skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always respond this way, and I always get scorned here. But, the iPhone platform has worked for us. Updates have been a bit slow, but we feel like we have been rewarded for our work.

Some things are tricky and unintuitive, but that's the way it is in any market. Selling a product just isn't easy. You are always fighting against smart people, and there are unknowns.

I feel like people shouldn't get into the App Store market thinking that they will make a million dollars their first app. Only a few people can succeed like that at any time. But, if you jump through Apple's hoops, listen to your customers, and try and serve a real need, you can make a living on the iPhone.

People expect launching an iPhone app to be like launching a website, which you can do in a single day. They expect to be able to push whatever code they want, and push releases whenever they want.

Well, the App Store isn't like that. And while my website is fun and cool, it doesn't make much money. My iPhone app does.
Also check out http://ddance.fm
Microsoft Sues Three in Click-Fraud Scheme
It's an indication of the motivational factor of the promise of money. Every gold rush "success story" sends N more enterprising individuals chasing after the big payout.

I've met our payroll for months on iPhone contract work and licensing, but not one of our clients or customers has made back their initial investment. I hear the same from other iPhone developers.

Moreover, we've found Apple to be capricious in their regular and seemingly inescapable rejections, absolutely impossible to contact directly for any reason, and in the worst cases, only responsive to bad press.

Personally, I wouldn't write another in-house iPhone application for love or money, but I'm happy to capitalize on the gold rush while I focus on other platforms.
Twitter's impact is mind boggling, although post-Google I should be used to how much and how quickly software can make an impact. You think the developers realized 3 years ago they were creating something that would affect the political situation in Iran? :)
That's funny, so was I!
that game would probably be a huge success.

Duke Nukem? Winner

Grand Theft Auto Series? Winner
Clixpy is recording your actions right now
eatingwords.com
papersubmit.com (never finished it...anyone with drupal experience who wants to finish let me know)
weheartthings.com
Welcome to the Brave New World: TweetPsych (not my project)
My understanding, from a contact within Apple, is that the reviewers are indeed Apple FTEs. It wasn't clear if they were somewhere on the main campus or in one of the satellite buildings, but I was led to believe they are in Cupertino.

Certainly some of the stats I was able to get from testers (thanks PinchMedia) suggest the testers have access to the AT&T network in the US. I could probably find IP addresses from Apple's /8 if people wanted to try to validate further.
The App Store team simply knew what the questions were going to be like and were unwilling to face them.

I haven't been following WWDC very closely, did Apple do something major to piss off developers? Or is Marco referring to general App Store issues?
Am I the odd one out in listening to jazz while I code?
I've heard that proxies are being passed around already. Also, saw some assistance in that area going on over at slashdot..
I'm waiting to get a new job to try this Ruby on Rails apps : http://wiki.github.com/jamis/bucketwise
Last time I did this (10ish years ago) the standard was a product called "eVal" that was basically a huge Excel plug-in.

It took FOREVER to enter all the data/variables, but it gave you a pretty good valuation idea.

A quick Google search shows there are many similar tools out there today.

For what you are describing, a modified/simplified template could probably be developed in a week.
Donations are not a business model. Its putting out a tip cup and hoping money falls into it. Tip cups do not have a curious property in physics that causes money to be attracted to them.

I do downloadable software, of the "makes people substantially less money than Wordpress" variety. Roughly 1.8% of downloads result in people paying me money. The average paid me is, I say without fear of contradiction, far above the average donation any Wordpress developer with a significant amount of donations has received. (Edit to add: here's a point of reference. Back when MoveableType was donationware, the average donation was 38. Cents.)

When you offer something for donations, you're saying "It would be REALLY NICE if you could put ANY money into this here tip cup because, as you know, almost nobody will. That $1 there, that makes you a better person than 99.9% of the public." This is a cruddy frame of mind to put your I-can't-believe-its-not-a-customer into from the perspective of separating them from their money.

