skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an unreasonable position to take. Almost all third-party software products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs, and to suggest "Don't depend on someone else's API" as a strategy would be akin to saying "Don't write software for a living."

The challenge is to determine, in advance, if the platform you are writing for will maintain some reasonable level of access to the API, both now, and in the future.
Makes sense, will add an note on the paypal comment in github
ArmA 3 developers denied appeal, must face trial over espionage charges
Hopefully in 200 years people will look back in shock that we actually used to eat that stuff.
The mac app store version of evernote lost the ability, but if you have the version downloaded from their site it should be in the PDF dropdown menu of the OS X print dialog (also useful to disable Chrome's print dialog, which adds one more annoying step).
> You're going to base a business on scraping twitter.com?

A business? Probably too high risk. A nice FOSS client, though? Why not?
The document is no longer public (about 10% of the companies emailed me asking me to remove them from the list.
They've been in re-org bankruptcy since january. Part of the re-org was a new contract with the union. The union rejected and went on strike.
Twitter.com is slow. I pretty much stopped using twitter altogether instead.
> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Emphasis on "supposed". It doesn't always do it, and definitely never to everyone's taste. Hence the custom clients.

> I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...

By now I doubt anyone is truly surprised, but it's disappointing nevertheless. Twitter's success is partly built on the explosion of Twitter clients that allowed Twitter to evolve faster than its dev team could follow (hence all the scaling issues). Then they bought a few players in the Twitter client market. And now they've strangled all the ones that remained in that market.

So basically, Twitter now has an obvious and provable history of leaving things open, deciding that thriving third-party market X is nice, stepping into it themselves, and killing everyone else there.

That's not a reputation I'd like to have for my business, when it is a piece of underlying infrastructure that depends on others to make it thrive.

Anyone starting a business from today onwards and having any critical dependency or reliance on Twitter is insane.
just like anyone who had apps using Tumblr's v1 API which they terminated quicker than anyone could hear about it's demise
(I posted this in the other article about hostess that got buried)

I will remind people here the following: Indiana is a right-to-work state. This was passed last year.
Right to work lowers employer burden why someone is laid off/fired. Along with that, makes it a felony to require union dues to work at a company. However, the union is still required to represent you upon its charter.

Hostess also lost a sizable chunk of money with the lawsuit concerning Sachs donuts. Because of things I do not understand, Hostess had to kill all lines of yeast donuts and all "packaged fresh" yeast donuts. And from talking to employees of Hostess in Columbus,IN, those machines were scrapped.

A good reason why the union was giving hell was Hostess wanted to cut wages by almost 20%: the union already agreed to a 10% cut and reduction of benefits. Hostess wanted 9% more, and threw a tantrum here locally.

Who was in the right? I have no idea. But it looks the the nuclear option was used: blow it to the ground.
Two key quotes:

It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.

and

...with technical people, it's one thing to look at their resumes and another to see how they are viewed among their peers

Test.Test.Test.Test.

Don't be a dick, no matter how smart you are or how much you know. Playing nice is more important.
Not exactly. Twitter doesn't want you to build anything that will take a single eyeball from them. There are still services that can be built that don't fall in that category, though, such as sentiment analysis.

At least, for now. Twitter has shown they are willing to be hostile towards their developers. Even if I fit in the "don't take their eyeballs" category, I wouldn't build on their platform because I don't trust them.
When Does Outsourcing Make Sense?
"Of course, good luck on getting anything with a functioning REPL on iOS anyway"

Ruby Motion comes pretty close.
"I, Pencil": The Amazing Brilliance of Our Modern World
> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8

That it's a terrible experience on many fronts, that it's slow as molasses (especially on mobile networks), that composition sucks, that multiuser blows, that it's got no idea where you left off and doesn't care, etc...?

> This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Crappy?
But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.

And this is why Chomsky is the idol of nodding undergraduates everywhere.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it's bonkers to say you're "not allowed" to debate war policy. That claim is a lie. It's readily disproven by reading any of a number of New York Times editorials or walking down any street in Berkeley, CA, or Cambridge, MA and reading the bumper stickers.

Yes, "I support the troops" is not a particularly daring or radical point of view. But it's clear from a Google search for "I don't support the troops" that there's a vocal minority who disagree with it. There was a time not so many decades ago when a much larger, much more vocal minority disagreed with it, and thus it's not quite the nullity that Chomsky describes it as.

