skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comment was made about an iOS device, which it is more applicable too. Apple has a monopoly on legit iOS App distribution, where Android tablets and phones can install apps from the wild.

It may sound like a small point, but the feeling that I didn't own my iPhone is a big reason I prefer Android.
Did Yahoo never internally adopt Yahoo Mail and Calendar? if so, that would be analogous to Google using Lotus Notes internally.
Not giant hands.
Maximizing the implemented portion of the solution space is not the same as innovating.
Can you change corporate culture by removing turnstiles and parking barriers?

Try asking yourself the opposite question... "Can you change culture by adding turnstiles and parking barriers?"
Except that the vast majority of Android devices are not bootloader locked (Almost all samsung phones are sold unlocked, HTC provides an after-market unlock tool for most phones, Motorola recently started doing so). Besides, even if an Android phone is bootloader locked, you can actually do more on it than on an iphone.

And also, you dont have to contribute patches back to aosp to appreciate software freedom. How about building and running your own kernel on your phone. Is that something you would be interested in? Most Android phones can do that.
A nearly identical business model, but we have some unique technology and more direct customer contact. For example, when you place an order we have a system which modulates your measurements with data from other customers to identify potential measurement errors. When those are flagged we will contact you directly to sort it out and ensure the suit has the best chance of a great fit. Measuring yourself is error prone, so we have a lot of mechanisms to identify and rectify those issues.
IAP wins because the developer can capture more of the area under the curve for what people are willing to spend to the play the game.

With traditional games, you either pay the $10 or you dont. Once you have bought the game, you are done. Maybe you can buy an expanion pack later, or a tshirt, but the developer literally is out of ways for you to spend money.

With IAP, players can pay as little or as much as they want.

The danger is that the game can become less fun if you are always being prompted to spend more money. But I think there are games that do it well. I have spend over $100 playing Valve's TF2, a game that is free-to-play, and I don't regret it.
I'm also not sure what is making you think its "future is uncertain"?

It has been around for 4+ years, has been actively developed since inception, has never taken any funding and is a fairly popular OSS .NET project with a strong and active community.

In that same time frame we've seen multiple generations of Web Service Frameworks in .NET (Mostly from Microsoft), where many of which are now deprecated: .asmx, CSF, WCF, WCF/REST, WSE, WCF DataServices, RIA, MVC (escaping complexity of earlier options) and now WebApi.

We still think they continue to promote the wrong approach to web/remote services, as there are more natural benefits of SOA-inspired message-based designs: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages...

ServiceStack's original IService<T> interface has remained unchanged for all its lifetime and we believe its solid design insulates it from re-writes and allows it to evolve naturally to adopt new features. It's simple and flexible core allows it for any plugin to extend and enhance its core functionality: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Architectu...

A number of the plugins we maintain ourselves can be seen at:
https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Plugins

OSS software is itself immortal, even if the commercial company behind it collapses - the source will always be open.
i.e. it can't be killed by competition, you will always be able to take a fork of an OSS project fix bugs and enhance it as much as you wish or simply contribute to someone else's fork.
A thousand years from now, most people won't know much about the politicians, generals, celebrities or billionaires this century or last. But they might well know who first walked on the moon.﻿
This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already.

(Shrug) A $100 bill lying on the ground will be picked up very quickly, by the original owner if no one else. That means that if you see $100 on the ground, chances are that it's not real. It might be a $1 or $10 bill that you've mistaken at first for $100. It might be counterfeit or play money. It might be someone playing the old "glue some cash to the pavement and laugh at/film people trying to pick it up" game. The chances that someone has actually misplaced a $100 bill in public, and that you are the first to come upon it, are very low indeed.

They convince you that they created some device specifically for you.

I don't know about you, but if the engineers don't do their job well, the marketers have no chance of making me believe that. Otherwise my house would be full of shiny gad.... wait, uh, OK, moving on to the next point....

The marketing budget numbers came out during this trial I believe, and they were staggering.

Larger than the marketing spend across the entire Android ecosystem?

The fact is that there are plenty of tech companies who spend more on marketing than Apple does, and who often have better ads, as well. Each of those companies has something in common: they sell less stuff than Apple does. Therefore, your dismissal of Apple as a "marketing" company, while not necessarily wrong, must be incomplete.
Does it strike anyone else as crazy that we haven't done that since 1972?

Technological progress is a funny thing...
Interesting, unfortunate, but not as nefarious as outright censorship, which is what happened to me:

http://arachnoid.com/psychology/reddit_psychology.html

In short, a Reddit moderator took offense at my expressed position on the status of psychology as a science, and bluntly told me that I couldn't post my view on that specific topic, and if I did, I would be banned. He made it clear that I could post any viewpoint I wanted except that specific viewpoint.