When you offer stuff for sale, you say "It would be TOTALLY MANDATORY that you pay me exact what it says on the sticker for this here thing. Everybody pays for it, except thieves. [In point of fact 98.2% of people do not pay for it, but I don't clobber my users over the head with that fact, now do I.] Offering to pay me $1 for it doesn't make you nice, it makes you a cheapskate and parasite on society." (And the best part is you never have to tell people this because they already know.)

There are people who do well with donations. Rick Brewster of Paint.NET is the only one who springs readily to mind for me. He pushes the donations fairly aggressively (+) and distributes a program which is probably competitive with some of Adobe's low-end consumer offerings.

+ Another problem with donations: they fail quite frequently because people are embarrassed to ask for money, like they feel they are doing something wrong. So they bury the tip cup out of the way and don't aggressively promote it within the application, for fear of being thought poorly of by cheapskates who think $1 is too much to pay for $APP. People with this philosophy will never be mollified, and charging money from the getgo means you never have to worry about what they think of you.
I don't think Apple would agree with you and, since they make the device, they pretty much get the final (official) say on that. They view it as an appliance that happens to combine several different sets of functionality into one physical device. If you break out each component you'll see they're almost always very tightly controlled and otherwise not open to general purpose (unlicensed) access.

iPod / PMP (Apple, Microsoft, Creative)
Camera (Cannon, Nokia, Sony, etc)
GPS unit (Garmin, Tom Tom, etc)
Phone (cheap flip phone)
Gaming device (PSP, DS)

There are exceptions of course -- and workarounds/hacks to circumvent protection (just like Jailbreaking on the iPhone) but more or less these sorts of closed appliance like devices are quite popular on their own. Apple simply combined them into one physical device and kept the same rules.

Apple doesn't sell the iPhone as a general purpose computer so any consumer who buys one expecting it to function that way probably bought the wrong product. I can understand why someone might want that option but it doesn't change the fact that Apple does not sell a product that fits those needs and, based on the success of stand alone devices sold in the same fashion, it is almost completely irrelevant in real world sales or usage for most people. There is of course jailbreaking -- there's also Linux on iPhone hardware. I'm not sure how much progress they've made but I seem to recall they at least had a booting kernel a while back.
Alarming? If you're working 100 hours a week, you can't do anything else, and need someone else to take care of everything around the house for you, because you are spending all of your waking hours at work. This will destroy your relationships in a short period of time. Furthermore, this will unquestionably reduce your life expectancy. It takes a hell of a lot of money to compensate for even a few years in that situation.

Note: I'm not talking about working 60 hour weeks, which is very taxing, but nothing like this. 100 Hour weeks mean that there are no weekends, ever. You're working 14.25 hours per day, which is just enough to wake up, drive to work, eat your meals, come home, and sleep, day after day, with no respite.
It's awfully nice of Adobe to release the specifications of their protocols after they've been fully reverse engineered and described by 3rd parties making the actual formal specifications rather redundant.
what the hell are you talking about? I make my own notes within a book. A lot of times I even add things I have read from other sources in the book I buy. Once I own the book, I am allowed to do anything with it as long as I am using it for my own personal use.
you are putting four kids through a hell that will probably damage them emotionally for life...and you're worried about becoming a better entrepreneur??? jesus people, get your priorities straight
Austin TX 78728 Storage To Consider
Renting a storage unit in Austin TX 78728 can afford many different benefits.
8 Things we can Learn From Homeless Marketing
And in fact, they are using Twitter to keep up to date on what proxies are working at any given time:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=functioning+iran
(I'm so very very sorry, but this is an off-topic comment. It seems that I can't comment on old threads, and I cannot send private messages to users either... so I'm stumped, and here I am.

