skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally had my name in Russian letters, so that it resembled my real name with symbols. Facebook got aware of this and blocked my account and forced me to upload a scan of my ID card. After a heavy dispute because I was not willing to hand out my ID to a foreign company (and various other reasons) I gave into their request, uploading a fake ID of me with fake data.
They're certainly not "losing" their way because they released a shitty product in Maps, a subpar OS release in Lion and other minor issues (so far).

However, Apple is certainly not innovating like they were when Steve was around and the market itself, in particular the smartphone market, is becoming very mature - smartphones can only get so small, thin and fast before they reach an apex. And think of the iPhone in relation to the Porsche 911. It's more or less the same car for the past 50 years. Every 2-3 years Porsche makes it better. It works for them, the consumer, the brand and the legacy. I'm not sure why some people were expecting a Phone in the i5 that would make them breakfast but it's a better product than already great product in the 5.

At this point, Apple is such a massive company lead by not a visionary, but a supply chain genius in Tim Cook.

Ive leads design, but Cook has the final say. Forstall and the iOS team don't really care to shift much and take risk in exciting new features (after all, why take risk, if it ain't broke, don't fix it). That's why there are barely any new and groundbreaking features in iOS 6 vs. 5 (BS on your "200 new features" - nothing but minor tweaks) Do not disturb? Come on. It's nice but not a keynote slide.

I LOVE Apple products, I used to destroy my eyes on Apple IIs back in the day and have always loved what they do. I've followed (and had) most every product they've launched. I still have a Newton somewhere and once in a while play Sim City on OS 9 classic like a super-nerd.

I also think consumerism expects A LOT from this company. When Steve was on stage announcing products and wowing audiences, there was innovation, risks, big bets were being placed on products - now, the empire just runs, like a conveyor belt. Every year, a minor upgrade. It works. It sells. It's fine. They're not losing their way, they are just becoming a part of the status quo. They're not challenging anything. At least in the last year or so. Leadership is strong but they're going in a straight line. Calculated moves.

You can't blame them - this is a massive public company and one mistake will lead to an uproar. The question is - will Apple's biggest mistake be not taking a risk and innovating.

Remember, even the Roman Empire fell.
Accredited investor rules only apply to US and Canadian companies. It's possible to angel invest in companies in the rest of the world without being a 1%er - in Europe at least it's very common to angel invest in friends' small businesses/startups.
Not wanting to take the pill is classic cognitive dissonance. You want a good and lasting relationship forever but after you realize you'll never have it you come to terms that it isn't that great anyway because of this and that.

Not sure why this is on HN though.
Why it wasn't be?
Excellent piece. A few comments:

> The constraints that limit ordinary companies also protect them. That's the tradeoff. If you start a barbershop, you only have to compete with other local barbers. If you start a search engine you have to compete with the whole world.

This is one of the reasons why 37 Signals' "small Italian restaurant" is not pertinent to many web businesses.

On PG's concept of startup, which I feel is spot on:

At this stage in my life, I'm more interested in... the "stay small" type of business, ala Rob Walling or patio11's bingo card thing. I think there's something to be said for a niche that's small enough that it's not interesting to larger companies, but can be served with a business that's mostly automated enough to mostly run itself. Perhaps you won't make zillions of dollars, but if it works, it's a good path to more freedom, which for some of is, is what it's about.
Careful what you wish for. Microsoft's "frictionless ways to buy online" always seem to involve more restrictive, less comprehensible licensing. I'd love to see Microsoft move to Apple's simplified model for non-volume licensing: one license = your choice of

1. all users on all devices you own or control for personal, non-commercial use.
2. all users on a single device for commercial use.
3. one named user on all devices for commercial use.

C.f., e.g., Mac Office, where it looks like the only (non-subscription) option for individual, commercial use on multiple devices going forward is a $220 license per device, with no upgrade or multipack pricing, and moves towards electronic delivery at MSRP rather than (frequently discounted) retail sales of packaged product. Net result: an Office license I can get for $150 today will cost $440 next year.
+1 I had the same thought. A small business that grows slowly with a high probability for sustainability in shifting economic times is a very good thing.
I was listening to this on the audiocast version on NPR. It's very good.

The image that is the four drugs side by side is hosted on imgur, which is unusual. http://i.imgur.com/P4csH.gif (right below the line “Because it's amphetamine, it's not recovering completely,” Kim says.)