Once I realized it was censorship, that I had done nothing wrong except to offend a specific moderator who felt justified in silencing me, I stopped posting to Reddit.
The noise that parents make is not going to be the waste of their children's lives. It is going to be over the fact that these companies are preying on children.

There have been a number of cases of kids discovering that they can make in game purchases really easily, doing so a lot, and by the time the parents find out thousands of dollars have been spent.

See http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/parents-sue-a... for one lawsuit based on this. Admittedly it was over a bug where kids could spend thousands of dollars on a "free" app without needing the password. But kids learn parents' passwords all of the time. How long until there is a lawsuit over the problem of kids who got the necessary password running up huge bills?
AFAIK, it's completely decentralized. When a scout ant finds food, it returns back to the nest leaving a strong trail of pheromone. Ants tend to follow a pheromone trail and reinforce it on their return if they find food, so when a good source of food is found, a strong pathway is quickly established by a growing number of ants following the same route.

An ant may randomly leave a pheromone trail, which ensures that other, perhaps more attractive food sources are not missed. In general, the stronger the signal, the faster ants move with the less probability of diverging from the path.

This strategy ensures optimal area exploitation under varying conditions. For instance, if the food is concentrated in one or a few locations, you'll see a single column between the nest and the source, but when the food is scattered through the area, the ants would disperse too.

Source: an excellent book "Cells, Embryos and Evolution" where it was used as an example of how complex and seemingly organized and directed behavior could be achieved by a population of identical individuals acting under uniform rules.
What's left after the gold rush is a stabilized market. The market for iOS is still huge and growing. There are differences because gold is a finite substance. There will always be an iOS market for apps where once there was none before the App Store existed. After the gold is depleted, there no longer remains a market for gold and the gold rush is over in that instance.
> I don't want this to turn into a typical iPhone vs Android forum dicussion, so I'm not really going to say anything else.

I agree, but I can't let this stand as implied fact.

> But browsing on a high-end Android phone (like Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S3, One X, Xperia S) will be significantly faster than iPhone 4S.

My comparison was to a Galaxy Nexus running Chrome. Is it fast? Yes. I personally don't find it as fast and responsive as a 4S though. Just throwing power at Android doesn't solve the responsiveness issues it still has in ICS.
If you cannot tell the difference between an iPhone and a Samsung, you should better buy yourself a Huawei.
Long time ago I had an ibook g4. Supposedly it was very nice back then, and very pricey too. However, after playing with it sometime, it just looked cute. Overpriced and cute. Apple products are a jail that looks very nice, but its a jail anyway.

He comments first about the laptops. About laptops before the Mac App Store even...
I honestly don't know what he's going to say, or how he thought it was a jail, and would like to know.
I can agree with it in the case of an iOS-device, but in this case he said "Long time ago I had an ibook g4".

I am starting to get pretty tired of hearing that the products I use every day for professional work are toys, that I gave up my freedom to use them and worship Apple etc etc.
You are a veteran video gamer. This is a different model of play from what you are used to.

Many of the people playing these new style games haven't played many video games before.
Looks like it was a photo of one of these tanks: http://www.amazon.com/Fascinations-ANTW2-AntWorks-Illuminate...
Absolutely correct, you can be well dressed without a suit.
I'm aware of the FSF. That happens to be one extremely narrow-minded definition software freedom. It's not everyone's. If your point is "I only buy devices that are open in the eyes of the FSF" then say that.

You didn't though, you said "software freedom" and in practice iOS provides plenty of software freedom. It just doesn't reach the unrealistic standard of the FSF.

Neither does Android frankly, but at least with AOSP it's closer.
I've heard this. What's the history / backstory?
Best $1 billion dollar marketing campaign Samsung ever spent
Yes, highly subjective. The following has happened to me more than once:

I'll sit down to put the finishing touches on a song. The drums are always tricky to EQ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_equalizer), especially the snare. I'll easily spend 20 minutes carefully dialing in the exact sound I'm looking for. Sometimes I'll spend over 5 minutes on a single frequency band, agonizing over the effect of a single decibel boost or cut. Finally, after I've gotten it to sound perfect, I realize that the frigging bypass button is on. In other words, the equalizer wasn't even on. I was completely imagining the changes, yet for 20 minutes I was certain that my delicate adjustments were really doing something.

I'd be embarrased about it, but it's happened to nearly every recording engineer. IMHO the placebo effect applies more strongly to sound than any other sense.

tl;dr: Audio nerds sit around in darkened rooms by themselves uselessly twiddling their knobs for hours on end.
It's like the article-writing style at The Onion: the (amazing) headline comes first, and the actual content, if any, comes after.
There are forum posts and youtube videos for how to cheat in most IAP games.