You mentioned in one of your posts that you're an owner of the Natural 4000 keyboard - I just received mine from amazon (after picking up some symptoms of RSI) -- I love it, except one little thing that has me thinking that I should return this: the space bar is abnormally hard to depress. Is that so for your 4000 as well? Should I just return this keyboard and get another brand, or should I request a different 4000 without this 'defect'?
Thanks, and sorry again for the odd manner of messaging.)
The use of git at Google is (AFAIK, IANAG) limited to checking out the revisions of a limited portion of the tree. Kind of like using git-svn to track just part of a repository and managing most of the checkout using bare svn.
I guess that depends on the user. The user who wanted basic stuff like MMS, multi-tasking and tethering hasn't been getting the best experience.
The number of "iterations" in biological cognition is quite small. You don't get many synaptic transmissions in the time it takes for us to have some act of cognition.
Consider video game consoles like the Nintendo DS, PSP, Xbox, Playstation, Wii. All of those appliances are unable to run unapproved code, and sell in huge numbers. A mobile phone is really more like a video game console than a computer. Simple, reliable, easy to use and fast.
Git does not like the use cases the author writes about. Git does not like gigantic sprawling repositories (Linus mentioned in his Google talk that this was a problem with importing the KDE tree). Git does not like large binaries (there is some chatter on the mailing list about somewhat improving the situation), which makes it tricky to use for, e.g., games. Yes, Git is not perfect for every group and every use case. News at 11.

Beyond that, the author's snarky comments fall flat until they simply begin to contradict themselves: "The distributed stuff isn't really asked for, or needed... Just give me a version control system that [lets me] merge changes into my coworker's repos, without having to check them in first."
Letters to Joel Spolsky
I have about 3 years experience with lithium ion vs. lithium polymer batteries whilst building my own e-bike battery pack, and using both types of batteries in my Thinkpad.
I find it somehow cool that there are people who have studied poop-eating plants for 20 years. Are there really 20 years worth of knowledge there?
Facebook Chat Hits 1 Billion Messages A Day
This shows that Twitter is gaining too much power, isn't it?
Sounds like they're both optimized for very different use cases and very different definitions of scalability. Good to know.
This reminds me the recent HN news item saying "Non profits kill the innovation". But this article makes me think that things are even worse than that. Wordpress should do something to change this I guess.
So... you want a Terracotta-based Distributed Cache
Where and when to use PHP, ASP or ASP.NET?
Looking beyond the hype and FUD slinging to show you where and when to use PHP, ASP and ASP.NET for your web apps.
The iPhone is slick. Its got an amazing UI for a mobile device. The input is clever. Its very shiny.

But having had one for about 2 years, 1 year of which it was only about 60% functional due to an "insensitive" touch screen, and having lived with the less than friendly support staff, I'm pretty confident in saying that's about as deep as it goes.

Its very shiny. Its designed to look pretty in Walmart and in AT&T stores and in Apple stores. Its designed to have nifty little IMHO useless widgets that impress your friends in 2 minute water cooler conversations.

But when it came time for me to finally buy a new phone, there was no way in hell I was buying an iPhone.

Thus, this article surprises me in no way. I had no interest in developing for the thing as soon as I read the license agreement, especially after having used it for a while.

It would seem to me there's a huge opportunity here for someone else to come in and blow the doors off of them, in terms of developer friendliness, openness, support, price, etc... but in searching for a new phone I didn't see anyone clearly better.
Poll: Which assembly language(s) have you written code in?
Z80 family
6502 family
68000 family
8086 family
PowerPC family
ARM family
How to Retire On $500 Per Month
Hackers ready to enter in your inbox
First they stole data from your system then barged into your profile on Orkut or Facebook and now, they are attacking your email account.
haha...nice one
Well, from all I'm hearing, it's not like iPhone is the get-rich-quick scheme that lots of devs were hoping for.

I realize some people feel all hip with a iPhone in their pocket, but I don't think the devs really have enough reason to stick with Apple through this behavior.

