skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Music, movies, TV, and podcast subscriptions. All tied up in Apple's little ecosystem. A very pretty noose to keep people chained to its hardware.

Really? Because, last time I checked, people mostly RENTED movies and series off of iTunes -- not outright bought them (except some tiny majority of bizaros). In which case there is nothing to be "tied to".

As for music, last time I checked, iTunes sells DRM-free music, something that was first achieved for major music companies there, after Job's open letter on matter. So you can move your music to Android just fine. And even if it wasn't DRM-free (which IS) you can of course use your own DRM-free music collection with iTunes, like the vast majority of people do.

And podcast subscriptions? Really? Aren't they available everywhere, anyway?

People buy the hardware because they like it, and bought it since the first iPod, even before there even was an iTunes Store. Heck, they bought the iPhone even before there were third party apps too.
Still doesn't really save you unless you can export all of your data into some open data format that can be read hassle free by other services (oh and you need a guarantee that the company won't just kill their export functionality when they get bought by another company etc).

You also have to ask who controls the browser, this is going to ultimately be whoever controls the OS. iOS won't allow alternative browsers, not sure if Windows RT does?

So there's nothing really stopping the OS vendor with enough market share deciding they won't allow certain HTML5 / JS functionality incase it interferes with native app sales.

It might seem the case that one or two big ecosystems eat up everything else and choosing which ecosystem you live in becomes a major life choice. At this point computing and media have become a natural monopoly.

Of course then follows the "open" renaissance.
Hint: it's #1. The women of france, as part of the population, voted for what they can't wear (not what they can) as a tiny sacrifice for the greater good. Superficial comparisons are always misleading
nice to see this idea being picked up again. I had a similar idea quite a while ago (early 2010), although I didn't build it on top of the twitter API (which in retrospect might have been better). http://askcue.com is still online and you can anonymously ask questions. btw. it seems that the site doesn't work atm.
Clojurescript still requires a JVM. Will this change in the future?
Original Apple 1 Computer, 1976 (Lot 20)
Then why not write a blog article about it or something. I don't see why such discussion should happen "off list", because it would in fact restrict the discussion to one-on-one's between you and whoever emails you, without anyone benefiting from the extra eyes.
Nexus 4 has a working LTE radio in it
Does this make any legal sense?
From the little I know, when you purchase a dvd you can do anything with it, including reselling it.

The service offered by the company which is "send us your dvds, we'll stream them to you anytime anywhere".
In other words, remote reading of your dvd, without appliance needed on your part except the pc/viewer.
As far as I know there is no law to prevent you from viewing your own dvd, however you may want to watch it.

Ownership of the dvd remains with the customer.

Add the possibility to buy and sell dvds.

Now everyone who uses that service can buy or sell a dvd to anyone who uses that service, without any shipping whatsoever, and with the instant ability to have it streamed, of course.

In effect, one purchase of a copy of a movie can now be resold indefinitely to provide people with the movie when they need it, thereby limiting the needs to those of a movie rental store, all while avoiding any other fee/tax.

Additionally, the company could have a stock of dvds (actually digital rights containers) that can be instantly sold for streaming to customers then bought back, or physical media acquisition, AND eventually resold through retail channels when they become obsolete (if the physical media is still new, as will be the case for the latest james bond movie that you needed eleventy beelion copies of at release day).

Now it all sounds real good, but does anyone know why it wouldn't work ?
Assuming this in reaction to the Ryan Carson / Paul Graham thing, it's a fantastic overreaction. Let's reiterate:

- Some single founder companies are successful

- Evidence/experience suggests companies with multiple founders are more likely to be successful

- Y Combinator does fund single founder companies

That's it folks. Nothing to see here except, presumably, someone trying to get some traffic by positing a stance that PG doesn't actually hold.
you should define some filters for the target repliers and to notice that is a real question. e.g. #q.code.java .

Listeners/repliers would subscribe those.
I always wondered how much deactivated iphone there was in the ipod touch.
"There’s a plethora of reasons why a business can fail, or not get started."

I am calling "strawman" on this.

There is a plethora of business models suitable for single founders.

Graham's position is that the data show that startups are not among them.
I think he means tied up more in the sense of its 'difficult' to move it for the average user. sure you can pull out your content and sync it to android if you know what your doing (read - tech savvy-ish) but the vast majority of the users use iTunes and have never used anything else.
It's these users that will have the problems of being 'seemingly' locked into an ecosystem.. mainly because they don't know (or care to learn) anything different and it becomes too hard.
Doesn't Bond work for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) rather than the Security Service (MI5)?

https://www.sis.gov.uk/
Black Friday: Up to 90% off GoSquared
I think it all comes down to standards, as the OP mentioned in the article. Google services usually support open standards (ODF for google docs), which makes migrating your data, when the service closes, a whole lot easier.

