annoyed by hearing about new company launches? It's sad that this warrants an apology.
If I try a new restaurant and they don't bring my food to the table, I walk out without paying. If the food is horrible, I can send it back. If I pay the bill, I'm acknowledging that I got something of value. I may not decide to go back, but at least I'm not hungry any more. The same applies to your other examples. If the projector malfunctions when I'm watching a movie in a theatre, I get a coupon to come back another day.

With the app store, there's no recourse. I bought several apps that didn't work. It's not that they weren't as good as I expected, not that they crash occasionally. I wasn't disappointed. I was SOL, having received no value for my money. Sure, it was only couple of bucks, but I hate being a sucker.

If the app store would let me delete an app in the first 24 hours for a full refund, I'd buy a lot more apps.
Twitter Plans to Choke Access to Apps It Doesn’t Approve
Is it just me, or is it kind of odd that he titles and begins the post with a plea to "Stop Using the Cup of Coffee vs $0.99 Cent App Analogy" but then proceeds to totally use Starbucks as an shining example for how to run your app business (and at the end he even says "Just do what Starbucks does") ? By the end he's promulgating that people should adhere to the analogy by taking lessons from Starbucks.

Maybe I'm being pedantic but this seems like a contradiction.
Looks like Jason Hoffman has stepped into the forums to explain the reasoning behind their decision and do some damage control:

http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955

They probably should have done that on the original letter.
You're taking "Starbucks" too literally. Consider any tangible branded good, even if it's your local corner florist or a gas station.

Tangible goods are largely non-free. The alternative to a cafe beverage is either one from a competing establishment, or one you make yourself (I'm considering water and coffee to not be directly competitive, YMMV, I don't drink decaf).

I think you're understating the gambles involved in technology products. Or maybe I'm just overly risk-averse.
It's just using regular gzip. I'm sure I could do more work to further compress the files, but for the time being, I just wanted to get something out to show people, rather than optimize prematurely. :)
We all know it's not sentient, but for some reason it still hurts to read. Spike Jonze's IKEA commercial played on the exact same human tendency:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg
I love to see them, but it is hard to keep up with so many.
This removes their duality of being a media / service play. This is highly beneficial to Twitter itself as well as to a new service/platform aiming to be a pure microblogging piping service. The only loser here are the Twitter app developers and startups which are faced with a now limited channel to promote their apps.
I think if I understand memory addresses and assembly language, then I understand pointers. If the guide doesn't explain why pointers are useful and efficient on real hardware, then it's missing the point. Which was my point.
Debian was my third distribution (after Slackware and a short stint on Redhat). I started using it on the recommendation of some more experienced students in college, around 2001(?).

I've stayed with Debian ever since. In the beginning it was (of course) for the automatic package dependancy resolution and retrieval.

Over a decade+ of use, I've never understood people who made fun of Debian for being deprecated by the time it came out. I always used sid/unstable to get the latest-and-greatest on my desktops and put up with the occasional breakage (maybe 2 or 3 times in over a decade), and used the rock-solid stable on my servers.

I've also always been impressed by the work and dedication of Debian Developers (DDs). From knowing a few, I think having "Debian Developer" on your resume is an excellent badge of quality.
"It is also limiting the rate on its API per end-point, meaning that most individual clients will be limited to 60 calls per hour instead of 350 calls per hour. "

If you can't raise revenue, reduce expenses. That cut is significant enough to reduce their rate of growth of monthly expenses but probably not enough to reduce their rate of user growth. Probably not a bad move for them.

With press releases like this Twitter is App.net's new best friend.
I'm the total opposite. It might be nice to see all the launches in one place, but the relative position of each YC12 launch on the front page conveys information about the level of enthusiasm HN has. As long as nothing from Torrentfreak hits the site at the same time.
That's a tradition--we'll be doing the same at pennapps again in a few weeks.
'We're NASA and We Know It' is a funny, funny parody video
This all makes a lot of sense for non-main packages. I am curious though what people are doing with their main packages and their non-code dependencies. Say you were writing a web app in Go, or some other executable. Is the convention to put main packages in src/cmd/somename? And is there any convention for the location of related files such as templates, configs, etc.?