Wonderfully laid out, however.
Also ironic is that real numbers may not be "real" (i.e., exist) at all. The uncountable part which is THE part that completes rationals to continuity cannot be described or generated in any way since there are only COUNTABLY many different computer programs (or mathematical formulas).
> SPDY compresses everything, together, by default.

So does TLS 1.0 on ~42% of HTTPS servers. [1]

> I wish that I liked SPDY.

You're welcome to hate SPDY, it's just equally bad as HTTPS when it comes to this particular attack.

[1] http://blog.ivanristic.com/2012/09/it-seems-that-it-is-that-...
> However, Apple is certainly not innovating like they were when Steve was around and the market itself, in particular the smartphone market, is becoming very mature - smartphones can only get so small, thin and fast before they reach an apex. And think of the iPhone in relation to the Porsche 911. It's more or less the same car for the past 50 years. Every 2-3 years Porsche makes it better. It works for them, the consumer, the brand and the legacy. I'm not sure why some people were expecting a Phone in the i5 that would make them breakfast but it's a better product than already great product in the 5.

That is a great way of saying it... love the Porsche analogy.

However, I challenge you on one point. I don't think Apple EVER innovated. Rather, they've iterated. And they did this wonderfully. Apple is notorious for not innovating but rather taking already established ideas and doing them much, much better than even the people who originally did them. That is their secret. They are great and simplifying and making it oh, so pretty.

EDIT: I should caveat the above to the modern Apple era. Post 2001 or so.

And not to take anything away from this, but when most people say "innovate" they typically mean something other than what I say above. In reality, the groundbreaking new features are never from Apple. If you looked at the marketplace, someone, somewhere already had those features. Apple just did it better a year later. That is what they do, no shame in it either...but they are not an innovative company.
Exactly my thoughts!

I don't want anything to do with this life style.

I posted this in another reply but I'll post it again because I think it's so relevant.

DHH talking about startups

http://vimeo.com/3899696#t=1290
Oh good a new class of people to hate. I hate the 90% who say no to the experience machine too. Humans are insane.
To answer the question in the headline. No, the company and brand has always been "arrogant" and occasionally "entitled". Just look at the iPhone 4 antenna problem. This is the same thing, they lose airports and train stations. Then they tell people to use it so they can find all the problems so they can start fixing it. I don't know about you people but I use the map app but I use it to find locations where I haven't been before. I find the response slightly arrogant to this whole maps deal. It is "your holding it wrong" all over again.

I have a bunch of Apple devices. But this maps thing and other things like Gatekeeper makes me hesitant to buy a device that is more expensive than the competitors. The thing is that I don't feel that the premium isn't simply worth it anymore.
Project X Haren: from Sweet 16 Facebook invite to riots in an innocent town
In part 1, Ramit mentioned an e-book about customer retention. Do you know the name of it?
This is not true. Minecraft is the best example; it had an insane growth rate both in percent and absolute numbers, exactly what PG is talking about. The other games you mention are also good examples of starups in high-growth terms. And when talking about markets, most people who enjoy Diablo, Baldur's Gate and Minecraft _don't_ enjoy free-to-play games, since these games have no element of art or story to them.

And PG even explicitly said that not all companies should be startups. You are reading things into this essay that aren't there.
For modern startups, growth can be optimized on an ongoing basis but not if you're not building something that people love. There's a reason why Zynga games' growth aren't sustainable and they need to rely on the novelty of games to grow.

I'm sure even Blizzard and Steam teams are very focused on growth as a metric. It's just that unlike Zynga, they believe that creating fun mechanics in their games and improving on them through patches make for a great way to move their needle. Therein lies the difference. I guess the focus shouldn't just be growth at all cost, but sustainable growth.
Right, maybe he doesn't know what everyone wants. But shouldn't the users decide that for themselves? Why put so many restrictions to prevent users from installing 3rd party applications?
Which city/country are you in?

The new iOS map app is fine here in Barcelona, except that all the street names are in Spanish instead of Catalan.
Weird, I'm on Arch and it's no more hassle than Ubuntu. Do you use a custom WM/etc?
If this is all you hate SPDY for, your hatred is misplaced. Most HTTPS connections in the wild will have compression turned on anyway.
OK, but you're making an observation without a solution... that kind of thing is pretty much irrelevant to people like Paul Graham and CEOs of startups, who have to make decisions about what things to do. You can call people immoral from the sidelines but it will have zero effect.