If only there was an open standard for "offline" apps that could be used on android, iphone, iOS, windows, linux...etc with the same end user experience.
Wait, whose fault is this DRM thing? Device makers or the music and movie industry? http://www.apple.com/es/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
Does not work for me in Chrome. Works in Safari. I'm on a Macbook Pro.
Even the Massachusetts data privacy laws (which are more comprehensive than most that apply in the U.S.'s crazy quilt of overlapping jurisdictions) fall short of requiring password encryption. The closest I can find in the summary of requirements (on page 4) is that anyone who stores information about a resident of the Commonwealth is required to use "a reasonably secure method of assigning and selecting passwords, or use of unique identifier technologies, such as biometrics or token devices"; there's no specific method of hashing or encryption, and no guide about what's "reasonable".

There's also a requirement to encrypt data in transit over insecure networks, or when stored on portable devices, including laptops, but that doesn't seem to apply to main servers wired into racks.

(As to whether these apply to you, well... IANAL; the law claims to apply to anyone who's storing data about Massachusetts residents, but I don't know how well that actually sticks to people who are physically located elsewhere.)

Official summary of the requirements:

http://www.mass.gov/ocabr/docs/idtheft/201cmr1700reg.pdf
Looks rather interesting. Does anyone have any experiences using tools like ImageMagick for batch compositing/coloring/modifying PSD layers?
you don't really address anything to do with being a solo-founder in your article. sure your subject to external pressures like everyone, but the benefits of having co-founders allows you different perspectives. It forces you to challenge your own ideas and opinions, sometimes for good, some for bad, but your questioning.
The danger of doing it on your own is you can often go un-challenged and unless your very disciplined it will be easy to go often down a path that may not be the best direction
In the OP example, "using" has the same semantics as "typedef". The new syntax emerged from the need for "template typedefs".

http://www.stroustrup.com/C++11FAQ.html#template-alias
Not with the naked eye as the sunlight reflected by Earth makes that difficult, but we do have deep space telescopes, don't we?

I don't know much on this topic, but if we are able to spot planets that are light years away, then what's the problem with detecting objects that are gonna crash into us in the next 1000 years?

The only problem I can understand is that the sky is a pretty big place, but surely we also have a lot of time to detect such objects.
strange. It works on chrome on windows.
Oh. I wish they would have just shoehorned it into typedef somehow. I guess they must have had reasons why they couldn't.
I would submit to you that the reason why Apple is what it is today is because software & hardware are intertwined.
You seem to be confusing phenotypic complexity with actual complexity. Software engineering is the quintessential form of complexity reduction, code is never infinite in length. In machine learning you don't even need to come up with the rules, let the machine learn by itself.

Descartes loved reducing the "complex" world to math; Written law has been with humanity since times immemorial in fact being of the fundamentals of society, how is that failure?

You seem to imply that an automated judicial system would be immutable; i don't think anyone argues that laws should never change.
Why not use Bitbucket or someplace else that offers free private repos?
I started out on my own and it was very tough to begin with, once you can hire someone it really does help to have someone to talk through problems with.

Even though I started on my own I managed to get some part time mentor type people to support me, without advice from some kind of objective outsider I think it is exceedingly tough to make good decisions.
> Graham's position is that the data show that startups are not among them.

Actually I don't think that is his position. It is more that it is less likely to succeed.
I wonder how they are not hitting the twitter API limits, probably fetching a whole bunch of questions and caching them ..
I guess it's possible, but status quo is very powerful.
> iOS won't allow alternative browsers

Depends what you mean by "alternative browsers". iOS allows alternative browsers but not alternative engines (in that javascript executed on-device has to be executed through webcore). Thus Opera Mini is a completely independent implementation (all of its interpretation and rendering is done on Opera's own server), though most alternative browsers (and there are many) are UIWebView wrappers with additional features.

What iOS does not allow at all is setting an other browser as default.

> not sure if Windows RT does?

It's unclear. It definitely does not allow JITs (WinRT doesn't expose VirtualAlloc or VirtualProtect), which iOS does not allow either, but I don't know if a JIT-less completely independent browser implementation would be allowed.
These kinds of posts really bug me. Users don't give a rat's left buttock whether the "ecosystem" is closed or open or anything in between. They want something which works well and lets them buy stuff they want. Simple observation of consumer behavior has shown over and over again that people simply don't care about whether their stuff is tied to Apple or Google, or whether their location is being tracked by Twitter or Verizon, or whether they'll have a difficult time moving their music to a different device later on.

If this was written as another post trying to convince developers to avoid developing for closed ecosystems it wouldn't as bad; evangelists can be a good thing, even if he's fighting a losing battle. However, as this post seems to be geared towards consumers, it's almost completely pointless ranting.
Ask HN: How To Be Goliath In A David Market?
What's your thoughts ?