In a free society, one opinion people are "allowed" to have is that their volunteer troops by and large deserve moral and material support even if their missions have politically controversial justification. That is an opinion a large majority of Americans currently hold. Some Americans hold an opposing view. In a democracy, this kind of disagreement happens often, and trying to convince me that one side of the disagreement has been influenced in the "exact" manner as the Nazis influenced the Germans requires a better argument than Chomsky's goofy proclamation that somehow we're "not allowed to talk about" war policy. Germans in 1942 were actually not allowed to disparage the war effort, lest they end up in prison or worse. Their primary sources of information on the conflict were all directly controlled by their government, who deliberately, actively misled them about its aims and progress. That is so many light years from a "yellow ribbon" campaign that I still can't begin to imagine how you think they're comparable.
Better advice would be: Don't depend on someone else's API when they've made it quite clear how hostile they're going to be towards you.
> "If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter"

That's exactly what happened here. Twitter does not currently have a native Win8 client, and a native client has always been a value-add for Twitter's users - many people prefer to have an always-on Twitter widget on their machine that pushes messages to them, over a browser window they have to poll.

I haven't used this software myself, but it certainly seems like something that is welcomed by Windows users and improves the experience for the relevant set of Twitter users.

The root problem here is unsurprising: for many web startups what's good for users is not good for the company. The modern, ad-driven web company is a precarious balance between tending to the sheep and throwing them at the wolves as hard as you can.
There is something to be said about work-life balance too. When you work from home, it's really easy to let other things distract you, because "it's ok, I'll just work more latter to make it up." Then you end up working 12 hours, because of all of the interspersed distractions. If this happens too often, then you run into issues with the barrier between work and home breaking down.

I've personally, experienced this, and I've seen people comment on HN about having experienced it too, so this isn't just a hypothetical situation.

That said, I know people that successfully work from home, and do things like have a separate office that is only for work. I was just talking with someone over the weekend about how he took a bunch of time off of work, and at the end realized that he hadn't even entered that room the entire time (emphasizing how much of a separate "I'm at work" space it was).
The same used to be true of Twitter.
My understanding is that this was a re-org bankruptcy but that the unions rejected the contract that was agreed to during the re-org and went on strike. Nothing left after that other than to liquidate.

This sounds to me like a game of brinksmanship in which neither side blinked.
There's this snippet showing that humans are involved.

(http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/03/18/google-books-scannin...)
Is there any concise typescript reference around? The playground doesn't showcase that much features. The language specification while extensive is not that great as a cheatsheet.
Trees are seen as a step towards gentrification to some. Efforts to plant more trees in the tenderloin have been actively rallied against.[1] As they believed the increase in property values they would no longer be able to live there.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116165781554501615.html
> "If they're pretty, that's a bonus, but well designed tools that don't answer these questions are just lipstick on a pig."

That statement of yours is truer than words could ever say. Enterprise doesn't want to strike back. It just wants to do what it knows to do best.

Now here is what I think about the whole situation: Lately venture capital is totally clueless about where to put their money. I don't know how many of you have heard of the new "10 million is the new 1 million" [1] catch-phrase?

Some have even reported that "they" are going to look at fewer large deals only in future (closed room conversations you know). Of lump-size $25 million each instead of putting 2.5 million in to 10 separate deals. Sounds like "digging the grave only a little deeper" but I could be wrong.

Color me bad, but consumer web is unbeatable in terms of growth, tenacity and also performance on the stock market. Look at Google story, for example. The new kids will probably learn about art of managing stock exchanges soon. That's how big enterprises have survived with little innovation to their credit.

And mind you, enterprise software like Salesforce, Yammer, Box, Asana or Linkedin all have consumer DNA in them. This DNA can be easily mistaken for "pretty design" actually.

There is no getting away from consumer web, in my opinion.

[1] Seems like Chris Dixon's blog is off so added the cached reference here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Mobile is changing the way enterprises think the same way the web did: very slowly.

They will recognize the need long before they act on it. And when they act on it, it will be on an offering built to their specifications, with data connections to other enterprise systems that they have millions invested in.

And most of the initial mobile rollout for enterprise will be shoddy half-assed stabs in the dark by the same enterprise vendors they already have, that are neither well designed, nor disruptive, nor will they deliver on the promise of mobile particularly well.
"I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem"

While that may be true, Twitter has a lot of its popularity and mechanics to thank for from the third party apps.

Think of hashtags and slashtags: http://gigaom.com/2010/04/30/the-short-and-illustrious-histo...

Even the verb 'to tweet' and the bird imagery allegedly came from outside of Twitter.