My opinion is that corporations are essentially "amoral" -- not immoral. Morality simply doesn't enter into any substantive decision. Google's founders often invoke the self-interest argument: "people don't have to trust us to be moral, because if we acted against our users, they would leave us, and we wouldn't make any money". This is what I call an amoral argument -- with no negative connotation to "amoral". PG almost invoked a version of this in footnote 8.

You might think that being amoral is equivalent to being immoral, but morality isn't as well-formed a concept as people think it is. Namely, the most common use of the concept of immorality is to label "stuff I don't like". I mean, what's wrong with millions of people playing Zynga games all day? Would people be curing cancer if they weren't playing Zynga games?

Another issue is that a person isn't moral or immoral; it's well known that the same person will act moral or immoral according to their environment. Paul Graham even said that about HN (in terms of trollish behavior). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)

In the case of Wall St, there's no possibility of it "considering its own morality". No amount of goading or convincing will make an ounce of difference. The only way I can think of is for voters to make it clear to elected officials that they won't tolerate the status quo, but so far that hasn't happened. Even after the 2009 crash.

(And btw I didn't make any assertion about morality in my original message, other than to say "I somewhat agree" about Zynga, so not sure what you are disagreeing with.)
I had to choose one name per movie.
If a movie is based on a novel, I believe the author of the novel should be credited in the first place. Usually the script degrades the quality of the novel.
Agree. While the title emphasizes Objective-C/programming, in this particular example/game, I think the visual/art side is more significant. Good job, indeed!
Can you point to something (in the iOS line) that was as broken as this? I can't think of anything
This is an article that was written in 2000 by Joel Spolsky (as another commenter also noted): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

It pretty much describes with different terms what pg here described as a "startup". I think startups have always had that definition (at least since the late 90s) but folks came along and started calling every little thing they own (i.e. their blog, non-profit, life-style business) a startup.

Obviously, a lot of that had to do with how the tech media also entertained that liberal definition of a startup -- and everyone and their mom started jumping on that wagon because it was considered cool.

I think articles like this should be a must-read for anyone wanting to get in the game, seriously.
SmartOS looks pretty interesting (the thing he works on as mentioned in TFA). Do people have opinions about it?
The Skinny on IE's Update Policy
to make what is clearly a generalization, though I think an accurate one:

Silicon Valley = makers

Wall Street = takers (sometimes enablers or rewarders for the makers)
Yes, the issue was blown out of proportion

But heads rolled at Apple, ask a certain Mr. Papermaster (not only because of that)
No, he isn't. He runs a services company that was recently acquired. Definitely someone worth listening to.
I'm interested in the case where you provide all the artwork for 30%. I guess it shouldn't matter it is for Android or even the Desktop app, right?

Also, please make signing up available for people without facebook or any other soc.network website account.
Doctors found to lack trust in drug company studies
I agree with your comments.

Yes I know about repeated headers but as I explained I've actually found a use for them. I do pipelining everyday. I don't think "Gee, these repeated headers are really eating up my bandwidth." It's just not that big a deal. The headers are like 10 lines or less. The headers for HN are like what, two lines? Headers are nothing compared to all the useless cruft in HTML nowadays.* That is a situation where I am definitely thinking "This is unbelievable. 90% cruft and 10% content." Wanna "fix" something? Talk some sense into web developers.

* Unless you start jamming them with larger and larger cookies.

Multiplexing is also my preference. I think you would be able to keep your left arm. But I'd rather do it over UDP. HTTP is OK, we all have to use it, but it's not the bee's knees. Uploading stuff via non-idempotent HTTP requests needs to die. The web browser centricity school of thought is not my thing. SPDY is probably excellent for Google's purposes, it just isn't for mine. I guess I am one of the few.

I think Firefox has actually had pipelining support for many years. They just never turned it on by default. As I say no one seemed to use pipelining. Neither servers nor clients. But they sure took notice of SPDY.

I'll bet the SPDY fan tested things with downloading stuff from multiple domains, simulating the typical hodgepodge webpage. But that's not how I do my "browsing". I block everything but the stuff I want, it all comes from one source, one domain. I retrive only the content and leave the cruft behind. Efficiency.