What I've been doing recently is keep web apps in separate gopaths, and having code in src/ like usual (with src/cmd/frontend as an example, then a 'go install' outputs to bin/frontend), and then relevant dirs to the app: config/, templates/, etc. all in the root of the gopath, much like a typical project directory tree I suppose. However, I get the impression this is not the 'right' way to do it.
I can also confirm works on iOS (using iPad), has a couple of spacing glitches, however page turning animation is extremely smooth, an the actual pop-ups are exact same as on desktop, no problem and performs like a champ.
I would put Instagram on the consumer line between engagement and analytics and LinkedIn on the engagement line between between business and consumer. They four quadrants are fairly specific though and are not a good match for everything.
No, I don't think I will stop using it. It is a good analogy because it addresses the unnecessary tradition of cheapness related to getting anything online even though many of those online things do provide more (and longer lasting) value than a cup of coffee. It's still an analogy, it has obvious limitations, but it's not a bad one.

Fact: Starbucks Coffee is a Trustable Experience

Coffee isn't specific to Starbucks, and though I admit given the choice between reasonable alternatives I'll choose Starbucks by default, that still doesn't mean the experience of sitting in any coffee house is even remotely consistent. Location matters, clientele matters, it matters if the staff has a bad day or not. And in reality, no coffee house experience is 0.99 cent - it's 5 bucks or more in practice.

Fact: Your $1 App is a Total Gamble

It is a gamble but not as much so as, say, trying out a new coffee flavor, a new kind of pastry, a new pizza delivery service, or a million other new things you don't know anything about until you give them a spin. With apps, at least there are screenshots, feature lists, and reasonably reliable testimonials. With anything new, there is a risk. If I stick with the old stuff, I might miss out on something great. If I take a risk and explore, it might not be as good. It's a gamble.

Fact: Starbucks Has No Free Alternative

Nothing is really free. Everything costs resources to make. The price you're paying in the app store is just one aspect or this. But sure, the closest physical world analogy would be bargain-hunting, which some people spend considerable amounts of energy on. In the software world, there is also the danger of confusing "free" apps with open source apps, that would be another thing entirely.

Fact: Free Apps Are Often A Great Alternative

Not every app idea is worthwhile. In fact, I posit that most of them are not. For stuff that is really obvious or trivial, free is of course the best alternative. "Free" is not a bad thing per se. It's just that some things do cost money to make and a lot of times, app developers need to make a living as well. In these cases, "free" simply doesn't work in the long term. However, I would argue that app developers are not primarily competing with "free" rubbish apps, their struggle is to get the customer to engage at all as opposed to doing nothing.

Fact: The Starbucks Craftsmanship Is On Full Display

Granted, not all app stores do a good job of making stuff discoverable - but in my opinion, they do have sufficient UI provisions for showcasing the detailed workings of apps. I would argue that apps are in fact on full display. If customers are wise enough to make good judgement calls is another matter entirely, but the same dilemma applies to food products actually.

Fact: App Craftsmanship Is Hidden Away

Customers don't care how complicated your app is, the same way they don't care how much craftsmanship goes into making good coffee. Both processes are not generally known (or even of interest) to the average customer.
Thanks! Longer may come down the road but some off the top of my head:

Mobile is totally different from web - small screen, on the go, harder to easily iterate after launch

Get a feel for the apps you like/aspire to be - check out cool apps and get ideas from the ones you like

Figure out what you're optimizing for - limited real estate means you need to focus on the flows that matter to you

Do multiple rounds of user testing - you are going to be surprised by what people try to do

Polish comes at the very end - easy to get ahead of yourself and you might have to throw it out
check out this german startup:
http://www.aktienprognose.com/?idd=qy

they do stock forecasts based on quantum mechanics.
Seems a little naive. I don't think our OSs, device drivers, X engines for X in [webbrowser, GUI, 3d engine, etc] will be just... done by front enders...

Chicken and egg: will "real coders" will make the last tool and die out to be replaced by front enders forever more? Who will maintain the tools and make them better.

This is silly

Better tools don't replace coders with front enders, they simply allow a greater percent of the general population in the form of front enders to participate at all in creation.

(also: comparing some excel plugin allowing python to the matrix brain downloader seems.... unjustified)
I can understand trusting someone to monetize their product, but trusting someone to change a site based entirely on gimmicks and the narcissism of their customers or incestuous nature of the "social media elite"? Eesh.