skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...anything not directly inside the control of the company inspires cold sweat and shakes from management types..."

Along with shareholders, creditors, vendors, customers, auditors, employees, directors, SOX compliance, SEC compliance, hell anyone with a vested interest or fiduciary responsibility.
You can report them to twitter by way of direct message to http://twitter.com/spam (although none of the spammers I've reported have been removed)

You can also block them, but I don't think this achieves much.

Alternatively, just ignore them (my preferred method).
And what if they offer mirroring/redundancy as part of Azure?
---"I wrote Mongrel and then gave it away, on the hopes that it would help a bunch of other people, and that giving it away would come back to me in some way. Maybe a job, or some respect, or hell maybe my own company doing more software like it."---

I'd agree with "none whatsoever" ... I'm sure he has plenty of respect ... but to take advantage of that respect you still have to go out and market/network yourself to take advantage (or have someone help you do so if that's not your thing). I'm sure it looks great on a resume.
App Store tops 1.5 billion downloads in first year
I took a class on "Revolution in the 20th Century" as an undergrad, and the professor there pointed out that Chinese agriculture is built on marginally-fertile land; they absolutely depend on large irrigation networks and on using human waste from the cities to fertilize the countryside. And those networks require a large centralized government to maintain them. Which is why China has had large centralized government, of one form or another, for so many centuries (although not continuously).
I'm pretty sure Google gave up on its online office offerings as discrete apps.

I think WAVE was their move. It has formatting tools on par with Docs and has a much more natural-for-our-time data model. (mixed content, sharing and collaboration supported as a matter of course, extensible for pulling from or publishing to any number of destinations, etc)

And as WAVE is federated, if Google's branded offering to business doesn't include a self-hosting option, someone else's will.
if someone was making millions from work I'd done, I wouldn't feed proud in the least. I'd feel like an idiot.

You should probably clarify. I bet if you were getting a kickback you wouldn't care if someone else were making money. Like if you were a writer or musician and your agent were making a healthy cut, you wouldn't care if you were getting paid too, right?

So it really comes down to being jealous other people figured out how to make money from your stuff when you couldn't.. right? That skill has value and perhaps they deserve to be making the cash.
Tell HN: My startup is giving away Pitchfork Music Festival passes
Dormitory converted into gigantic Tetris display (2007)
> It just makes me laugh a bit that some people think that keeping documents on their server is more "safe" when they are much easier to break into than Google and with most times very poor remote data backup procedures and tests.

It's about accountability (believe me it's a pain). Google wont take responsibility for "problems" - down time for example - in the same way. If everything is in house and there is a break in or critical down time people can be blamed, scalped and so on.
I love embedded servers. I don't think adding SSL would be that hard. I've done something very similar in C# and kept putting off SSL, only to find that X.509 authentication was trivial.

The harder part is maintaining session info between requests and garbage collecting dead sessions, though you could just authenticate each request.
"The other reason I love writing email software is nobody else does. You guys are all giant pansies, even with a project like Lamson you’re still all afwaid of big bad monsta SMTP."

http://james.apache.org/
I'm talking more about "library" style code. BSD means companies can integrate it, and potentially contribute back. And this does happen. GPL may mean they simply do not use it, and thus the project loses out on potential contributions.
Mind boggling. And I thought The Wire might have been exaggerating for dramatic effect.

I wonder how these maintenance costs compare to the costs of a typical IT setup? If it's actually cheaper, then it looks like a classic case of being stuck in a local minimum.
The best university is the one you feel is right for you. You could go to the best university in the world, but if you don’t fit together, you’ll accomplish nothing. Conversely, you could end up going to a relatively ‘poor’ university and click with it; you’ll end up making so much more out of the experience.

I’d recommend that you get a shortlist of a few universities that appeal to you (around 3-5, depending on budget and time restrictions), and visit them.
So that's the source of all those Ballmer+chair jokes on slashdot.
If you have too many people in your feed to track, you need an app that sorts them for you so that you see tweets from the most important/interesting people in your stream first (not necessarily people you know).

I don't know...I manage Twitter accounts for the blogs I update, but I don't use my personal account very much. Even with the business accounts, I'm horrible about checking for @ replies and usually respond several hours later-which kind of defeats the "real-time" purpose of Twitter, does't it?

It seems like you have to be always on to really make it work for you, but there are many hours during the day where I need to be focused on what I'm doing and not on checking Twitter.

But, you have one more new, non-spam follower anyway!
You couldn't be bothered to read six pages of a very well written and thought-out article? WTF is wrong with my generation? :(
To the original author: you might want to consider your marketing. I've never heard of your app, and it's the exact kind of game I like.

