drats

>uninformed comment by some woman.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people/jennifer-granick

Are you serious? I am so over the know-it-all snark on HN.

This is an excellent explanation of the core outrage in this case. I can't believe there are people in other threads attempting to excuse the actions of the prosecutors. The publisher dropped the case, there should have only been a pursuit for a minor ~30 day tresspass sentence if MIT specifically requested it.

There isn't a 37 signals "voting ring" but pretty much we see about a blog per week from them of extremely low/general quality. Often they are of a lifestyle/why we didn't go big and why we are actually better than all the big IPOs changing the world nature. I mean this post boils down to "I love my company (that I own, not that I work for)". I think even if PG posted a blog so vapid, "I love Ycombinator, I can picture working here for years", even he would get a bit of fire. I certainly hope we aren't going to be seeing these vapid posts for a decade or more from 37S. You could randomly select a book from the self-help or business section of a bookstore, select a random page, and have a good chance of getting something more insightful than a standard weekly 37s post.

I seriously have nothing against them, I wish them more success even: just not success getting to the front page here because frankly they don't talk about interesting algorithms, technologies or business strategies. They are incredibly boring. No mobile, no Google glasses, no new computer game, no crafty actionable patio11 strategy, no raspberry pi hack, no programming language hack, no excellent presentation, no struggling story of success, no rejection and comeback, no scaling of servers, no clever command lines, no new SSH shell, no browser plugin, no investment philosophy, just "I love my business".

75% of their posts are simply not HN-worthy and there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. Please just subscribe to their twitter or RSS because their weekly show here is frankly tragic and they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.

Edit. Just to note I own a DHH book, so I will pay for the writing of this guy when it's actually worth it. I'm just saying this blog stuff isn't even worth free.

I'd also like to second the point regard the advertising of apps. Advertising your own app to me in a pop-up is pretty much the death-knell for my usage of any site.

Irrespective of the guilt or innocence of Assange or the Pirate Bay people there have been massive irregularities in Swedish government activities such that they can only be explained by corruption or incompetence and vindictiveness. While that should come as no surprise to anyone, it certainly damages Sweden's image heavily.

It's a harder technical problem than people think, in terms of scaling and encoding smoothly (and playing smoothly while the rest of the video loads, which Vimeo can't seem to do). Google also has tons of fibre in addition to server infrastructure.

It's also extremely hard to break even, as even a low resolution video in bandwidth terms is many times larger than a news article. News articles often manage to squeeze in more ads than YouTube did initially as well and news on the web is fairly cut-throat and thin margin. With an article you can just examine the plain text to put a relevant advert there, with video it's much harder (although certainly possible). There is also a problem with discovery and search related to this which needs high level machine learning and thus your average "we took a regular service - taxis, maids, food - and make a phone app which uses GPS and calls it to your house for a premium" type startup guys probably don't have a clue about what would be necessary.

There was also a lot of speculation that Google has been running YouTube at a loss since acquisition. If that's true it means that their partner program was paying content producers for a long time out of Google's pocket rather than out of real viability. So a competing site going for just technology needs to understand that they are competing with a distributed stable of talent. The same goes for paying money to music producers. A startup would get legally slammed just as they were taking off (and running out of runway). Perhaps the more aggressive advertising and long commercials at the start of videos is now exploiting this subsidy-created monopoly, and perhaps in turn that will give rise to a competitor.

edits: multiple, "steaming smoothly" to "playing smoothly"

"Dumbblack"

"then proceeds to do what black men always can’t help but do"

"black men always telling which way is up because they feel they are the “authority” when it comes to any and everything, most often when they don’t know shit about shit"

" I know when black people start to speak down to me from their pedatsol which is white privilege, they aren’t listening, nor will they"

"I cannot afford to take black people’s shit anymore."

Those are all quotes from the article, except I put 'black' where the author put 'white', both sets are clearly an unacceptable way to speak. While I am sure this guy has faced real disadvantage from some bigoted people, this post is laced with racism against white people and ridiculously over-the-top statements about colonialism and "neoliberal white supremacy".

Yes, I fail to see what Quora is other than a cliquey silicon valley Stack Overflow Q&A site which actively doesn't want more users because it acts protective over content, demands signups and generally acts in a stupid manner rather than just giving me what I want. I don't see a single thing it does better than Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow is public without the sign-in stuff. Of the 30-40 times I've hit Quora from web searches it's had useful information for me only once. What a load of hype. It certainly seems to stroke some important egos though, so they can play with it for as long as they like while the rest of the world moves on.

