j2labs

First, too little, too late.

Second, Android's main innovation is being an open source OS available to anyone to use / adjust / distribute.

Third, the comparison to RIM is that the public doesn't expect meaningful innovation from Microsoft anymore. Even though Metro is a reasonable improvement, it's far from enough to make the public care.

IE won by force. The anoligy doesn't seem right.

Comparing html and xml is silly. They are basically the same.

Platform independence was the point.

If people use the app daily, it's worth going native for the better performance.

Your example about 60m vs 2m is intentionally engineered to be an exception and I said there are exceptions.

Retina display was something that had never been done. Totally worth talking about.

My original point was anecdotal, so continuing on that, I've only heard game developers discuss the GPU.

Most reviews of the latest windows tablet discussed the hardware. This processor and that amount of ram... I couldn't care much less.

Interesting point. Could you elaborate?

Branding theory goes against your claims. It's not the oportunity that matters, it's the behavior and psychology of consumers.

RIM is dying for the same reason windows phone is a dud: both companies have failed to produce meaningful innovations and the public recognizes that.

Can you share data showing otherwise?

Here's an article from a few weeks ago supporting my claim: http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/appsblog/2012/dec/04/io...

Edit: to clarify, Android is doing better, but it is still no match for iOS.

iOS users buy apps 6x as much as Android. The article itself says that.

HTML is fast to develop relative to native apps therefore if the app is ideally used infrequently, a native experience isn't worthwhile. There are exceptions, of course.

The last option is just a default last option.

Similarly, it's interesting to me that Microsoft users will tout things like hardware in their devices. No iphone user mentions hardware because they don't care.

Is the device and its ecosystem a great experience or not? That's ALL that matters.

The general public is mostly ambivalent towards windows phones because it's just too late for Microsoft to be involved. It's nice that they saw the light and now believe design and usability are important but everyone already thinks of the smart phone world as being owned by iOS and Android.

Microsoft is famous for saying, "developers, developers, developers", but no sensible developer will build for Microsoft when network effects are already so well established. Microsoft would have to build something at least an order of magnitude better than Apple to get the world's attention and they haven't been capable of that for many years now.

Any life left in Microsoft comes from the inertia of people depending on Office. Even their latest OS got little more than a shrug from the world.

Two years is long enough to build for all platforms...

It's simple: if you intend to sell the app, build first for iOS. If the app isn't something users will use daily, just use HTML. If neither of those are true, build for Android and iOS with iOS first.

We shouldn't look to WSJ for insight on startups. The trends are already passed by the time they're aware of them, which is why the article feels like it's talking about 2012 instead of 2013.

It's actually both. Bad models and bad incentives, from black swans and the models that ignored them to corrupt practices and liars.

The delivery is so emotionally charged too. It took several paragraphs of "I can't believe no one gets this!" before we even got to Milton's theory.

I am proud to have paid him homage by naming my web framework after him. He deserves so much more.

I was in Hacker School's first batch, batch[0]. It was awesome. I was brought into the idea when my friend Dave Albert reached out to me. I met Dave through the hacker culture in NYC.

There was 6 of us in a small room, all working on things and talking about what inspired us. I had some things I was working on at home and loved the idea of working on them with a bunch of other hackers around. I don't personally like coworking spaces, but I thought the term "school" would mean something quite different, something more compatible with my goal of writing a bunch of open source.

Everyone could use their time however they wanted. The basic premise was to see what happens when you put a bunch of people, who love programming, in a room together. Do they sit there? Do they pull out SICP and get to work? What happens?

I used my time there to work on building Brubeck and I also built the demo projects most people use to learn Brubeck. I learned a ton just discussing the system with the other people there, but I learned the most when I would just listen to what other folks were thinking about. Everyone ended up building a huge amount of stuff and we improved each other's work by sharing it, picking it apart, etc.

We come to HN for a particular reason. We're looking for like-minded folks. The word "Hacker" is significant. It is a beacon for us. Hacker School knows this and takes on the challenge of being another beacon, and they do it well.

I have been a reader of PG's essays for 9 or so years and found the culture of Hacker School to reflect the same ideas. They understand the value of doing things simply because it would be neat. They know what it's like to be let down by a typical education experience. Hacker School is what they're doing about it.

I wholeheartedly recommend anyone with a passion for learning and technology to consider applying. What you learn is up to you and your passions, but Hacker School is the environment you've been looking to lose yourself in. That's why it exists!

My first comment actually addresses each of your points.

What is your source for that info?

Also, whether or not it cost the business money has nothing to do with the quality of the break-in.

Nothing particularly interesting seems to have actually happened. Some posts got onto the Dashboard, which was still running. In fact, everything was still working just fine.

Script kiddies found a small crack and went for it.

This kind of a thing is also very easy in Python if you use Gevent.

I have used Gevent a lot over the last couple years and see a lot of similarities in Go's concurrency, which I think is great.

Concurrency doesn't have to be about insane looking code!

I took a healthy severance from a company that bought my previous employer with government backing.

It felt like I was already given unemployment.

In addition to that, other people surely needed the funds, which seemed limited at the time, more than I did.

Life: Leaving financial services voluntarily, never taking unemployment while I was without work, and going all in on whatever future that meant for me.

Programming: Committing to the idea that ideas must, must, must be expressed cleanly.

On the topic of startup documentaries, Something Ventured was very good. It's in Netflix too.

Well, my point was about how economic value is relative, which elaborates on Chris's point.

I agree, it's not the same as Chris's point.

Once upon a time I was a VP at a bank that no longer exists, but was prominent, and saw decisions being made the same way about whether or not to build a custom system or buy a vendor based system. Banks can gain a significant advantage over their competitors if they can build lots of great, custom stuff. Goldman has guys that build custom JVM's, for example.

The vendor based system promises to deliver some level of infrastructure and some level of completion for a project right out of the gate. It was fascinating to see the discussion happen.

The bank was considering two vendors. One wanted to sell their system for $10M and the street viewed it as having excellent quality. The other vendor was willing to sell for $5M and there was work that would have to be done at the bank to complete a lot of the project. The bank chose the cheaper vendor, thinking they could build logic to fill the gaps for less than $5M.

Scope creep eventually came in and the project turned into something that the bank spent well over $100M on. The project was not complete by the time the bank collapsed, but our new owners took the project on and spent more money on it.

$100M didn't seem to bother anyone as long as the people using the systems made a lot more than that. And to think, the decision was originally made based on whether or not they wanted to spend an extra $5M... It was said that the more expensive vendor was an order of magnitude better, so the squabble over $5M really seemed silly in retrospect.

Chris's point is similar to the lesson I learned at this bank. The lesson is that economics is a study based on relative notions, not closed systems. If you look at just the raw numbers, you might be coerced into bad decisions. I suspect we could've gotten better work done if we were on the better system.

I think this point can also be observed in the sale of Instagram to Facebook. Consider the balls on that team to ask for so much money! At first many folks said, "$1B!?" But if you break it down into a percentage of what Facebook was worth at the time (~1%), the numbers seems much easier to swallow.

1% of Facebook for the fastest growing competitor seems reasonable enough to me.

Pointless response.

That's an amusingly long URL, given the context of the name...

This type of service has been written many times before without kernel panics.

I didn't get to see Charm before they shut down, so I have no idea what they were doing.

Could anyone speak towards how their experience was unique enough to cause kernel panics?

Rocket is at it again.