I've never been thrilled with SSL (and guess what, I'm not a Javascript fan either... Netscape was the world's slowest and most unstable browser but they did what they had to do to make ecommerce possible; now we have js, ssl and cookies, what lovely things) but what choice do I have? And what am I supposed to do if my bank has an unpatched SSL? Email them and tell them they are idiots? I just assume there's always something wrong with SSL; if I just wait a while somehow I'm always right. Time to upgrade. Again. I've become an NaCl fan, so maybe there is hope. There life after SSL.
Somehow titling Minecraft, Diablo, BG as "Startup"s or "Startup-like" things feels wrong to me.

Minecraft was one guy (probably) enjoying himself while putting together something creative. It then exploded. Did he really target 10% growth per week?

Diablo, BG, etc. were all calculated bets by people with lots of experience in the industry. They weren't building a business model, a new organization, etc. They were doing "projects" they felt would promise high returns. That's it.
I never used the word hate. I never said I liked SSL either.
last time I checked, the Tonido syncing app had 2GB limit to syncing feature in free version
The initial iPhone OS, before it was called iOS, shipped without copy and paste or 3G at a time when all mobile operating systems had both copy and paste as well as shipped with 3G on their premium models. The first iPhone certainly qualified as a Premium Device.
Yes, they are. Normally if someone wants an exclusive right to content they pay the producer for them. Virtually everyone else asks for a non-exclusive license. This is very different and has been discussed here on HN before.
The original iPhone didn't have copy/paste (and it was right to ship it).
Same story here. Exactly the same date (14 September 2011), haven't heard anything since.
Yes they started in USA, but when UK was announced it wasn't a blank map (like OSM was when it started). The UK maps started with purchased, non-free data. So in a way, you need to bootstrap it somehow.
This reminds me of how they "scrambled" to hire antenna engineers and similar job posts with iPhone 4 launch!
The US does not recognize copyrights over databases. The issue though is that depending on the ads in question there may be creative elements.

For example, suppose I place an ad to rent my house out and include just info. Not likely protected but if I do it in iambic pentameter, probably is protected.

What this wouldn't prevent is someone scraping CL for facts (appartments for rent, x bed, y bath, z sq ft), extracting those facts, and arranging them in another order. That doesn't strike me as protectable in the US, even if it involves scraping directly from CL.
As I said compression is not the only condition that needs to be met for this attack to work. The browser needs to make requests to other sites, automatically, e.g. via an img src tag.

As for HTTPS, nothing requires me to seek out sites that use HTTPS. Nor to trust sites that use it which I'm forced to use. And nothing requires me to send headers asking for compression support when using HTTP. But with SPDY, everything is compressed, all the time. It's all on by default. This is by design.
Meanwhile you can use ownCloud - http://owncloud.org/

Still not perfect, little bit more work needed to install the server part, but it works, is opensource, you can access your files over web browser (mobile apps on the way), new versions ship regularly and as a bonus the sync client apps are written c++/Qt so no annoying java required.
I have been on online networks of one kind or another since 1992. I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community and people taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community. That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names, because those friends still try to build up reputation for those pseudonyms. (You'll have to be the judge of how well I'm doing here building up the reputation of "tokenadult," a screen name I brought here from two other online communities where pseudonyms rather than real names are mandatory but changing names is difficult so that reputation still accumulates for each name.)

That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there.

AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of

It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.
I hope your service thrives and you get bought by twitter. Good work, but the fact this had to be built by a 3rd party and did not come from Twitter itself is a sad fact.
Thanks for the feedback! I handle sourcing and making the art for the MGWU games. Although I didn't directly work on the art for this game (I was recently hired), it is on the top of my list to redo the rocket icons/text. The "patterny" area you are seeing is lava and if you download the game you will probably find that it's slight deficiencies are not as noticeable in actual gameplay - some procedural generation could be great though.

We are into shipping product asap here; The Deeps is an awesome game (really!) and future versions are going to be even better.
I'd highly recommend Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis to anyone interested in the subject, for exactly this reason . . . and, subsequently, Henri Cartan's Elementary Theory of Analytic Functions of One or Several Complex Variables as proof that, nevertheless, "algebraic" need not imply "boring" or "computational". As a silly example, I'll never forget Cartan's definition of "2π" as the unique positive real number such that the kernel of the homomorphism "t -> e^it" from the additive group of reals to the multiplicative group of unit-length complexes is the set of integer multiples of 2π.
That should be addressed by better employee rights in the USA
Drama is for the internet. Real life is for getting shit done.
Although you're right that it's no impossible, it is much harder. It's like default values on software products. The easier something is, the more people will do it. Lots of things are harder without Facebook access, like accessing photos from a family member.