Thanks!
>A religious defense only helps religious people.

Anyone can claim religious reasons, there is no religion police (yet).
To me it reads like she objected for privacy reasons and the religious phrase given is just an argument they think might be accepted more easily. (I might be wrong, but it is a possible scenario.) - (Which is a sad thing in itself.)
There are three things I want to do with PC technology: store stuff, run programs (which may mean consuming the things I've stored), and stay connected with friends.

None of these should be dependent on location, hardware, or my personal affiliations. Geesh, it's almost 2013 folks. I should be able to walk up to a panel at a store, have it recognize me, and have all of my stuff available. Do whatever I would do at home using my PC if I like. Walk away from the panel and it resets. There's no clue or trail that I was even there.

We keep trying to use these metaphors about how the internet should work. It's a walled garden. It's a bazzar. It's a type of newspaper subscription. It's a club for friends. Each metaphor works okay -- for a while. But then the people making money off the metaphor start trying to make sure that we never grow past their little idea of happiness.

The tech community is smarter than this. Location-free, hardware-free, non-walled technology is the goal. Let's start going there.
Show HN: Farmly – find fresh, locally produced food in the UK
Thanks for the correction. I read the Isaacson book and the impression I got was that Woz wasn't "all in".
Assuming it was YC, why not just give your cofounder's mom a copy of one of the magazines where YC was on the cover. (Inc., Vanity Fair, etc.)
pretty fun for trolling strangers tbh

i didn't come across one serious question though. just a bunch of random nonsense 'where do we go when we die??' 'should i go to sleep???' etc
That's some unfortunate grammar.
"Skyfail: UK government's official job site advertises fake 007 position"

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/23/3681630/uk-government-off...
Did the app hit the Twitter API limits? I can't see any questions...
The tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't and businesses still will use any tactic possible to milk their accumulated crop of consumers dry and protect them from other wolves.

Better start listening to stallman if you want all that (I certainly do).
Amelia's Internet Governance Forum speech in Baku
You are going about it wrong, you need to talk to the audience. Try this phrasing instead:

"Use is three times as performant as utilize."
And I'm just reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.
Amazing book.
They want stuff that works yes, until it goes out of fashion or something that works better comes along. Then they learn th ecosystem lesson the hard way...

That is the problem.
Direct link to subject site:

http://youasked.it/
There was one called java once. Oh wait...
Hi Mike.

Seriously, I would not try to say LuaJIT is worse than PyPy, ever. I picked richards, because it's the best benchmark from the set I know, while still being not a very good one. I'm all for saying "this is a bad benchmark".

I think you're putting words into my mouth. I did not say PyPy is better for large scale programs, I said we have more focus and I derive it from what we use as PyPy benchmarks. Since it's impossible to compare, because we lack programs we don't actually know, but my gut feeling would be that LuaJIT would be slightly faster on something large.

The problem with Python (and why we choose our approach instead of hand crafting the JIT) is that Python is a very large language, with lots of builtin modules and types interfering in very unobvious ways, while Lua is not. This is why we decided it makes more sense to go that way, we probably wouldn't do it for Lua. People tried to write a JIT by hand for Python and failed so far, I'm however fine with the explanation we're just too dumb to do that.

Overall I find your answer way too agressive - I didn't claim PyPy is better, I mostly pointed out to things I know and added it's very unscientific and that scientific approach is very hard to get. Also your attack on our meta-tracing is unfounded - Python is just a very very large language with strange corner cases and we have to somehow deal with it. Feel free to implement it differently, but I'm happy with our approach.
It's amazing how smug we can be and how we can lose all sight of perspective.

When apple released their kit, there were already competitors in the marketplace.

What the wright brothers did was much more akin to inventing the first computer, period.
In C++11 you can write "typedef templates". However, as "typedef" has always been a misleading keyword (it does not define a new type, it declares an alias for an existing type) it was decided to instead overload the using keyword:

template <typename T>
using MyVector = std::vector<T, MyAlloc>;

As a side effect, it is now also possible to use using as a 1:1 replacement for typedef:

// strictly equivalent to typedef int MyInt;
using MyInt = int;
I agree with everything but your first phrase - a 5 years old kids can't pay for his education and can't enter in a legally binding contract. This breaks that line of thought.

Is that a collectivist troll?

In that event, let me warm your heart: your reasoning hold perfectly well if you replace education by healthcare.
Perhaps your idea of knowledge is limited.Communication skills? Dealing with people different from yourself? Dealing with people you actively dislike? Conflict resolution? Dealing with a power hierarchy? Learning how to navigate complex administrative systems and bureaucracies? Learning how to learn? Learning self-discipline?
And then there's the fact that self-schooling really is quite ineffective when compared to being tutored properly, and utterly dependent on the student being able to grasp difficult concepts without outside help...
Agreed. This is exactly why I don't buy "new" hardware like a tablet.
Egalitarianism is never a goal.