I certainly don't.
Or the user who actually uses a phone to make calls.
That doesn't make it any less odious. In fact, that makes it MORE odious! You're proving my point. ;-)
Isn't it a balancing act to give the END USER the best quality the company believes the user should get?
My sense is that for the last century or more the biggest struggle has been just getting it done anyway you can. Then making lots of it.
The next paradigm will be about making the right thing in moderate amounts.
I see less mass market, except where the production costs require it, and more medium and small markets.
Being a nomad in one's country is fun if one's country is big. I come from a tiny European country which would take only a few weeks to explore, eh eh.

That's a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing the URL.
Be nice if I could see how much it costs before I give it my email address :/
I had a Crackberry once. Worst thing ever. Email sucked. Browsing sucked. Mapping sucked. Crappy menu system with the actions I wanted to use most frequently buried in the deep abyss of boring, corporate-inspired menu hierarchies. The thing was as ugly as bat shit. I voted with my feet.
Here are some examples of machines built using EMC as the controller
Heh, I didn't want to start a opinion war but you have a point. One of the iPhone users I know actually went out and bought another phone to use in his car because he was so sick of dropped calls.
Why not link to the original story, instead of blog spam (albeit from a famous blogger)?

Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple
http://www.marco.org/122990476
Could I trouble you to provide a link?

I'd like to help out if possible (have a couple of spare servers not doing anything now).
That would be the single best thing to happen to my computing environment ever.
Pretty interesting article, once I got past how hot the author was, and how young she was when she became a professor at MIT. Women like that used to fill my dreams.

I think it's self evident that language influences articulate cognition. It's a discrete index to a world of continuous phenomenon. But not all cognition is articulate. How far do our linguistic markers reach? Take math for example. When a mathematician intuits a proof, he's already conversant in the language of mathematics. He'll use that language to construct a formal proof. But did it also help in the first place?
Sounds like he'd run the US auto industry even deeper into the ground. He has the same broken mentality of telling consumers what they want and not learning from what they are actually buying. He just happens to believe that it's electric cars consumers want whereas the old US auto industry believed it was gigantic SUVs and hideous station wagon/mini-van abominations even when the market was changing under their feet. For the most part affordable/dependable 35-40MPG cars are completely acceptable to people. Most people don't need 100MPG hybrids or 100% electric cars and most won't pay the premium for them.
No, it's the boot loader, locked to the device that they own, that actively blocks loading unsigned software.
> One of the big mysteries is that Somali immigrants to the US and Sweden have a much higher rate of autism than their native counterparts.

Given that Somalia lacks a government, I would imagine health care there is rudimentary, and it's likely that autism (and other conditions) is under-diagnosed.
Compare Landlord Insurance
LandlordBuddy.co.uk provides useful landlord insurance information, and allows you to view landlord insurance plans and compare landlord insurance.
Oh but I do get to rewrite paragraphs in books to my hearts desire. I may not be allowed to sell the books so made to others, but in the privacy of my own home I get to do what ever I want. Not so in the case of the iphone et al.
Proxies for Iranians
Priyanka Chopra Looking Hot & Sexy at IIFA Awards 2009
"Postman noted that Mayer had taken large portions of the legitimate Paul Allen Web sites in order to make his site look as if it was connected to the billionaire."

Seems like a legitimate seizure to me. If you're actively trying to fool your clients in order to make a profit off someone else's name, that seems like a legitimate cause for domain seizure. It's like someone registering gooogle, making a google copy, then putting their own ads on it.
As I said in the other version of this:

Psycholinguistics research has repeatedly shown that the amount of influence is minimal, amounting to, in general, forcing you to pay attention to certain aspects of the world more so when you're describing using language than when you're thinking about things in other ways. E.g., you notice color differences more quickly or more accurately when you have to choose between two words that your language could have, than if you were picking a tee-shirt. Or you're more attentive to left and right orientation if your language has words for left and right when you're talking about something positioned relative to your body, but if you're just trying to navigate somewhere or looking for something, your language doesn't affect your thinking.

