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This is cool, but the API looks a bit cryptic. Is there a way to simply lookup an item by URL?

Edit: Nevermind, figured it out: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?prett...

Thanks. Glad to see cool new services coming from Europe :)

But you should think heavily about differentiating from Geckoboard. For one I would add some kind of Apple / Android appstore metrics. Geckoboard doesn't have those and I would be glad to pay you if you did.

If I may ask, what were you considerations for having near 100% unit-test coverage even before private beta?

Indeed, there's a corruption problem in Latvia, but nothing like this. And it looks like it's improving rapidly as oligarchs are loosing power.

This reminds me "Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108294

It's about drawbacks of using Adobe AIR as kind of a cross-platform shortcut for building apps. From such perspective HTML is really not that different. If you want to deliver the best possible user experience, native apps is the only option in a lot of cases.

In a way that is good news for developers since it creates niches.

Still practically none of (web) cloud apps have the level of usability available in desktop apps. Even though HTML has come a long way, I doubt it will ever catch up. Imho the next trend will be native apps with integrated interfaces to cloud services. These kind of applications have existed for a long time, but they were not widespread. Now however with the advent of app stores it's becoming mainstream. Pretty much every serious cloud service already has a native mobile application. Why not do the same for the desktop?

So it took them 4 months to notice an unusual usage pattern? Or they did notice and intentionally let it slip?

Either way, this should have been a really bad publicity for Telstra, but I guess they don't really care.

ps. I know 100% that both my mobile operator as well as bank here in Latvia will call me within few hours after an unusual usage.

Anyone feeling socially awkward should read Dale Carnegie

Indeed, I'm equally surprised. At my last startup we also had a voluntary group lunch. I think it was quite critical to maintain a good spirit during rapid ups and downs common to most startups. Imho absolute loners are dangerous to startups.

You can already do some of those things in a 3rd party app via API (except for in-app purchases and iTunes authentication). Of course there are downsides like the AppleScript API kind of sucks and you need iTunes app running for it to work.

However to really become a platform iTunes needs to move to the cloud. Let's hope Apple will get it right with their rumored iTunes streaming service.

Having had worked on browser-based enterprise applications I can only say that there's deadlock situation.

As a vendor you need to provide compatibility with old outdated browsers because enteprise doesn't want to upgrade because that would break a number of other applications they use. The functional gap between something like IE6 (which is still an enteprise standard in a lot of places) and a modern browser is so wide that you almost end up creating two separate versions of the frontend. And eventually some vendors figure that it's not even worth supporting the modern browsers, so they don't. And so it goes...

I now honestly believe that web browser is a bad platform for entererise apps.

Two best decisions I've ever made

1) working for a bigco -> startup

2) single -> married with a kid

It took me a while to come to these 2 points but I've never looked back.

Imho they have lost to Scala before they even started. And from my experience with Hibernate, Gavin King used to be this arrogant "you are doing it wrong" type who never really listened to anybody (or at least he worked hard to maintain that impression).

Regarding toddlers apps it looks like very few of them have done actual toddler usability testing.

Also it would be very useful if iOS had a "toddler switch" which would allow to

1) Disable home screen updates. This is very annoying, often I've a bunch of my apps rearranged or even deleted by my toddler

2) Disable some apps

3) Any app can read this flag to alter functionality

4) Make home button harder to activate - for example it needs to be pressed together with some gesture on screen.

Indeed Pivotal Tracker and Github Issues focuses on two different things - Pivotal is about planning, Github Issues is more like a registry. They may actually complement each other although I haven't checked if Pivotal provides integration with Github Issues already (it certainly does with Jira and Lighthouse).

That's why we were using complexity estimates in points (say 1 to 5) instead of actual time estimates in my last startup. Once you have some worklog, it's easy to calculate how many points the team can get done in a week (or whatever your estimation cycle is). This little abstraction made estimates much more reliable.

I guess some "agile" methodologies propose a similiar approach, but we didn't really follow any specific one, just figured out what works best as we moved along and kept the process as lean as possible.

I'm pretty sure this is also the current vision of the Dropbox team. They are making a lot of effort to become a platform not just a product.

It's so in Latvia and I'm pretty sure in several other small European Union countries as well. For iTunes there's at least an unofficial way to get an US iTunes account, but it's not simple and convenient enough for an average user.

Judging by the amount of "pirated" lossless downloads available I don't think that's entirely true.

I do care about lossless format but I don't care about physical products. I'll never buy another CD again but would be happy to pay for a lossless download. Of course there are none, so I frequently find myself heading over to dark side (where there are plenty).

Something quite similar happened to me few years ago and I ended up with a very scary case of dysautonomia. Luckly it only lasted for couple month, but in this rather short period of time my whole perspective on live changed. It was only then when I truly started to appreciate the saying "Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present."

What's the deal with all lowercase? Totally unreadable.

Switched from Django to Tornado a few month ago, and I've never looked back since. In Tornado everything just seems to makes sense and nothing gets in your way. I've worked with Django for couple years and never felt this way.

Yeah, me too. I think it's just politics, in the best traditions of big corporations, that doesn't do any good to actual web developers.

From practical perspective we would be better off with Web SQL DB. Functionally it addresses everything a developer needs to create offline HTML apps. API is not perfect but you can always improve that with small wrapper libraries (like JQuery improves DOM API). You can always easily implement IndexDB-like API on top off SQL if you really want that. The opposite is probably possible but much more difficult.

Also I think IndexDB might turn out to be yet another compatibility headache because everybody will be creating their own implementation (I'm pretty sure there will be at least 3 - Microsoft, Mozilla & Webkit). It's a speculation but most likely this wouldn't be an issue with Web SQL DB because everybody would just use the same SQLLite backend.

And worst of all, this is delaying progress of web applications. Lack of solid cross-browser client-side storage solution is the last big gap for next generation of web applications. If everybody had just agreed on SQLLite we could be there today... now it's still unknown when we will get there.

To be honest this sounds like first signs of depression - stuff that used to be fun is not anymore. Maybe I'm wrong but my guess would be that it's not directly related to programming, rather to lack of inspiration...

I think the situation is very similar in other new EU countries as well. There is enough talent but the lack of startup friendly business environment (VCs, market) is really discouraging.

So at this point teaming up with peers in NA is one of best options if you don't want to move abroad. I'm from Latvia and was a tech lead of startup which was founded this way and it worked fairly well for everybody.

A piece of advice - working for some international bigco can help you with contacts abroad, which may turn out useful once you feel ready to go startup.

Good news but I really hope Google figures out how to solve DeadlineExceededError. They are popping up from time to time for my app (http://www.knowcase.com) and I don't think it's datastore related.

So here's something very similar i launched recently http://www.knowcase.com (works on ipad & mobile too)

Yes, stupid bug, forgot to remove some console.log statements which breaks on Firefox if Firebug is not installed (but works fine on Chrome & Safari). It's fixed now.

Hey fellow HNers! I created Knowcase as a sideproject over couple months, mainly scratching my own itch.

I've been using Evernote to save all kinds of things that comes into my mind or I simply needed to remeber. I loved the "access anywhere" aspect however I was never quite happy with other things. It was not very convenient for organizing information and sharing/collaboration was basically absent (to be honest I haven't tried paid version). And the UI had a lot of things I didn't really need such as all the fancy formatting (it's esspecially iratating when you copy paste some bits of info from websites).

Eventually I came up with the idea for Knowcase. It wasn't originally intended to be an outliner, but somehow I fell in love with outlines, and have never looked back since :)

So here it's - any feeback is higly appreciated. Thanks!