aleemb

Today is the fourth time in 2 months this has happened. At first it was hard to imagine the government would go through with it but they did.

It's strange, the first time any such news get floated (blocking FB, YouTube, phones or Supreme Court rulings) it comes as a shocker, people huddle and complain and with some passing of time expectations are lowered across the nation. Complete mobile network blackout doesn't feel like a big deal now that it has become a regular occurrence.

People have been making plans ahead of the scheduled outage and some are even happy to be offline and free of interruptions.

is there something good for pdf conversion to epub?

I hope some more thought goes into the usability as well. I find the syntax for links confuses a lot of users for whom I have enabled mark down editing. Wiki style [[link text]] works great if you assume links have no space or maybe something similar. Similarly the syntax for images has also always bothered me.

It's about reach versus monetization. The web lets you build a great audience very fast. The iPad comparatively has a much smaller audience, albeit a potent one.

The introductory article talks about what it's going to talk about and that it's for people "who love the Internet... and even coffee" which doesn't excited me much but either way, given the attention on this HN post, I would like to get a taste of the goods. Any sample articles would be nice otherwise it's a complete toss in the dark for me.

> Lots of people (myself included) had been saying that Facebook was overvalued pre-IPO.

You could have shorted the stock or traded options.

There was a fair bit of uncertainty because the average Joe, his family and friends all used FB. Many investors feared that the stock would be driven by sentiment rather than rationality. If the stock went to 50, it would not have surprised me.

Like you I didn't support the high IPO valuations either but I still would love to own the stock with minimal downside risk. As would a lot of other people out there. FB has a lot of appeal.

At $10 the company will have a market cap of about $20 billion, which is pretty low for a company with a billion monthly active users. If you discount that, you are probably discounting the bigger picture.

At some point Apple had tremendous unrealized potential. The idea that it could get into phones and do really well wasn't hard to digest. On the contrary, it seemed like an obvious move.

FB has similar unrealized revenue potential. It could start charging $X per month to businesses with > Y fans. It could offer premium dashboards + analytics or similar features. There is no shame in premium, I am not sure why they only do advertising and commissions but my sense is that currently they are focused on growth and building a moat around their business.

I don't own the stock and I don't care if it goes up or down but your post seems be discounting the company's potential.

For buttons you could add a bevel--gives it more affordance

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

Also noteworthy is the "How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters" talk

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw

pdf: http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf

naveensyed

aleemb

I found the example complicated. Real learning comes from simplifying. In the case of the provided example, it is trivial to simplify.

$100 is worth $121 after two 10% interest cycles. The PV formula asks the reverse: what is $121 two cycles out, worth today (what is its present value)? In reverse, we can calculate that by dividing $121 with 1.1 twice. That's pretty much what the formula is : FV/(1 + i)^N or $121/((1.1)^2) = $100.

kapish?

You have it the other way around. It's not so much about apple wanting to monopolize the marketplace as it is about apple defending its own platform. The discussion is platform-centric.

Today Amazon's application on the iPhone sells books. Tomorrow it may sell music and maybe some day even applications (if I am to believe that jail breaking is now legal in the US).

Apple wants to the be "front platform". Any platform that sits in front (or "top" if you prefer) has the upper hand. Browsers sit on top of the operating system and Microsoft tried hard to dwarf browser growth as it threatened the OS itself. In fact, Java's ambitions were similar. Flash is just that. Adobe AIR has already made minor inroads. This is also in line with Jobs' decision to disallow Flash and Java. If Macromedia sold iPhone applications, iTunes would lose gravity.

The case here is a similar one. If vendors build their own stores through their application, iTunes will inevitably crumble. Apple is making a really long term bet that will without a doubt encounter a lot of resistance. But in the long term it wants to perfect the business model.

It will be a first if it works, but it's tricky. Platforms need to be open enough to allow others to build on top but Apple has developed a very unique platform. Unlike Flash or Windows or whatever else, Apple is the gatekeeper for the entire ecosystem. That means it can regulate the platform while others cannot.

Apple has been architecting it's platforms strategy for quite some time now. It is trying to build the perfectly sustainable platform. I am almost certain that they have secret discussions on "platforms architecture".

Exciting stuff.