skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems a lot of Apple junkies want to try to justify the failures of "their" platform (as if no one had anything better to do than be an apologist for what is, in the end, another computer manufacturer) by saying that the rest of the stuff that's not being complained about works nicely.

That seems to me like an extremely weak point. Computers may be mostly about appliance functionality but the real value of one lies in its customizable parts, and some things are not, in the opinion of a lot of people, negotiable.

Take iTunes. There was absolutely nothing that prevented Apple from implementing USB syncing, which practically every other music player has gotten right and there's no way in which anyone would claim it's Apple's fault if it doesn't work with a player. I don't see how that dilutes Apple's ability to control its own environment. Oh wait, that means I wouldn't need a crappy iPod and I could instead manage with any one of thousands of USB mass media-based players.

Which goes back to the iPod. Wow, was that an inferior product. Apple did not make a single iPod that was actually a superior player on technical terms until 2004. Before that a huge number of players from iRiver, Cowon, and many other smaller players swept the iPod in terms of capability. Hell, my old iRiver iHP-120 is the only portable DAP I know of that had a digital audio output, and until the appearance of the iPod Shuffle no other Apple player came anywhere close in terms of sound quality.

It's not even about the fact that there are better choices of music players; it's about the fact that a vendor is precluding me from using a component of my own because their proprietary implementation competes with it, even if I might not think that badly of Macs, and it costs them absolutely nothing on their part (save trying to strongarm me into buying their DAP).

By the same token one of the things many people want a phone with the power of an iPhone is to have a replacement to lugging a portable computer. That demands an open platform, and as we have seen, Apple has no intention of letting that happen.

What really surprises me here is the fanboys who can clearly hold the doublethink that is believing Apple control is better when they have shown they have no problem with inhibiting users from getting better software than what they have (Opera, Google Voice, Gutemberg Project, etc.).

I guess Apple is a fine company if you're the sort of complacent, couch-potato consumer who does what he is told even if it's not for his benefit. Just keep shelling out cash and you can keep buying into the illusion that you're part of the computer users who "think different".
Automated testing is the only way to improve the baseline quality of your code. It's painful to do in the beginning, but think about it like exercise -- once you make it part of your routine, you'll be healthier overall.
Ask HN: Have you stopped beating your wife yet? ;-)

FWIW, I do drive a stick shift, and I've always driven a stick shift (so, close to 10 years now...) I learned to drive on one. I think my stall-count was 5 on the first day and 37 on the second day, and I only got the car moving about twice on the second day...
Wow, $4m is what you'd need to keep your standard of living? My father and I always said $2m is the magic number. We also assume you can pull 5% APR, which seams realistic but I honestly don't know for sure.
http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...

I agree with David that no amount will ever keep programmers from programming. So instead of sweating out 14+ hours a day in hope that you can retire in 5 years, why not live your life as you go.
Right On. Nice article.
In fairness, Android should start appearing on other carriers Any Day Now.
The proprietary i'm talking about with respect to the iphone is the app store. Not just anyone can write for the app store, you have to go through Apple.

The point I'm making is that they are control freaks, always have been and it's not new. They want absolute control over their brand.

I'm okay with that. It's their company. But I don't like their closed-ness, so I don't buy their closed products.

I actually did buy a macbook pro though, precisely because it was more open than a PC -- it'll run windows or mac OS and that I like.
Here's a more appropriate link to the story: http://tr.im/w7Ba
Rate My App: VapURL
http://vapurl.com/

VapURL is like a URL shortening service, except that the URLs expire, both in time and in number of visits. Come up with your own creative uses.

We'd really like to get some feedback and critique on our little hobby project.
No, it's really not.

Please explain why this (my last tweet):

"3x recommended dose of Vitamin D slashes cancer risk by 77%: http://is.gd/28Nbq

is better than this:

"3x recommended dose of Vitamin D slashes cancer risk by 77%: <a href="url">2005 Academic Study</a>"

I can see why you'd URL shorten when pushing to SMS, but an actual anchor/href gives me the ability to mouse-over and see the target URL and the link isn't dependent on a 3rd party to work. No one can frameset the url without the linkers permission or shove ads into the experience.
i have two levels: anything money, and nothing money.

$500k-$1m is my anything money. its enough money to allow me to do anything i want, but not enough for me to do nothing. i'd still have to work, but i could effectively make money by almost any means, i could do part-time work or take a really low-paying but fulfilling job and maintain my lifestyle.

$2m is my nothing number. enough money that i can do nothing and live off the sum. i could maintain my current lifestyle easily with $2m and never have to worry about it.
I also enjoy hearing about new designs and sites, which is a main reason I read HN.