This effect is precisely what you'd expect, ofcourse, because you get it for absolutely everything else. If your culinary habits involve avoiding high fructose corn syrup, when you're looking for food you're going to be quicker to notice the presence of HFCS than if you're just talking to someone and they mention the corn industry's current HFCS production rates or whatever.

The generalization: when some cognitive task requires that you pay special attention to something, you will. Language is not special in this regard.

And that is how language influences the way we think.
This has to be somewhat location specific. AT&T seems to have some of the best reception where I usually spend most of my time, the Gulf and East Coasts. The iPhone seems to get as good or better reception than my old Nokia (disclaimer: this was a very old Nokia). Apparently it is terrible on the West Coast.

Of course these are isolated data points. I do think that Apple has made a mistake by limiting the iPhone to one carrier, especially one that can arouse strong hatred like AT&T.
You own a copy of the book, but you do not own the contents of the book. Similarly, the owner of an iPhone owns the hardware, but does not own the software. Claiming that one should have the same rights over Apple's software that you have over a copy of a book that you own strikes me as nonsensical.

I understand that people want Apple's software to allow certain things, but I think stating it as if Apple is impinging on the user's rights because it does not is a dishonest exaggeration.
Very cool, but in itself not very useful? Can you add some metrics for tracking how users use the site? (If this is already there plz ignore)

What would help me is seeing the aggregation of use across several users instead of the mouse movements of one.
JEWELLERY: Necklaces, bracelets and earrings 
A piece of black jewellery is a must have piece in any jewellery box and this collection of

handmade necklaces and necklace made from Black Onyx and many other black beads and pendants offers a

huge selection*
When looking for a piece of handmade jewellery then a classic black necklace that has been handmade into a

stylish design is always my favourite. This site offers may unique and original black necklace

designs
If like me you like something a little bit different when it comes to your jewellery then have a look at this collection

of handmade black jewellery that has all been designed and handmade from black beads by a young designer
*This collection of black jewellery has necklaces, bracelets and earrings that have all been

handmade from a beautiful collection of black beads and black semi-precious stones into beautiful and original

designs.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens in these stone age regimes when a communications technology or Internet advancement (this may be quite a bit down the road) emerges that cannot be easily or really blocked at all.
I'm sure that's AT&T. I'm in Australia and there's been no such problem personally or from anything I've heard.
Yeah, I experience problems with mine as well. Not dropped calls, but rather the software/OS freezing/crashing more often than it should. I expected much more from Apple in that regard.
They've learned to block facebook, flicker, friendfeed, and text messaging, haven't they? I'm sure they'll learn to block this too.

But by then hopefully technology and people will have moved onto the next new thing...
I agree. I was just about to copy that same line from the article. The article title is sensationalized. I had assumed he took it from someone also with the name Paul Allen, but it was just someone who made a satirical film of the real Paul Allen.
Ask HN: Is this VC event legit?
Is this VC event worth going?
http://vctaskforce.com/content/view/565/
Has anyone attended any of their events? Are they legit?
I thought the dropped call problems were over until yesterday. I have to turn off 3G in order to make a call. This phone is pathetic when it comes to making calls. My razr was so much better as a phone.
Despite this overstatement, you did get the point didn't you?
Simple Steps To Drive Way More Traffic to Your Business Blog
It’s one thing to start a company blog. It’s something else entirely to get people to visit.

Driving traffic to your small business’ corporate blog takes equal parts old-fashioned marketing and contemporary Web tools. It’s a mix of common sense practices like printing a blog’s URL on company business cards with search engine optimization and blog software plug-ins to come up with the right formula to motivate people to visit, according to corporate bloggers and blog marketing experts.
From what I saw in official Chinese media, the penalty for cheating is being barred from retaking the exam for two years, which I found to be surprisingly benevolent. Those that manufacture and distribute devices used for cheating face jail time.