Edit: grammar/typos

>No vacation policy

This seems like you'd want to explain it a little more, given plenty of other companies cover flights to conferences and while that's a nice perk nobody considers it to be a vacation.

Also the author missed the point of clicks, subsequent searches and back buttons/bounces: Google sees all of these as data to be mined. So while the Apple engineer is worried about returning the wrong result supposedly (yet they return tons of wrong ones anyway), the Google engineer is saying "we are mostly confident on these ones, lets put them out there and see which ones cause the users to bounce or search again and which ones terminate at that point and then we can upgrade their scores".

>They say Apple's browser and HTML5 support are conspicuously superior to Android's.

Not even remotely true for anyone who's used ICS. And it's not "Apple's browser" it's the rendering engine from the KDE(GNU) world which Apple improved, and Google improved just as much. Safari is so overrated it's not even slightly funny. Chrome, Firefox and Opera are light-years ahead of Safari.

This should be the top comment. Again and again we see Twitter, Facebook etc. being blamed for this type of stuff. But in truth these companies have well established processes to deal with requests from law enforcement authorities, as do ISPs. This situation is scandalous when you see how much time and effort is devoted to revenue raising through traffic and parking violations, but there is apparently no time to follow up death threats.

>so far there’s zero evidence that it’s a good way of providing startup capital for would-be businesses

Flagged immediately for this statement. Troll journalism.

Exactly the hidden issue here is whether you will have the newest version of Android or just be stuck on an old version. People are even still selling ICS capable phones with Android 2.3 today.

This is the kind of ridiculous statement that comes from Slashdot. Yes for a Mars rover or medical device we might want some insane level of reliability. But reliable enough for Google, IBM and Amazon and thousands of other companies is enough to take the title "reliable operating system", the rest is just playing semantics.

This is a good example of the Apple cultist. Other products get panned all the time as only being incremental but nobody waxes lyrically about the "real people who take real pride in what they do" and how saying that "the sentiment you just expressed was deeply hurtful, and, in fact wrong". Deeply hurtful? Are you serious? It's a luxury product from a corporation which will do anything from driving manufacturing workers in China into suicide to suing people over bogus patents, get over yourself and your devotion to a legal entity.

Other than compatibility with other people I don't find MS Office has many advantages, but I will concede it is better designed, especially when you have to pay for it. Compatibility is the huge killer argument for Office and will remain so for some time.

All that said, for high school level essays, slides, spreadsheets, where you are not really interfacing with government or businesses, then the argument for OpenOffice is overwhelming. Even more so when your government can't even afford to borrow on the open markets. I.e. no private investor in the entire world thinks you are credibly going to pay back what you borrow. In that case you have to go to political allies who are prepared to shoulder the costs, for political and not economic reasons, and it might be a good idea to take the 90%-as-good free office package for your school students to contain costs.

Andrew Orlowski has to be one of the most unreliable troll journalists and last person who's word I will take at face value.

It might be an incentive to pass fewer laws, or ones that aren't so long.

Broken HTML, demands Google login. Flagged.

I made this case last week.

"Apple products are like a good classy restaurant or hotel chain. They take ingredients everyone has and put a lot of work into fit and finish, they make the customer feel special for a slightly higher price."[1]

And I stand by it. I'll go even further actually, I think Apple is one of the least innovative big companies. Look at all the big research labs at Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM or Google. Anyone who seriously follows this stuff knows a) Apple doesn't have a profile in the academic world and b) knows enough computer history to know Apple is claiming things invented decades ago.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435504

For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer. Asides from integration with other Adobe products, print colour management and a few higher level features it has everything a person might need who's main job is not image processing. That's most of the "market" in terms of general home users and web designers who need to process photos and do logos etc. So while I imagine photoshop can keep a lead, and an inertia, with professional graphic designers, people working for magazines and photographers the only reason the GIMP is behind in raw numbers is that people pirate photoshop. In effect it's free competing with free; piracy is functioning as shareware, market-shareware.