It's probably important to note that this isn't my article or opinion. I just found it interesting to read and slightly amusing.
I think you've mischaracterized my argument. I've not said anything about amount here - my position (farther down, I think) is that founders should pay themselves merely the minimum salary required to qualify for group health insurance. (Usually, it takes two employees, at least in most states.)

I'm pretty sure that we actually agree about this, generally; my point is that having a sense of urgency that comes about from recognizing that the company is unprofitable due to salary expenses has, in my limited experience, done wonders to get people off of needless "optimizations" and onto making stuff people want.
For the state I live in, I find there is little knowledge of linux/unix in state and local governments. This quickly narrows the playing field to Windows and to proprietary from there.
5% may not be that realistic these days when you have to hedge for inflation as well.
Probably easier, and comparable in costs, to move to the rural midwest - e.g. South Dakota. Or Detroit.
Computer vision for autonomous robots.

I've done a lot of 3D graphics and I think working on the inverse could be fun too. I think a lot of progress is going to be made quickly now that 3D depth-sensing cameras are becoming available. Most interesting to me are self-driving cars (e.g. the DARPA Grand Challenge robots) or dynamically balancing 2-legged anthropomorphic robots (e.g. Honda's ASIMO).

I don't know anyone in the field, so if I was really going to pursue this I'd probably start by going back to school.
Inconvenience can sometimes equal undesirability. I think you'll find a lot of the proponents against closed platforms have the same critiques against consoles.

I actually have the same critiques of the Playstation, XBox, Wii, and every other closed harware devices that has been deliberately limited in its functionality.
Probably not. The only place they're really warranted is on Twitter, so if Twitter did it themselves that would go a long way. There is the whole URL masking annoyance as well, so ideally Twitter would support long URLs, but that might not happen because of the 140 character SMS restriction.

A federated protocol seems a little much for this one service which can handle the issue themselves, IMO.
I think porting to a number is only available to well connected web-celebrities right now. Supposedly it's coming in the fall to us plebeians.
Do you really think he meant it to THAT degree? Straw man FTW. We're on Hacker News talking about "FU money"-- I don't think anyone here is in danger of starving.

There are actually quite a few studies out there that show no correlation between money and hapiness once you are "safe" (have a little padding and enough $ to eat, have decent shelter, feed your family, etc).
http://permanize.org/ too.
yup, 4 million is the amount I'd need.
that's what you get when you use url shorteners - broken links to your website.
Lots of these services are failing. I found a huge list of them once and MORE THAN A THIRD were marked as "defunct"
I had 80% of my own company in the 90s. My outside investors were limited enough that I could sell when I wanted. I walked away from $20M buyouts twice. 2 years later, things became unstable and then just fell apart. I kept pouring funds in to save it for another 3 years until I was too financially crippled to keep going.

My advice: at 5x, sell. That's over 2 years your predicted growth. The money you've got is the best money you've got.
Dude, seriously, submit something besides constant links to your own blog. This topic (photo stitching to create panoramas) isn't even that well covered and the topic is pretty stale as well.
Not only that, but if it's an "original" URL that's broken but at least well formatted you at least have a hint of where to look, for example in the Google cache, archive.org, or elsewhere on the original domain.

Shortened URLs give you no hints as to where the original document was located.
I occasionally find them useful outside of Twitter. In my experience, some applications (email clients, etc) don't handle/parse really long links (Google Maps links or ugly eBay auction URLs, for example) very well, so giving someone an is.gd link to a hideously long and complicated URL is usually easier for me.
Does that make their points any less valid? Would it not seem reasonable to look at both sides of the issue - especially given the issues that they raise with the studies (particularly given some of the oversimplifications in the media after they were published)?
Not every article, just those I find remotely interesting. If other people also find the article interesting it gets upvoted. That's kinda the whole point behind these social news sites.

As far as the front page thing, that's because it only takes 2 points to make it to the front page. So a big site like techcrunch that has a couple million users, is more likely to hit that threshold.

Well nothing(maybe the name of the company/other products), but then I haven't seen the original thread when I submitted, since the submit link sends you directly to the submit page.
Most systems HAVE to mark shorteners as spam, given their use.

Can you think of reasonable and serious reason to shorten another shortener?
For the right price, you can get any internship you want.
Neat idea.

I'm not sure that most users will think it's neat, though. It's not like shortened urls hanging around is a security risk to them. At least, I can't think of a downside. Scarcity is scary, though, and fear leads to alternate behavior. What I mean is that a user might think--I don't want this to expire! What if my friends come back in two weeks and can't click the link I send them?

I guess creative uses could be releasing a url for a limited number of beta testers, or a limited offer. In both cases, however, you want website smarts, too. In the first example, you want the website to also be checking the number of beta testers who sign up in case the real url gets leaked. In the second, you still want to have a landing page that moves visitors to the new offer or something.