I'm not impressed by your site, either, because it does practically nothing to sell me.

Your giant header graphic says nothing at all about the game.

The actual name of the product is hard to read and in a poor location (not to mention, unremarkable).

The headline "Streaming Color Studios Presents" is useless, because I neither know who you are, nor do I care.

The screenshot is cuteish, but not compelling enough on its own. The app honestly looks too busy, and busy in a chaotic way, not in an awesome multilayered way like Stone Loops of Jurassica.

"Now on the App Store!" may be impressive to you, but it's not to anyone else.

Your call to action is practically hidden because it's light grey on a light grey cloud, and the smallest thing there. The whole banner isn't clickable, which is, if you ask me, insane.

On your main page, on my 30" monitor, WHAT Dapple is isn't even above the fold. And I keep my browser size about 85% of the vertical height of my Cinema Display.

And on and on. I could go on forever. And I regularly pay more than $1.99 for my iPhone kicks.

Your article's overall premise is pretty silly, given that the very existence of the iPhone proves that cost is only a differentiator in a market full of mediocrity.

Your game is admittedly "another color matcher."

Its design doesn't jump out.

Your site does little to sell it.

I haven't heard of it by any other means (and all my friends, like me, are deeply into puzzle/matching games).

Maybe that's why you can't sell your game. It's easy to blame price, but feh. Price is a symptom in your case. I see you wrote how you had a temporary spike after you dropped your price. That doesn't mean that price is the main reason your app isn't selling, just that at a lower price, those other problems are slightly compensated for.

It seems like your only source of sales, to me, is people browsing the App Store itself. Well, that's just not going to cut it, for anyone except a few statistical outliers.

Yes, it takes a lot of exposure or a lot of prepping to convince to buy something over 99 cents, that's true.

But if you do that exposure and prepping, and be a Purple Cow, you can easily charge more.

Do yourself a favor and spend less time writing articles about iPhone app prices, and study the art of making sales.
CDs have indeed been replaced for anyone below 30. Radio still offers a group experience not matched on the net, and you can't get internet radio in cars, but I wouldn't buy radio shares. Faxes are obviously old technology and will disappear when the software is easier to use. Mail will be around for as long as we respect paper docs above electronic ones but the transition is well on its way. Don't know why you thought trains would be obsolete.

These things take time, but change is unambiguously, if slowly, in progress. Just wait!
The GPL and Derivative Works
"There are hundreds of thousands of programmers who wouldn't have jobs if not for that fact."

Not my experience. There would still be plenty of work for those hundreds of thousands of programmers.

The reason that most companies have programmers is not because the want 100% control over the software and data. It's because they have no choice. They can't find pre-packaged software that perfectly supports their business rules.

Moving their apps to the cloud does nothing to change the way they run their business. They'll still need the same programmers to support that.
I don't know if it's legal, but if they obey robots.txt the publisher shouldn't complain.
YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye
Well their sole act of spamming might be simply following me, but really it's a neat little trick.

1) Open a new Twitter account
2) Post some innocuous stuff, like poetry, or quotes
3) Post an advertising message
4) Add 10000 followers
5) Each of those goes back to your main page to see who you are and reads the spam message
6) $$$

I can see where this is going to get out of control very, very quickly.
Don't very large companies use services from providers like SunGard (hosting) and IronMountain (records management for compliance)?
"what's the point again? I'm still missing something here."

When you find that missing point, please let me know ..
Meebo employs libpurple developers. The libpurple team looks to have specifically OK'd Meebo's use of libpurple. I don't think they feel "hard done by".
Then they don't have a privacy advantage anymore.
Which email client users are you targetting?

Thunderbird and gmail both have abilities to show RSS feeds natively (gmail via web links).
Thomas Jefferson's Geeky Gadget-filled House
Is it really a duplicate post if the two submissions link out to different articles?
haha, the blink tag!! He is the responsible!
Rackspace Discusses its Cloud Strategy
I don't want to minimize their achievements, but it never takes one or two people to build something that large. There is an entire organization to support their efforts -- sales, customer support, QA, etc... There is a tendency to "hero"-ize developers in big companies, but at the end of the day it is an organization-wide effort.
Yes.
Facts can't be legally protected.

A compilation is protected only as a completed work.
You can't, for example, photocopy the yellow pages and resell it. But you could copy each and every phone number from the yellow pages and use those numbers in your competing directory.
Send:
@spam @<Account name of spammer>

Or you can directly message @spam

http://twitter.com/spam
yeh your right. My fault i should have highlighted the idea of intellectual property. Company payrolls are not as critical (in this respect) as the latest word document detailing the spec for the next greatest consumer product.