People don't own ideas, they are granted temporary monopoly on real innovations to encourage their disclosure so that they, in the short term, and society, in the long term, can profit. The question isn't "first" the question is "obvious". I would argue with gestures already established and real touch screens a group of designers would quickly come up with a latch (horizontal stroke), a door handle (curving stroke), a safe padlock/rotary phone (circular motion) and general patterns (nine dots, some pattern dragging across them) rather easily. Spreading the fingers or the hand to zoom was already in minority report (2002). Double taps to do something different is already in the double clicking of the mouse.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

This is silly, touch screen technology, faster ARM cpus and the rest make these things possible and came from elsewhere. My first computer with a GUI was 100mhz. As soon as smartphones got 600mhz+ and as soon as people get touch screens (foreshadowed endlessly in sci-fi) are you seriously suggesting that if you took a room of fresh graduates from a design school (which is a bar lower than "ordinary skill in the art" as most UI designers have years of experience) and brainstormed for an afternoon that you couldn't come up with all this? There is clear prior art on almost every aspect, it was just a new blend. And that which didn't have prior art was logical evolution (as I said in an earlier comment about phones unlocking + physical slide latch locks + touchscreen... slide to unlock, wow I don't think any designer could have thought of that /s).

I'm pretty sure there were mouse-gesture plugins for a couple of browsers before the iphone, forgetting the sci-fi prior art. So you are suggesting someone with a degree in UI design with knowledge of mouse gestures and presented with the problem of making a touch interface with a mobile would not find this obvious?

Few buttons, PDA.

Tablet with news, Knight Ridder tablet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBEtPQDQNcI

Icons finger sized in a grid. Well given we already had desktops, and given it's a handheld device, then it's insanely obvious to have fewer icons in a grid at finger size. Low resolution screen compared to our desktops, hey maybe we should have fullscreen as the default.

Pinch to zoom, multiple sci-fi movies.

Slide to unlock. Phones already had something called "unlock', and physical bolt locks already slide... So we make a visualisation of what amounts to a sliding latch when when have the touch screen, pure genius, nobody besides Apple could have thought of that, right?

"Trade Dress" to stop competitors should also be entirely illegal unless there is no branding or logo on the phone, or the name is too similar or in some insanely small font. If it has "Samsung" written on it it's insane to argue that anyone would confuse these things. What if these rules applied to TVs, cars or bottles of perfume? Perhaps technically they do, but people have had such things for so long they don't think about them in that way. It's farcical that anything clearly identified as a different product on the box can be subject to such rules.

Apple products are like a good classy restaurant or hotel chain. They take ingredients everyone has and put a lot of work into fit and finish, they make the customer feel special for a slightly higher price. And they have a dress code that permits only a certain crowd in there (app store approvals vs. more free entrance policy of other application stores, and by the way apt-get and various frontends to it pre-date the app store). All due respect to them for doing a good job, but Steve Jobs' entitlement complex knew no bounds and there is no moral or logical merit to their claims only a slice of legal merit on the back of stupid laws.

Your central thesis seems to be that drug laws do have a problem but they could have picked a better example, that's not much of a thesis. Besides they do pick better examples, they are just reporting this one as well and he was significantly harassed by an agent of the state ringing up every place he applied to for a job (a point you pass over in silence). Your whole schtick here about how it's not a pure doctor who missed out on crossing a 't' and dotting an 'i' when prescribing a drug and then was subsequently raided by a SWAT team that shot his puppy is a non-argument, they are just reporting data as it comes in to fit with a wider campaign you seemingly agree with on many points. I would guess going by your comments you've had a bone to pick with Reason for a while now and you are using this as your platform to express it. However, take note of the number of replies you are getting. I mean I just think you are just being argumentative and weird (copyright notice in your about page? wtf) but someone even called you hateful.

I would recommend people don't work for Apple. It's one thing to lie about computing history and say you invented everything so that customers believe it and give you lots of money (which you then use to outsource jobs and stop the company charity program) it's another thing entirely to drink your own kool-aid and start a series of the most embarrassing lawsuits I've ever seen. Apple is now officially not just a dodgy liar, but they are a joke. Work there at your own peril, I personally think they are a complete disgrace.

>Webkit is the premier cross-platform browser engine.

Taken from the KDE guys, who had to make a lot of noise to get contributions back from Apple. And if the KDE guys hadn't done tons of work before, why didn't Apple just start from scratch? If the bad press about it hadn't forced their hand, I doubt they would have done anything. And, at this point, when you count KDE at the start and Google at the end, Apple wouldn't even have a majority share of the reasons for Webkit's success. Good to see your only point on this issue is a weak drowning not waving one. That's the best you've got?