I'd love to learn better uses for this. My first reaction was "not another shortener", but I feel empathetic to your idea now, even if I'm still lagging on coming up with creative, practical uses.
This is lame. And it's such a weakness of URL shorteners.
You may want to bend the ear of these guys:

http://www.expatsoftware.com

I have lived abroad for the last couple of years. It is a wonderful experience. There are much, muuuuuuuuuuch easier ways of reducing your burn rate, if that is what matters to you. One simple one is taking your fluent command of the English language, American passport, and familiarity with all the local systems and relocating to anywhere in the US where the living is cheap. In St. Louis, for example, I know there are plenty of livable apartments near Washington University for about $450 or so. (When I was there it was $800 a month for a very capacious 2 bedroom apartment.) Add on another $200 for food, and we'll round it up to $1,000 so that you can take the bus to see a movie once a week and deal with life's little expenses. There, that's your ramen profitable number.

It is absurdly easy to sell that much a month, if you actually sell stuff.
Corrected again :) Thanks.
Me And My Successq
"There's a plugin for that."
http://url.ly/app/tools [real URL!]

I find the shorteners an annoyance. You can't fix the dependency problem.

I wonder how they could increase SMS limits past 160 chars?
Animated Desktop Wallpapers, Creative Wallpapers
Well, frankly, I don't buy those studies. Speaking from life experience of course, having been extremely broke and making money improved my happiness considerably. YMMV.
I got google voice about a week ago.

The only feature that I cared about on the iPhone was visual voice mail. Google voice is many, many, many, many, MANY times better than visual voicemail.

I will not be getting an iPhone now, thanks Google!
$1M
Oh, I mean no offense to you. It's always better to post links than to hesitate. Let the community decide. But always try to bring good stuff to the community.

Any good community has opinions on both sides.
The reason becomes more clear if you use a Mac. Adobe has only bothered to deliver bare-minimum performance on MacOS X, even on the newer Intel hardware. The thought that they could somehow pull off an ARM runtime that performs with modest battery draw seems extremely unlikely.
The whole point of doing the startup is to achieve something you wouldn't have had by working for someone else.

$2 million at 5% = $100,000/yr. You can achieve that by simply working as a programmer for someone else. Without making any of the sacrifices it takes do a startup.

If I'm going to sacrifice my youth(20s-30s) doing the startup, it better be for a big enough payoff to make it worth my while.
Hyperventilate all you want. If China actually creates an effective eugenics program (which is what I assume the end-goal of this is), the rest of the world is curtains.

Look at the title of this guy's book:

The Genius In All Of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong

Well, what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life. Will his book disabuse the world of this notion...or, does it merely repeat it?

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=978038...

DNA does not make us who we are

Well, I guess that explains why humans so frequently give birth to squirrels.
That's an easy one. The apologists are saying they like their product just fine. No problem. They accept the limitations/restrictions. The drama queens are, mostly, unwilling to switch to another product that fits their requirements/political views better. I make this assumption based on the constant repeats of the same story over and over again. Someone who was truly upset would have switched to another platform long ago. What's that? None of the competition is as good? Welcome to the real world. You can rarely get exactly what you want. Accept it or man up, pay the $175 early termination fee, and get another product.
I like this idea a lot. I think there are more directions you could take it, though.

What if, for example, you had a contest, and the winners got one URL and the losers got another? From a marketing standpoint, I could see lots of people digging that. Hell, I would use that.

Or what if more security uses were put into place?

To me, the uses for something like this could be endless. Beats just giving up like tr.im did.
Handy; a task better suited for a Greasemonkey script though?
Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses and digital pseudonyms (1981)
Dude, you keep saying that "it's the same problem we've always had", but it simply isn't. You seem like a smart guy otherwise, so I don't know why you persist in making this assertion. The difference is simple: url shorteners introduce a middle man, another point of failure or abuse, and one that can't be fixed by the person who made the link (because they may forget the original target and not know who to contact) or the person who manages the target (because they can't set up a redirect from the old url).
Yeah, but then you have to move to South Dakota or Detroit.
...if you're in that industry.
The way I see it, there's really no need to move out of the country to reduce your burn rate. I'm 99% sure that the inevitable culture shock and myriad other issues that come with living in a new country cancel out any benefit you get in terms of cost of living.

If you move out of the bay area and live like a college student, that should be more than enough to bring your expenses to a bare minimum.

I know its not hard to find a room in my local college town for under $400 a month. And thats right by the university. I assume that somewhere further out in the boondocks you can get a place for even cheaper.
To anyone interested to learn the cost of living in different places, I live in Montreal (Canada) and think it's a god damn cheap place to live. I pay $405 for a spacious 3 1/2 with parking (+$45 electric bill). There is plenty of entertainment in this city too. Also as a Canadian I don't have to worry about health care. So if you ask me, I think I am in a good spot for a start up.
Okay, so first, I'm certainly not saying every sedentary person should hop up and run for an hour tomorrow. I'm saying you can get there in a month or two of reasonable effort.

