aneth

Godaddy is he only place I've found "Extended Validation" certs at a reasonable price - $99 instead of $499+. I hate their website and crosselling, but I do appreciate as the author points out that they have people you can call - how many registrars have that?

Are there any alternatives for EV certs that are not a ripoff?

On the contrary, I would say their economy is maturing with domestic consumption becoming a dominant portion, their production methods are becoming more efficient as labor costs increase, their production scale is second to none, their educated and motivated population is poised to bring a new era of innovation and entrepreneurship to China.

And for the record, "communism in China" is already dead.

In response to the article, China's balance sheet was worse in 2004 before the triumphant expansion of the last 7 years. I had doubts they could outgrow their debts then. I have doubts today, but fewer.

China is controlled by the smartest, most effective technocrats in the world. Don't underestimate them.

I suppose 37 Signals and Adobe are ripping off their customers as well because their marginal cost is close to zero and they are charging... more than zero.

Actually, I agree SMS is a ripoff, but the marginal cost isn't why. It's a ripoff because it's something people want and there is no other way for them to get it, which is an effective monopoly. With Google Voice and other competitors gaining adoption on smarter phones, I expect this to change.

The title is actually "Two 11-year-old entrepreneurs learned the hard way what it’s like to be a minority in tech during Startup Weekend"

I think it's pretty clear "minority" here means black. By indicating the audience made their decision based on race, the author is implicitly calling them racists.

I'm not suggesting there is no racism, although I do think back has been broken and dwelling on cases where racism remains is counterproductive. The problem now is more within these communities than without.

My main point is that presuming racism where there is none is as bad as racism itself - because it IS racism and it perpetuates racism. If you say I'm racist because I'm white and I don't think an 11 year old black child is fit to be my team leader, then you are the racist.

Ugh.

If an 11 year old black child pitches me an incredible startup idea, I would not join their team. Calling me racist for that is racist in itself. I don't think an 11 year old is competent to run a company or manage a product.

This article is a rarity in being such a clear example of reverse racism. Get over yourselves. The fucking president of the United States is black. Do you think attendees of startup weekend are more racist than your average American who voted for Obama?

If a competent black adult pitched a startup, they would have had no more of a problem assembling a team than a white or asian.

This sort of self-important racism by people fixated on the past is exactly what holds black culture back.

Someone tell Steve Ballmer. Before he gets fired.

I'm unaware of any HN blacklist. Reference?

Your proposed solution involves blanket censorship based on your personal opinions about the nature of a piece of the Internet. There isn't much else to discuss.

The most important steps he details require the same extraordinary intelligence that makes one an extraordinary student. The most difficult thing for a genius to understand is what it is like not to be quick minded. Most students could stare at the same material for days and not generalize the concepts the way this guy does as he listens to the lecture.

4chan is a massive massive message forum akin to a common carrier or Google Groups. You are suggesting censoring one of the most active and interesting websites on the internet. Should we avoid linking to Craigslist because human trafficking takes place on it? Or ebay because piracy takes place on it? Or usenet because - well - pretty much everything happens on it? Or Google, or maybe just the internet as a whole?

The link is on HN because of the interesting thread and has nothing to do with what you are talking about.

There is evidence of a sugar link on almost every cancer study - but nobody wants to call this out because of the terribly obvious implications for the modern diet. The fact is, your doctors have been telling you that low-fat diets cause disease, pushing people to eat high sugar low-fat foods, thereby killing them.

Here's just a few references I found in about 30 minutes. I don't keep track as I probably should, but the link is painfully obvious.

- [ ] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6813992/ns/health-diabetes/t/stu... <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6813992/ns/health-diabetes/t/stu...; - [ ] the researchers think high blood sugar levels — another hallmark of diabetes — might also be involved. - [ ] "The highest risks for developing cancer and dying from it were found in people with the highest blood sugar levels" - [ ] insulin may influence cell growth - [ ] http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-30/healt... <http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-30/healt...; - [ ] "Our results provide further evidence that abnormal insulin and glucose signaling may contribute to cancer initiation and development," said Gabriel Lai, a cancer prevention fellow at the US National Cancer Institute. - [ ] http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/30/3/561.full <http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/30/3/561.full>; - [ ] The association of hyperglycemia with total cancer risk in women and in women and men combined for several cancer sites, independently of obesity, provides further evidence for an association between abnormal glucose metabolism and cancer. Type 2 diabetes, an extreme state of glucose intolerance, is associated with elevated plasma levels of glucose and insulin, both before and after its diagnosis, and is associated with an increased risk of cancers of the liver, pancreas, colon, endometrium, kidney, and breast (1,2). Less is known, however, about the effect on cancer risk of moderately elevated glucose levels among nondiabetic subjects.