If it weren't for Loren Brichter's app Tweetie, I probably wouldn't have even bothered with using Twitter.
Afaict, the really new thing Balanced is doing that I haven't seen anywhere else is programmatically authorizing merchant accounts. Is anyone else doing that?
> Having customers pre-order a product and pay directly for it isn't exactly disruptive.

Is it sustainable for tangible goods businesses? Generally, campaigns don't sell full pre-orders, they sell deeply discounted preorders. Unless there is some major, major margin built in there.... I mean, I'm looking at Pebble's kickstarter, and all but the first level give you 1 or more watches. Considering that the first run is the most expensive (by a wiiiiide margin, getting the tools made, setting up QA, etc), I wonder what Pebble's books are going to look like once all the preorders are filled?
You could twist that the other way, though. The Democratic organization was highly decentralized, leaner and more effective than the Romney campaign bloc, centralized and huge in Boston HQ.
I don't want to sound harsh but if your application read like your message here it's not surprising that you got rejected. Investors want people who are hungry for success, not people who feel entitled to it.

Regarding your actual suggestion, I'm not sure how restricting the number of applicants would help, after all it seems far better to have a first-level filter (i.e. alumni network) than to just impose some arbitrary limit based upon a lottery or a first-come-first-served basis.

YC has commented before that the no-idea applications are essentially an experiment. Historically many YC companies have pivoted significantly over the three months of YC, this naturally carries an implication that the idea doesn't matter as much as good founders, so it seems like a reasonable experiment. There's no a priori reason to assume that teams who have launched are going to be more successful than ones who haven't, they're just at a different stage of their life-cycle.

I believe this is only the second season where they've had no application ideas, so it'll probably take them a couple of years to measure if it works or not, but presumably from the fact they're still doing it the initial indications are positive.
A 32GB iPad doesn't have 32GB of free space either, nor does any computer or device have the advertised space free when pre-loaded with an OS.

So, I'm not sure your analogy works. It's standard for space to be taken for the OS.

50% is more than usual. What is the cut off for being able to sue?
Since tweetbot still works, why did you migrate from it?
Trying my best not to sound like a hipster, but tattoos are so mainstream today it is almost more impressive to me when someone doesn't have one at this point in time. Around here tattoo parlors pop up like Starbucks used to. They literally build across the street from each other. shrug
Don't rely on someone else's API? That's like going through life never trusting anybody. Sure, you'll avoid getting burned, but I hardly think that's an optimal strategy.

A better strategy is to trust somebody (/an API) until they give you good reasons not to. Admittedly, twitter seems to have broken that trust. I personally would't use them as a platform, unless the benefits clearly outweigh the risks of them haphazardly cutting me off.
Now THAT sounds like a successfully managed web project!
Brainfuck written in the C preprocessor
But those tiny tweaks are not tiny at all. Realize that there are very smart teams of engineers. If one team manages to get a bit ahead, it means that they are putting huge resources on the small tweak. Add up a couple of small tweaks and you end up with a new technology altogether. Formula 1 is about engineering. Ferrari is one of the leading teams in terms of getting new technology introduced to the real world. When production Ferrari cars started to have paddles behind the wheels, and people wanted them in other luxury cars, what do you think happened? Nowdays, even my daughters Power Wheels has paddles. But realize that those paddles were engineered into reality because engineers wanted to save space, time, and weight. Little tweaks that combined into a new way to shift gears.
> and recording IP addresses of peers.

Terrific! Anyone know the IP addresses of the state and federal Supreme Courts? It will be good preparation for justices to understand IP spoofing.
I suppose, and I suppose if the client used a user's IP they couldn't block them the same way. But wouldn't a client that scrapes the full HTML to get the data you want be horribly inefficient, and hard to maintain? API's are all the rage because they give you just what you want. Think about bandwidth.
"They make you search and dig for it specifically"

Although I also hate it when companies bury details, but I don't agree with this lawsuit. If hard-drive space is an important consideration for you, you should do a little more homework than this guy obviously did. I could see a case being made for him returning his Surface and getting a refund, but I don't see a case being made that Microsoft should have overtly printed, "WARNING: Our device only leaves you with 16 GB of usable space. Additional SD card not included."
I agree with the "Don't build anything for twitter" motto (and it would look good on a t-shirt), but part of me wonders if twitter could get by charging 25 cents a token past 100k, so developing apps is still possible, and twitter still gets its slice of the pie.