I'm not an expert, but I read what they say. This is way, way out of line with what any experienced running trainer would tell a beginner. Not even a beginner who was, say, an extremely fit swimmer. Definitely not a sedentary beginner. You have to give your connective tissue time to adapt to the peculiar stresses of running. (Plus, beginners are going to have crappy form and inflict more punishment on themselves than necessary.) By the numbers most people use, it would be very aggressive, but possibly reasonable for some people, to ramp up to 42 miles per week in one month from a base of ~29 miles per week or in two months from a base of ~20 miles per week. And that's pretty aggressive. Trying to get to 42 miles per week in two months from a sedentary state would leave basically everybody injured except genetic freaks or people with a previous adaptation to high-mileage running.

If you're starting from a sedentary state with no weight problem or existing injuries, you might start with eight miles per week and ramp up to 42 miles per week over nine months. That's a 10% increase in mileage every other week, and it assumes you don't screw up and get hurt, which many beginners do.

And, if you'd prefer, get on a bike for an hour instead. It's lower impact, and you'll burn at least as many calories as running.

That might be more reasonable (if you can find someplace nearby where you can ride in a fast, sustained way without blowing through stoplights or terrorizing pedestrians.) I don't have personal experience with ramping up bike training (I just ride to work once in a while) but from what I hear it doesn't require as much care as running.
Brave New World is a great dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley in which eugenics plays a central role. I think that reading it will greatly alter your view of such governmental interventions.
Thanks for your interest, but I do not feel comfortable disclosing that yet. Once I sell though, I will be happy to divulge the details (provided that the buyer allows for that).
That's a nice idea. There are other ways to skin that cat: if you have a server-side library that speaks perfect jabber, your web client can invoke it from afar. The library's API should work the same either way. Heck, if it's a Java library use GWT RPC.
Knob Creek's Unusual Marketing Campaign: We ran out of whiskey
clickable: http://vapurl.com/
What is the Optimal Number of Tweets Per Day
Apple halo is in full effect here obviously. The power of the Apple brand is quite awesome to behold, but it's also very sad to see people trying to tarnish the reputation of competitive products that are, objectively, good.
Sad to know that someone probably poured a lot of heart into this and now it goes down the tubes.

However, be ye warned: This is what happens when you base everything on somebody else, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Google or whomever. They can crush you in an instant, and often it's just because you're too insignificant to matter to them.
completely understandable
I wish I could speak from experience, but I've noticed that the more I make the less I actually spend. When I was a bit younger, I wanted expensive cars, expensive clothes, high-end restaurants... sunk myself into quite a bit of debt chasing after all of that.

Now? A small, comfortable place to live, a kitchen, the ability to travel, and tools to tinker with and fix things is all I really want. And I make a lot more now than I did then.

Weird, I know. :)

I'd be pretty pleased with a couple million; more than that is just something to invest in interesting ideas.

5x earnings for a company you'd like to take an exit from sounds like a plan to me.
The part that bothered me was this:

"And which freedoms? The freedom to break Apple’s DRM? The freedom for Palm to violate the USB spec by identifying the Pre with a different vendor ID?"

Palm wasn't actually breaking any DRM, and changing the vendor id was the only way they could make their software inter-operate well. I understand that Palm and Apple are huge competitors, but very rarely do people defend such blatant attempts at platform lock-in. I wouldn't call him a apologist, but it definitely feels reactionary to Calacanis's points.
If all he wanted was to dump a dependency, it would have been easier to cut-and-paste a slightly slower implementation from another library. I think he's saying he enjoyed it. The benchmarks are just after-the-fact justification.
Is it important to be able to speak French there?
I'm currently operating in Manila. Low cost of living. Extremely cheap local labor (hiring system admins for about USD$5k per year). People speak English well. Very American-ized environment, so minimal culture shock. There's a growing call center culture here, so bandwidth is pretty reliable. VC community is small but active. Manila lacks a big talent pool of software engineers. We've been experimenting with setting up an office in India as well to remedy that problem.

I was in Beijing for about 6 months. I would not recommend that unless you either (a) speak Mandarin fluently or (b) plan on staying there for the long haul. Engineers were highest quality I've seen though.
Apple only lost the personal computer war if you assume their goal was high volume/low margin market domination. I would argue it was not then and still is not Apple's goal. The iPhone will almost certainly remain only a small subset of the overall SmartPhone market however it will remain one of the best and make Apple more money than companies with larger market shares of the SmartPhone market. So I'd agree this is a repeat of what has happened in the past but I wouldn't call it a mistake. I think Jobs knows exactly what his company is good at doing.