A fair competition however is.

The best will rise up - working 12 hours a day if needed. How is that a bad thing?
Stream or rent media. "Buying" songs in an online service is as quaint as maintaining a collection of 8-track tapes. The "buy" option for movies and TV shows exists purely to extract extra money from anal retentives (what percentage of "purchased" shows ever get watched a second time?)
"In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.".

Not exactly my experience. I agree that there are many programmers that think they are fluent in a new language after a few months.

Learning the syntax of a new language, like learning how chess pieces move, takes a few hours. Mastering a programming language is like mastering chess, a lifelong journey.
Imagination (GPUs in iPhone) buys MIPS
Don't you know there's an app called Doubletwist that syncs your itunes collections to android phones? That music bought from the iTunes store is DRM-free?
Do people who write C++ also manually allocate disk blocks instead of using the filesystem? Just use a garbage collector. These problems will all go away.
There is still controversy about whether the Wright's were first with powered flight or not. Around the same time the Wright's Flyer took off you had Langley and Santo-Dumont. Both were in weeks of getting their first.

Also, the Wright's set aviation back a little with their patents on powered flight and wing warping. Even though control surfaces were better they basically had their competitors under their thumb with other 20+ year patents.
And even if it had taken a decade, that almost certainly wouldn't have set us back a decade today.
If there's no way to add features to the underlying core then it's not really much better than just an alternative browser skin. A JITless browser is not going to be much good for performance sensitive applications either.

This is enough power to enable the OS vendor to gag browser apps into being second class citizens effectively.
Use GIMP and write your own scripts, it's got a pretty comprehensive scripting environment.
I think people would just go nuts. In Germany you allready have a big movment for privacy (Piratparty for example).
What's the difference on PCs then? If users don't know how to move the stuff on their smartphones, they probably wouldn't know how to do it on a PC. Plus, many probably wouldn't know how to handle all that media period, except what's available from web services - where again there is no difference. I fail to see the point.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is only easy to remember because you already have a reason to remember it (ie a strong brand, Disney, has already pushed it into your memory).

If it didn't have a movie behind it, you'd say, "Super-what?"
There was a time where stories like "Something completely inane happened, here is the break-down" peaked, which rendered a lot of people practically allergic to post-game analyses like this.

That doesn't mean that all of them are bad, and I really liked this article, and hope to see more.
Firstly, in the hypothetical situation I'd like to see, who ages?

But even without that - HELL YES.
Thank you very much for this gift!
I should be able to walk up to a panel at a store, have it recognize me, and have all of my stuff available. Do whatever I would do at home using my PC if I like. Walk away from the panel and it resets. There's no clue or trail that I was even there.

How is it supposed to recognize you, but then have no clue or trail that you were even there?

The tech community is smarter than this. Location-free, hardware-free, non-walled technology is the goal. Let's start going there.

And who's going to pay for the platform to do all of that?

How do you keep the weeds out of your garden? Simple, build a wall. There is a reason walled gardens work.
Most uses of a language don't require mastery. Especially if the rest of the team knows better than to write unnecessarily clever code when boring code would do just fine.
Oh you will be suprised!

I think that some people suffer from a fear of learning something new and pushing the boundaries of their knowledge out further.
which would lead to a better algorythm that is less abuseable
Even more scary if the link isn't over ssl, but even than third party services could make it risky.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/893959/if-you-use-https-w...
Just off the top of my head, the cotton industry and banana industry are notable counterexamples to your argument.
Then the Data Liberation Front comes to your rescue.

http://www.dataliberation.org/takeout-products/google-docs
Much as I love the thesis of this post (I love it's formatting much much less -- more paragraphs breaks please) I don't agree that it is in fact possible to be an omni-competent generalist. Switching between Rails and Django is definitely pretty easy, but that experience isn't going to help you switch to, say, programming DSPs, or designing streaming algorithms, or architecting massively concurrent systems. There definitely is specialisation, and if you don't see it it's because you're blind to the box you're currently living in.

Total agreement with "You should always strive to become better!"
Abstracting the ownership behind an interface presumably is needed when the ownership model is very complex. From my experience this is nothing but a big red flag. If you need a class to manage an ownership, it means that you can't easily trace its movement, in which case it means that it is a total bitch to debug, leave alone being able to read through the code and understand where that damn ownership is at any given moment.

I know it's beautiful language with a laundry list of features, but keeping things simple is still the best approach:

#define __no_copying(type) \
\
private: \
type(const type &); \
type & operator = (const type &); \
public:

class foo
{
public:
foo();
__no_copying(foo);
...
}

In a spaghetti-less code this typically applies in 99% of all cases. There's a remaining 1%, which it's easier and cleaner to handle on a case by case basis.