Developers are learning to fight against it, but it funny how much effort goes into making sure some bits dont get flipped.
BTW, I took down MailCongress.org because I was getting attention only from right-wing advocacy groups. As a blue-blooded Democrat I couldn't bring myself to do that even if they were willing to pay. It came down over a year ago.
Oh yes, such a nightmare. I moved from Germany to the UK, 2 app store accounts. Then I moved from the UK to the US, 3 app store accounts. I am consistently switching accounts and accidentally repurchasing apps ever since. Luckily, it seems, that with iOS 6 at least you can update all apps, no matter which region they're from (how ridiculous that already sounds), without typing in passwords/switching accounts over and over again.
As much as I think we should invest in colonizing other planets, I don't think it is far to say that we slowed down or stagnated our progress into space because more humans haven't gone farther than the station. There was no great scientific accomplishment in putting a man on the moon, it was a great feat of engineering, great for politics, and (probably) great for the economy, but there was no progress made that a robot could not have done for a fraction of the resources.

The iconic vision of moon project is the American flag. If that doesn't suggest that it was more about politics that progress, I do not know what will.

On the other hand, today were are focusing our space exploration resources as efficiently as we can, sending small rovers to do research, cooperating internationally instead of duplicating effort, ETC.

Once we learn enough to make a long-term colony feasible (or run into some barrier that requires human presence to solve), it is simply a waste of resources.

Besides, we have a continues human presence in space, I consider that far more impressive than a couple of visits to the moon, or Mars.
Shoes coming soon. We're leaving Monday for a shoe scout mission...:).
I like that MvM costs money. It's a simple way to ensure you are getting paired up with people who are dedicated to finishing the match.
Great article Jeff. Couldn't do it without Trello.
The worst recruiter experience I ever had was in 2000-- admittedly the height of a very tight labor market. The recruiter sent me a pile of resumes. One of them was the resume of a person we had recently hired.

I don't know where the recruiter got the resume. But he wasn't aware that we had already hired the guy. Recruiters used to do things like that-- hang on to your resume and send it around even if you aren't looking for a job. The results could be embarrassing. I think social media has at least helped them avoid that mistake, but it tells you a lot about how much they care.

I used to always say, avoid the recruiter and ask for a signing bonus. If you don't come from a recruiter employers can afford to pay that fee to you. I think everybody knows that now.
That's not a power user.
I don't exactly know what the patent is.

I see.

But it was clarified by Samsung attorney in the trial that you do not infringe Apple patents by having one finger scrolling and pinch to zoom. So it is possible to make a modern smartphone.

Those would be the same Samsung attorneys who just lost a $1 billion patent suit?
May I suggest merging the postcard display with the input interface? It was the first thing that drew my intention, and I actually tried to click on it to start typing a message.

Other than that, looks like a pretty neat concept. I like the emerging trend of producing physical output from digital actions.
Blue Moon - Nat King Cole ;-)
I didn't like the screen shot at the bottom of the first page. I figured I could see what the app looked like, but instead it kicked me over to a slide where each line has a transition. I would normally leave after I realize that the screenshot only shows the top ~100 pixels of the app.
Another two tips for skinny dudes that want shirts: J Crew and Club Monaco. If the sleeves are too long, ask your dry cleaner or tailor to shorten them for you.
No. But considering that I paid almost nothing for it makes a big difference. It's not like paying U$ 1k and being locked in.

with my Ibook I couldn't install other OS on working conditions because Apple wouldn't just open the specs, so there wasn't really other OSs to install. It is also not really an option to install other OSs on the IPad. And it costs a lot of money, that makes a big diference. You pay to be locked in to Apple.

Then when Samsung comes around and offers almost the same features, people start to worry that their overly priced stuff will not be so special anymore, and act like Samsung's products are just a poorly made ripoff.
Flat lens offers a perfect image
> Was that not the whole point of the patent-system? That there is an incentive in doing/thinking first?

No. The point of the patent system was to provide an incentive to documenting your inventions and sharing them with others.
"I don't give a damn if robotic probes make more sense. I don't give a damn about the views of academic committees or health and safety. I don't give a damn about the supposed costs – money spent on space exploration is invested in science and technology right here on Earth, and has paid for itself many times over."

What he's really saying in this opinion piece is that he doesn't care a whit about evidence, and isn't interested enough in his fellow human beings to try to persuade them with careful reasoning. I was second to none in cheering on the Space Race when it was happening. I was taking a summer course on planetary astronomy, a special program of my school district, with the classmate who became my lifelong best friend during the summer when the first Moon landing happened. We were both fans of the space program and aspired to be astronauts. Our school district's school board voted that summer what to name the new high school: Neil Armstrong Senior High, of course. So I'm an alumnus of a school named after Neil Armstrong.