Companies will use outside tech when and if they are forced too. If it can come in house or they have a choice then voila :) If offered the choice between standard Office and Google docs the choice is clear for them - keep it on the premesis. However a self hosted version of Office-"Cloud" will appeal to those who see the value in cloud hosted apps (even if the whole point - reliability - is somewhat lost).
I estimated $100 because it is sort of a niche filehost that also has an application that would be spidering small parts of the internet to find content. I can see my low traffic site burning through 500GB/mo in bandwidth which would be about $100 at slicehost.
Doesn't quite roll off the fingers as well as amazon or wikipedia though. Anyway, those entries are as valuable as anything else. If I'm searching for the title of a book, why shouldn't stores that sell the book come up?

It sounds like some people in this thread would prefer non-profit communist Google, rather than a proper search engine.
@font-face makes the web pretty (or ugly). (Needs FF 3.5 or Safari)
Well, you would if I could find you...Twitter can't find anyone named danielbmarkham.
People are just terrible at reasoning about money. People don't know where the money they spend goes, people don't know where they waste money on, and so on.

( My biggest vice is wasting time picking the best "value for money" product, while I would be much better off if I work a few more hours, and then buy the best reviewed product in the most expensive class. )

Most people are absurdly irrational when it comes to money. Luckily, people are predictably irrational. So the sane solution is to avoid the whole iPhone marketplace.

A great product can still fail when people realize they should be willing to pay for it, and yet can't bring themselves to pull the trigger. Some markets just are like that.
Don't pay attention to your followers. Don't reciprocate followers. Follow people who interest you, or who you've exchanged messages with. I've had zero problem with Twitter spam, but then, I just use Twitter. I don't fret about what my follower list looks like.
Useful patches for OpenSSH represent a competitive advantage that other companies do not have.

True. However, they also result in additional costs -- you may have to rewrite your patches when new versions of OpenSSH are released, you will have additional system administration costs (you won't be able to use precompiled OpenSSH binaries), and you may have additional training costs (it's easy to find a sysadmin who knows how to use OpenSSH; not so easy to find someone who knows how to use OpenSSH-plus-your-local-patches).

Even worse, there's a risk -- and I've seen this happen to many companies -- that whoever wrote your patches originally will leave the company, and you'll be stuck wanting to update to a newer OpenSSH but without the expertise needed to merge your patches.

I'm not saying that it's always to your advantage to contribute patches back -- but I think in most cases the costs of keeping your own patches outweigh any competitive advantage they may give you.
That's weird, copied directly from the page it's:

danielbmarkham

must be typo somewhere or something?
I was referring to the actual programming only. Sorry if I inferred otherwise.
Nothing new: "it's a kernel," and so on.
This tip is awesome.
Twitter imposed a 2000 follower limit because of that exact fact. You can never be following more than 2000+(#_of_followers). So maybe you can make $$ and not $$$...
I'm going to town on my list. Thanks.
Telecoms certainly have to take the first step (and they'll drag their feet the entire way), but the second step is getting people to change their lives around the technology. IMO, most of the US would still lag behind (in terms of mobile technology) even if the wireless infrastructure was upgraded because they don't really care to use it (i.e. they're happy with the way they do things now).

As for this API, I think it's fantastic, but they should really take it a step further. If there's some sort of national or international consortium of retailers, they should create a free, unified API such that a good produced anywhere in the world will have an entry in the system. It'd even be cool if they added a rebate submission system into it as well, instead of having to mail in rebates for things.
i did my best work on beos before i worked at be, unfortunately. this is what got me hired:

http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/

be had their "focus shift" shortly before i started. after that, they were no longer pushing beos as a standalone product. they repurposed it as an os for embedded devices. the whole company was working on the ill-fated sony evilla when i got there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_eVilla

it was pretty obvious to me and most of my fellow employees i talked to that this product was not going to be a success. it wasn't.

be went out of business seven months after i got there and i was laid off. would have been a good experience if i'd jumped on the bandwagon two or three years earlier, i bet.
Troll.

I wanted to beta test a cryptography pentesting class in Chicago and figured I'd want to fill 8 seats to make it worthwhile. I twittered "If 8 people tell me they're interested in a free crypto class in Chicago, I'll schedule it". I've now got 40+ people, more than 20% of whom are flying into Chicago for it.

The whole process took me something like 5-10 minutes.

If you have nothing to say and nothing you want to hear about, there is no point to being on Twitter. But spare the rest of us the snark. I did Usenet since 1994, IRC, IM, LinkedIn and we have a fairly solid blog, and none of those media could have done what Twitter just did for us.
How Spore encodes creatures in PNG files
That's one of the things I miss about working in the City, changing out of workclothes at the end of the day, it really did have a psychological effect.
Anistock Video Backgrounds Hits 40,000 clips
I wish I could upvote you 100 times for mentioning that book. Probably one of the most informative books I've ever read, and it's only ~200 pages.