Although, it still kills the advertising cash cow.
Because their customers are advertisers, and their users are people who follow Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber. It's not the same service as it was when it started, when the API was important to them.
Aside from pissing off Twitter, and possibly getting a cease and desist, what's preventing developers from building a translator that sits between Twitter's web layer and their native application client? Couldn't something be developed that loads Twitter into a hidden webview that's locally scraped for the purpose of re-display however the developer pleases on their client? This implementation wouldn't require the tokens, and wouldn't be constrained by their arbitrary limits.

But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued.
I can't speak to the exact measures we take, but this isn't going to happen. For starters, take a closer look at the URL. It's not as simple as it appears.
I lol'd that Romney got his Orca app from Best Buy.
The article Zero Hedge quotes from states repeatedly that Ripplewood bought equity first, and then more equity and some debt.
I'm sure you meant: Jeff Bezos, Amazon: 30 in 1994
The message from Twitter reads "It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve", which I interpret to mean they could be planning a future native app that this might be inferior to.
The thing I found about RubyMotion is that the default APIs are just straight mappings to the Objective-C APIs, which eliminates most of the advantages the Ruby language could offer. Your code ends up being an essentially line-by-line copy of what you would write in Objective-C.

I never dove into any of the (meta-)frameworks designed exclusively for RubyMotion, but I do believe there could be some nice advantages to using it there. As much as I do appreciate the Cocoa Touch design, there is always room for improvement.
Completely agree. My 2 cents:

Since an individual can only play one part at a time, rather than showing two scrolling parts, two pages of the same part should be shown. Initially, page 1 can be shown above page 2. The playhead is the only thing that moves, from the left of the screen to the right. Initially it moves across page 1. When it reaches the right side of the screen, it moves to the start of page 2, below and to the left. At that time, page 1 is replaced with page 3. This way the pages remain still, while allowing the user to progress through the song.
It's not that simple. When you are in bankruptcy it's really up to the judge to approve who gets paid what.
I have to agree with the idea of being in a place where you can be isolated to focus on work. When working in an office, I've often found that the best times to work are either early in the morning or late at night when the office is basically empty[1].

That said, I think that if you are disciplined enough, you could work in the same place that you live (even as someone that finds it difficult to keep work/home from blending). If you set up a routine that you do when you wake up on a work day, and stick to the routine, you could 'trick' your brain into differentiating the space based on what you are doing. The thing is that you would need to have a certain level of discipline to pull this off.

[1]: It also helps that I find the sound of an empty space with just the HVAC noises as background sort of soothing. I liked just stalking empty classrooms, etc at university too.
That's true, but the numbers sorta matter. Comparable existing devices (basically iPads and Android tablets) have base OSes that are well under 1G. So comparing a 32G Surface to a 32G Nexus 10 is going to be surprising.

I don't honestly know the extent to which users might have been misinformed about their Wiis and Razrs. But a very reasonable argument here is that MS released a product and advertised it as having the same amount of useful storage as a popular competitor, which it clearly does not.
The respondents in general came from one geographical part of the city and also grade the quality of service of the city more harshly than others.

I interpret this that the parks department might be doing a really bad job in certain parts of the city. The trees are not kept well and trimmed, obstructing views and making driving unsafe, branches in the street after heavy winds, something like that. Now if I already think the city is doing a piss poor job, I'm sure not going to give them the justification they need to raise my taxes just so they can plant more trees (when they can't be trusted to take care of the ones that already exist).

In other words, the respondent's answer depends on the who they think is asking the question and how they think their answer might be used.
Appreciate the feedback (author, here). It is optimized for our qualified leads which are the top online publishers on the web. However, we've heard your feedback a few times in the past. We're working on a revamp to make it more descriptive for anyone who hits the site.
There is a good chance you are right and this would be evidence that the union was holding out for terms that the market had determined were unsustainable.

If you can start from scratch and lease/purchase/hire what you need under new terms then it is an existence proof that the union had priced itself out of the market (i.e. there were other workers completely willing to accept the new terms). This is true whether the new management is truely a new group of people or simply a new legal entity for the old group of people.
> Now we know: “work with us directly” means “die”.

Very good summary by Marco. It's really annoying when these companies have secret policies that have to be discovered rather than are clearly stated. It just wastes people's time to try to discover the policy, having to do costly time consuming experiments to find out what the policy is as if this was an unknown branch of particle physics.
The Single Biggest Enemy of Innovation
How does this hold up when you're talking about web development, especially javascript-heavy or -only applications? You live and die by the browser API don't you?
I think this method will have a lot of false positives. Facebook will want to hope that they show the ads to people who will be buying the product anyway, so they can take credit for the sale. I don't see it accurately keeping track..