Humankind has set foot on the Moon. Humankind has sent space probes to other bodies in the Solar System, and has collected and returned samples from a few of those, with Mars next in consideration. But meanwhile lots of young Baby Boomers who grew up watching members of the Greatest Generation or the Silent Generation becoming public heros by voyaging into outer space have discovered that there are challenging, tough problems to solve right here on Earth.

I have mentioned before here on HN that in the school year just before the Moon landing, my classmates and I built a time capsule with our predictions of the year 2001. The time capsule was opened that year. Our predictions largely proved too pessimistic, although they included a lot of gee-whiz technological predictions. Pollution was less of a problem, worldwide, than we predicted for 2001, and petroleum was more plentiful and less expensive.

The world gets wake-up calls every day. Every day people face problems. Life is full of problems. The way to have excitement in life is to be excited about grappling with and perhaps solving problems. That's even more cool than being stacked on top of a column of explosive chemicals to be pushed into orbit. People can float more freely than they float in microgravity when they free their minds to be imaginative about how to solve problems. If exploring space some more solves real problems for real people, some people will be willing to pay to send other people into outer space. But mostly people will be most willing to pay for what appears to have genuine utility, and there are plenty of exciting, risky, and challenging things to do right here on the ground that are likely to have higher priority than manned space exploration for most people for a long, long time.
Well, it crossed my mind immediately, and then crossed it again, then walked into the middle of it and started jumping up and down. So I wrote a comment.

I think the word you meant to use, regarding my comment, was "obnoxious". All pejoratives are not created equal. Singling one person out in a blog post and lobbying that they be fired with no evidence other than what was written years ago in a mass market book, and that they should go to a "nice" city and start an ad agency? I found that creepy. Yelling on HN about that point of view? You found that obnoxious, I'm betting.
An actual tailor is a great idea ! Regardless of where you source your clothes, your views on ties, matching trousers, leather vs rubber soles, etc. Things that fundamentally fit are key.
I switched to ZenDesk when it became too much to manage requests in GMail.

It works fine, but I noticed a drop off in user engagement which I think was due to the more 'formal' looking way support tickets appeared. When I was just responding to email I would invariably get back a positive acknowledgement if the problem was solved, now a good proportion of tickets never receive a reply from the user.

I could follow up with them ... but that takes more time too!

I'm think of switching to SupportFu who were mentioned here a while ago ... the end user experience feels just like a person-to-person email exchange rather than dealing with a ticketing system.
Regarding your first line, the link only appears after a delay, that increases based on how nested the thread already is. It's a feature that is supposed to prevent flamewars by forcing people to "cool off" before replying.

In practice it seems to lead to this, which is worse since it breaks the flow without solving the issue.
Imagine if Google found someone more creative to figure out their business model, which is also advertising. Think of what could have been!

Maybe they could have focused on developers. Then, they'd definitely have better APIs; maybe developers could easily build products that leveraged Google's search index! Great APIs, and also tens of billions fewer dollars.
I just couldn't install any other usable operating system on the hardware other then Apple's OS. The specifications were closed, you couldn't get much anything useful installed on it because it depended on proprietary software that, of course, only worked on OS X.

edit: besides, things don't look much better nowdays, eh?
Here's a list of keywords. Just feed them to a generic Markov random sentence generator and you'll get your response: Gatekeeper, walled-garden App Store, iOSification, hardware obsolescence in 4-5 years, closed-source, GPL, soldered RAM and SSD and battery, overpriced, eye-candy, skeuomorphism, big brother, reality-distortion-field.

I don't want to be a jerk or offend "alberich", but I strongly disagree with him.
nice i like post
> Except that the vast majority of Android devices are not bootloader locked (Almost all samsung phones are sold unlocked, HTC provides an after-market unlock tool for most phones, Motorola recently started doing so).

You named three companies, all listed only started doing it recently and only with high profile devices. The vast, VAST majority of Android devices are bootloader locked, because there are so many of them. Most of them aren't the high end Android phones that get all the attention.

> Besides, even if an Android phone is bootloader locked, you can actually do more on it than on an iphone.

Depending on the device you can enable installation of non-market APKs. Non-market APKs worth installing almost always require a root unless you're just pirating applications. That's about it.

> How about building and running your own kernel on your phone. Is that something you would be interested in? Most Android phones can do that.

I would personally throw that in the category of having an interest in OS development. Less of a niche than those who can contribute back to AOSP, still quite a small group. Also, not "most". Just those select high end devices with unlocked boot loaders.
its good book.