Regarding Apple getting help from MS, $150million is actually a lot in those days. And even more than that was having MS Office and IE on the Mac. I accept if MS hadn't done it though it's likely anti-trust would have come sooner and they would have been broken up. But it's a pretty minor point in argument, so I don't mind refuting your refutation that it was "minor" but then defeating my own argument with a better more contextualized one (MS needed to do it for anti-trust), as it's not a central point. Besides that helped the monopolist by getting in bed with them, seems they will do anything to survive.

>And now we've taken off straight into fantasy.

The key point here, is I don't actually believe it is true right now (like Jobs believed his lies, or at least his fans did and do), I just propose it as a likely future. Anyone with a passing knowledge of computing history knows Apple is neither a hardware or a software company, they are a lifestyle marketing company that has invented very little indeed. On top of that, the pattern of their actions says "big corp/profits".

So in summary, you have used a lame-duck Webkit argument which actually proves my point about how little open source they do whilst helping themselves to as much as they can. You then attack a minor point about the MS investment but nothing on the GUI or design issues, customer service, or lawsuits. Then you finally accuse my plausible projection of being a fantasy. It's not really much of a fantasy to say that it looks like the trajectory of the "remove two buttons from the Xerox mouse we invented because our users are stupid" public company in search of profit that lies constantly about itself and engages in near fraudulent legal proceedings against competitors will at some point decide that their desktops should run like their phones.

All my points show they aren't any different to any other corporation, and how in many cases they are worse, and they already have a device which is locked down like that with many App store scandals. Now they are developing in a very similar direction on the desktop, so we just complete the trend-line and we have 1984-lite (which they notoriously abused for profit in their ads along with many other historical figures in the cynical attempt to tie their bottom line to things people care about, Orwell must truly be turning in his grave to be associated with such saccharine ingenuous phonys).

Why should we cut a publicly traded legal entity notorious for lying about their inventions and being extremely litigious any slack? Have you seen how ridiculous their lawsuits over the Samsung stuff are? It's quite obvious they are prepared to resort to any filthy tricks to stop competitors. They also have a long history of screwing people who develop software for their "ecosystem", most recently in the myriad app store horror stories. Why should anyone believe a single word Apple says?

Apple didn't invent the GUI or the mouse, which were all taken from Xerox who in turn took them from earlier people. They leaned heavily on open source for their comeback but did quite a lot to obstruct return contributions or fostering a proper open source eco-system. They also relied on funding from Microsoft for their return. They borrowed extremely heavily from old products for their re-invention [1]. Jobs delusionally claimed the iPhone technology was somehow "stolen", when there were tons of tablets and smart phones before the iPhone and people had bolts on their physical doors which were "slide to unlock". This instigated a wave of patent attacks, including Jobs getting his personal friend the CEO of Oracle to attack Android on facetious Java issues that resulted in them getting spanked in court. And now, as the private Samsung design images show, the claims about the similarity of the Samsung models are just laughable. But nevertheless they don't want to compete on merit against products that look vaguely similar (in a world of rectangles...) but have "SAMSUNG" in large lettering on the box and the back. They try to claim that customers would be confused by this entirely different branding and even got a number of temporary injunctions against competitors. In addition to this they run the App store like dictators, and small developers are cast to the wolves at a moments notice. They have horrible customer service in many places outside of the USA (and even there they've be sued numerous times in the USA for dodgy practices like selling phones with dodgy reception). They are not God, they are just a publicly traded company looking for profit.

Gatekeeper confirms that it's not special and just another public company with a legal duty to make profit for shareholders in spades. Imagine a desktop as locked down as an iPhone, with "dev boxes" that let you run your own apps for a few hundred more, it's positively stomach churning even at the most basic level, then you have to factor in that they will cave in to all sorts of special interests (and perhaps security services). As I understand it, those in the app store gold rush already have to pay for all sorts of development licence and software stuff as it doesn't come with the OS. But what if the TSA doesn't like your TOR app because it's exporting munitions to terrorists? We used to laugh at that law back in the 1990s because it was unenforceable, now it looks like we are headed for a future where the app would just silently disappear from people's desktops. But you paid extra for the dev kit version right? But as you had illegal apps which were detected on your desktop your commercial bread-and-butter ones are now suspended, under review, or taking longer to review for updates.

Steve Jobs' pathological lying about Apple's inventiveness always struck me as unsettling, but there is much worse coming in the future I fear.

[1]http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secr...