Seriously folks, get a copy and read it. It'll make a huge impact on your perspective of other people.
This is simply false for the "Incorporated by Reference" standards (see point #2). Many regulations state "X must satisfy ANSII standard Y", when ANSII standard Y is not free.

Additionally, some municipalities have local building codes available only for a price.
Amazing Color Illusions
> Eighty-four percent of the public thinks that science has had a positive impact on society

And the remaining 16% thinks we are not better off because of electricity, medicine and buildings & bridges that don't collapse?

People who think science is optional in any society have not realized our entire lifestyle has been made possible by science.
Spore actually does this with the PNG files from the "Sporepedia". You can actually import an image of the creature you want from the Sporepedia webpage and the playable 3D creature will appear in the game! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=703719
Companies are persons of law, not moral persons.
I think you might be attributing a lot to malice. In fact I think if said European cities and NYC were built after cars were invented, they would be similar to the sprawl in e.g. California.
Every tweet is junk.
Mongrel was dual licensed, under GPL2 and the much more permissive Ruby licenese, so I don't think it was really an issue at all.
I'm the new guy, so I'm going to comment a lot in this thread. Apologies to the rest of HN. I'm genuinely interested at this from both a technology and a startup angle.

Were these folks who were already following you? I mean, they already had to express interest in you and what you're doing, right? It's not like you were approaching complete strangers.

I noticed I tweeted this weekend about how much fun it was to play keyboards at home with MIDI backup. I got a reply from somebody, even though that person was not following me. So is there some kind of broadcast for tweets that people get even if they aren't following? Search? RSS feed or something? How did that guy reply to a tweet if he wasn't following?
Completly misses the point that rendering is the bottleneck.
Good point, I had never thought about it quite that in depth before. However, I am still willing to contend that large companies who can afford the staff do (or should) have large internal patch sets for OpenSSH, FreeBSD, etc. You can be sure the NSA does. ;-)
If its optional? Encrypted? They can compete as well as anyone then. That is, if their stuff stops sucking. There's no reason to think thats impossible.
C# Parsing HTML with HtmlAgilityPack
The payment scheme is what interests me most. I can't even try it out and I'm seriously considering paying this guy a couple of dollars.

This is highly irrational behavior on my part considering there are dozens of free "social bookmarking" sites out there that certainly accomplish my very limited social bookmarking goals.

It reminds me of old carnival shows (or any nightclub with a line outside). Pay money to get inside. No preview up front. You're paying for exclusivity, mystery, and reputation instead of features.

Additionally, people who pay money for something often feel the need to justify the purchase to themselves and others. This will generally increase their happiness with the product and irrationally cause them to stick with the product through technical difficulties and feature shortages (humans are terrible at evaluating sunk costs). And because they have emotionally and financially invested in the company, there's a larger chance they will recommend this website to their friends, thus creating higher switching costs for themselves.

I'm interested to see how this pricing experiment turns out.
The only way local advertising will work is a pay-per-lead model.

The only way that will happen is if companies like these guys open up API's.

I'm very impressed!
Very true that the podcasts are little more than entertainment. However, I don't think there is a problem with unit testing within the community. In fact, there is probably very little real unit testing going on at all. Probably why everyone speaks so profoundly about everything needing it.
I don't disagree about stuffing ram in servers, that's obviously the best approach, but it isn't always an option. I'm talking about the desktop experience. Many of us are limited by time and circumstance and are still using 32bit OS's on the desktop. I can't stuff it with RAM, but my Intel X-25M SSD makes my desktop smoke like no other hardware upgrade ever has.

My of us are also stuck with mission critical legacy 32 bit servers that we can't just take down and upgrade so easily and licenses for enterprise versions of some db's that can handle assloads of ram don't come cheap. SSD's are much cheaper and a no brainer upgrade for that aging db server that just needs to be faster. The X-25E smokes here letting you get that speed without needing that expensive license.
Yeah, agreed. That criticism would really sting... if they didn't have a functional and (IMHO) successful website to point at.
Some of them had been following me. Some of them found out because a couple people RT'd the message I sent out. Maybe --- I doubt it --- someone found it on Search.
Developing micro-architectures in web apps and services
What has Zed gotten out of your Mongrel use? And what have you gotten from it, financially?
"...mainly used for filling out property vouchers..."

It's a pain in the ass to fill out paper forms with a laser printer.

Yeah, sure, they should probably have a new system that just prints the form filled out, but they don't.