Both of the examples in this article are about products that contain obvious solutions for core functions of an iPhone. Just because a developer builds a feature before Apple gets around to it doesn't mean Apple is evil for implementing a similar feature.

Does anyone think the creators of the iPhone never thought of using the volume button to take pictures or wifi sync? These are features every engineer who bought an iPhone for the last three years thought of on the first day.

The whole premise of this whine-fest is bunk.

There are two diet changes the best doctors in the world will give you the day you are diagnosed with cancer:

1) Eliminate sugar from your diet 2) Eliminate red meat from your diet

This improves survival rates by orders of magnitude.

The sugar cancer link is becoming increasingly apparent, and is the elephant in the room. Excessive red meat can be a problem as well, but from everything I gather, sugar is the real culprit. Sugar raises insulin levels, promoting cancer growth, causing metabolic problems, and inhibiting apoptosis, then feeds that cancer with excessive glucose in the bloodstream.

Want to avoid or treat cancer with your diet (along with diabetes, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases)? Stop ingesting sugar!

I agree. Piracy is the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft. If DRM worked, China - unable to afford Windows- would be a massive base of innovation for Linux desktops, and ultimately undermine Microsoft. If copyright were strongly enforced, nobody there would know what Louis Vitton is - instead it is now home to their most profitable store.

Piracy is great marketing. Better even than free. You have distribution of free accelerated by the impression of value. The best reaction to piracy is to leverage the demand and user base.

> In open source, nobody is entitled to someone else's time and energy. But that's what the word "irresponsible" implies. So, I think you should choose your words more carefully.

My words are chosen pretty carefully. Irresponsible implies just that - irresponsible. Taken to its extreme it would be irresponsible for Matz or Linus to suddenly retire from their projects without a trace. Nobody is entitled to have them continue to work on these projects unless they have a business engagement ("open source" has nothing to do with it.) That doesn't make it ok to abandon people who have come to depend on them, who have made them successful, and who have supported them. There are responsible and irresponsible ways to leave a project.

Case in point: _why left an awesome legacy, but screwed a number of people over by disappearing. People have reasons for behaving irresponsibly sometimes, it can be forgiven, and it doesn't mean they are bad people - but that doesn't make it any less irresponsible.

Even your employer is not entitled to have you finish projects you start before quitting, or to have you cooperate in knowledge transfer when you leave - you could quit at any time and provide the minimal contractually required information. Responsible? No.

So yes, the stewards of open source project do have some responsibility to their user base. "Fork it" is the standard, poorly thought through, open source geek answer. It is far more beneficial for everyone to work within the community and voice concerns than it is to fracture the code base. Additionally, there are many layers of software all of which no one is an expert in, and forks introduce their own management headaches. I for one would not be comfortable supporting a fork - I depend on the MRI team for that. We all depend on each other, and anyone claiming they have no responsibility to their user base should let their users know they feel this way so that the users can choose a different library or platform.

By extension, Rails is built on a house of cards - a language team that does not intend to support it, and doesn't care if they cause a majority of their international users a great deal of pain. That would be, as I said before, disappointing and frustrating.

While the MRI team benefits enormously from the international success of Ruby that is largely attributable to Rails, you are right that they are not technically obligated to promptly fix egregious performance regressions. A certain portion of the developer community might feel that it is irresponsible not to support your user base.

I find this kind of performance regression and the blasé response extremely frustrating and disappointing. What could the MRI team be working on that's more important than fixing a bug that quadruples startup time for the most popular Ruby applications? This should be fixed in a quick patch to 1.9.2. There are tens of thousands of developers wasting oodles of man-hours frustrated with this. It's bad for Ruby and bad for Rails.

Why is this not the #1 priority for the MRI team?

"If they wanted a path on easy street, the original investors could have sat around pocketing millions of dollars a month for years"

Instead they cashed out for hundreds of millions of dollars with subsequent investor money.

Seems like a reasonable deal for a very savvy person, but most people who would use the service probably need more help with understanding product and creating wireframes than with development. I can see lots of wannabe entrepreneurs coming in with poorly thought through wireframes of a few pages, lacking understanding of the interactions implicit in the wireframes - pop-ups, hidden pages, data model, authentication, user acquisition, etc. .

In my 5+ years of developing for these types of people, they need far more than someone who will "build your prototype." Generally they need guidance in knowing what sorts of decisions need to made, and then in making those decisions.

I'm all for string to provide a turnkey prototype development service, however I would fear most ideas and wireframes will be doomed from the start without push back for a well thought through MVP, which is likely not part of this service. That could lead to disappointment, over-reaching, and the unreasonable expectation of multiple iterations.

Don't forget that Facebook started as a "tool" - essentially a preseeded online yearbook. Social ideas are fine as part of your vision, but they are essentially impossible to bootstrap without being useful in other ways first.

No, that's not projection. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection)

Projection would be when fear of racism within yourself causes you to project that racism onto innocent language and people.

I take ghetto to mean substandard, unpolished, incomplete, etc... No racial undertone. An overly sensitive, dare I say politically correct and self righteous person, can read offense into anything.

To suggest that Pincus's comment had anything to do with race is your own self-oriented projection.

Well, Jobs is not criticized for failing to break into enterprise software because he has had outrageously, unprecedentedly, massive success breaking into other markets. Failure is perfectly tolerable when you are good at something. Ballmer is an all around failure, and there are thousands of better candidates for his position.

Even if your screen is sufficiently bright, it's still a waste of power and dimmer than it otherwise would be. But sure, this can be mitigated with a brighter screen.

I've used both on a Mac. When Apple started offering both, I agonized but finally opted for glossy and haven't looked back. My preference on most things is matte - I always opted for matte when people printed photos from something called "film."

Here's why glossy screens are better, for me anyway:

1) It's better in sunlight. Counterintuitive I know, but it's far, far better. Matte screens diffract light and render the screen unreadable. Glossy screens can be made visible either passively (in very strong light) or actively if the screen is bright enough (as many now are.)

2) Glare is controllable and not diffused on a glossy screen. With a matte screen, glare manifests as blobs, and spread across the screen. With a glossy screen, glare is localized and easily defeated by repositioning the screen.

3) Matte makes screens less bright. It's a translucent filter, so of course it reflects and absorbs light.

4) Matte filters can be added, but a matte screen can't be made glossy.

The real solution: get rid of awful overhead florescent lighting. Ok, not that easy for most of you, but I think Steve Jobs probably wants those gone as much as he wants Flash gone. Any word on lighting at Apple?

Can anyone imagine Apple operating, supporting, maintaining, and upgrading a national or global commodity telecommunications grid? Strikes me a small distraction from Jobs' vision - create great products.

The idea is completely contrary to what Apple is good at and what they want to do.

Ok, one good counter-point below: You can't loan an individual book (other than through the Amazon program) using a Kindle.

Folks, this is not an Orwellian conspiracy, but rather a limitation of matter and energy which is a consequence of the tradeoffs we make when we decide to use an ereader and put all our books in one device.

First, this is not a loss of freedom. You are free not to buy products, and people are free to write and distribute their work without compensation. Thanks to technology, publishers and distributers are now only relevant for works where the author wants to be paid. Otherwise they would just push a PDF onto their website and you can share it all you want.

Second, if consumers could buy books at 10% of the price on the condition that they not loan them to others, this is not a loss of freedom. It's a good deal.

Third, when you purchase a book, electronic or not, you are not purchasing the global distribution rights for the book. If that's what you want, it's available for a price I'm sure.

Fourth, I feel far more free to access books and information than I did before ebooks. My mother can loan me a book across the country without Fedex. For $10 (less than the price of Fedex'ing that book) I can permanently own a copy of that or nearly any book instantly, anywhere, anytime. I can carry all my books around with me all of the time. I call that freedom.

Fifth, let's not forget Amazon's library program! (http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/...)

This paranoia is completely unfounded and melodramatic. Take off your tin hats!

Interesting question. I'm not lawerly enough to answer outright, but regardless of the current law I don't that a case against someone lending their Kindle would ever be upheld. It's analgous to saying letting someone use your computer is a violation of your OS license.

Like you say though, likely a moot point.