kaolinite

Whilst a nice idea, I suspect you might have a hard time growing the community when people can just use Quora for the same thing.

That said, a service (perhaps this exists) where I can give you an idea and pay you a bit of money and in return receive a full market analysis, information on competitors, investments made, upcoming startups working in the area, etc - I feel that would be useful.

You haven't posted the real domain so I can't check but try pinging the clone's domain and make sure it isn't pointing to your server's IP. It may just be a domain that belonged to the previous owner of your server's IP.

The Surface is a strange one, seeing as it is both a PC and a mobile device in one. There are upsides - as you've mentioned - but downsides too. I suspect my parents might not be quite as comfortable using a Surface than they are with an iPad. I'm glad your wife is enjoying it, though.

However, I'm really not trying to get into a war between platforms. My point is that adding limitations, which many of us see as reducing how powerful a device is, can actually enable the user to go further and do more than they could previously.

My parents both fairly recently bought iPads. Previously they used a Windows laptop and an Ubuntu desktop - both far more powerful and giving far more control. Or at least that's one way of looking at it.

Their iPads may have limits on their functionality, but as a result of their simplicity, they enable my parents to control a lot more of their computing experience.

They rent movies, read books, use RSS (!) via Flipboard, edit photos, install apps (previously they would never install software) and - most importantly - they experiment with new things. Unlike the old PCs, which they'd become more fearful of with every inevitable fault or virus, with their iPads they can just hit the home button.

For you and I, you're right - mobile can be limiting. But don't underestimate the power of mobile for those previously intimidated by computers.

You're right - I should have pointed out that it was only a tangentially related thought. Something I think about whenever I boot up an instance.

I wish DigitalOcean would have one or two instances of each type (perhaps only the most popular distros, to avoid having too many unused instances sitting around) so that creating a new VPS is instant. Of course, some of the time - when multiple people are setting up instances - you'd have to wait the normal 60 seconds. But sometimes, it would be instant. That would be great.

Looks very nice, although I'd like to see one in person. It's a shame it isn't mechanical however, or at least that there isn't a mechanical option - especially as there are lots of good quality, affordable Japanese mechanical watch movements (e.g. Miyota) that could be used.

Would be interested in hearing more about how it will be made (and where it will be made). Always interested in hearing about the stories and manufacturing techniques behind watches, especially those made by independent watchmakers.

Hm, that form is perfectly fine. I wonder if it changed (the problem I had was about a year ago) or whether it was a different site I used (e.g. a UK site) or something. I was definitely only asked for dimensional weight.

Thanks for looking into it.

Edit: have just checked the UPS site myself and they have a much nicer quote interface than I remember, including dimensions and weight.

Oh it totally makes sense - the thing that surprised me was how it was called weight on the form, so I just copied the weight across from the parcel I had received. I'm sure it was partially user error, but UPS could certainly have done more to make me aware that there was a difference.

If you're sending parcels regularly, I'm sure this is all well known, but this was the first time I'd sent a parcel myself (instead of just going to the post office and have them handle it).

Has anyone else been hit, when sending items via UPS, by UPS's "weight" calculation?

I purchased a pair of shoes that I needed to return, going back to Italy, and I received a quote from UPS - having entered the weight on the parcel I had received - of around £50. Later, after UPS had picked up the parcel, I noticed they had charged me somewhere in the region of £80-100.

I rang up and they explained that UPS doesn't use normal weight but rather a UPS specific "weight" that also incorporates dimensions (i.e. two items that are different sizes but weigh the same will have different UPS weights).

I looked on the site and they were right - there was some information about it, plus a calculator for working it out. I must have completely missed it. To their credit, they did refund the difference and I only had to pay the original quote, but I do wonder how many other people miss it and end up paying more for their postage.

Here's how to figure out the "billable weight": http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/di...

I have no idea how they compare but the open-source databases has proprietary database tools too, such as Navicat, which have auto-complete, a good UI (Navicat is hardly beautiful but it works well), etc. There are a few other options too.

Whilst the search results are generally quite good, Google is often far better for highly specific or technical queries. Google also shows genuine intelligence and understanding at times whereas I find that DuckDuckGo does not.

One big problem I find with DuckDuckGo is the search suggestions. I found that with DDG they are very poor and that I used them with Google far more often than I thought.

That said - give DDG a go! I think that for many people, the results are more than good enough. They have improved dramatically over the past few years. Even if you're not ready to use them full-time, I'd recommend trying them out on your phone first, perhaps.

I recently started working as a contractor (just for a few months to bring some cash in so I can continue to work on my business).

As I have a business already, I was considering doing the contracting under the business to reduce liability. Does anyone know whether this will increase the amount of tax I have to pay? I figured that I would have to pay corporation tax on any money I bring into the company as well as personal tax on any money that I pay myself as a salary. Is that the case?

Honestly no idea. I'd imagine that's just in case they change their mind? The email itself was very poorly thought through (and is honestly quite arrogant).

It isn't, but I seem to recall it being mentioned either in the keynote or in the reporting after WWDC.

Update: https://developer.apple.com/news-publisher/

> Monetization is made simple with iAd, Apple’s advertising platform. Earn 100% of the revenue from ads you sell, and 70% when iAd sells ads for you. iAd provides campaign management, targeting and reporting capabilities that help drive your business.

So that's very fair, they don't take a cut if you sell the adverts yourself - otherwise they take a (industry standard?) 30% cut.

If you enable adverts next to your content, you get a cut of the profits (presumably 70%). By default, there are no adverts.

(Updated the comment to remove uncertainty now that I have a citation: https://developer.apple.com/news-publisher/)

With the launch of watchOS 2, developers are able to use voice input and the digital crown. Don't think they have access to the button.

You can switch tabs in Safari using Ctrl + Tab (and Ctrl + Shift + Tab to go backwards).

You wouldn't want to do that in Things (it's a todo app) - you're most likely not going past next month, at the most. You're right though - this wouldn't be a good replacement calendar picker for every app.

As the author of a fairly popular manual viewer for iOS[1], I was shocked when building the documents at the state of the tools and the availability of documentation for man. You would think that such a widely used command would have tonnes of information, formatting tools, parsing libraries, etc, plus articles and such - but surprisingly, there isn't that much available. Of the libraries that I found, many of them only supported certain formats or had strange bugs.

So, any improvements made to man are very much welcomed! I do feel, however, that a new format might be the best way to go - possibly something based loosely on Markdown or (my personal preference) JSON. I feel that if we had a more structured manpage format, we could do a lot more with it. I was hoping in my app, for example, to be able to pull out commands (e.g. enter "ls -lh" and it'll highlight the information for "-l" and "-h".) It is possible (http://explainshell.com/ does it really nicely) but it would be far easier with a nicely structured format.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/manuals-linux-bsd-manpages/i...

Best example I have is the whole navigation structure (this is on iPhone). Let's say you were listening to a playlist and then you went into an artist, maybe a related artist from there and played a song (basically, you've gone pretty deep). You now decide to search for a song and play that. In order to do that, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until the hamburger icon appears. Then, you can search and listen to the track you wanted. If you want to return to where you were previously, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until you get the hamburger, then redo every step you took to get there.

How is this fixable? Really easily! It's built-in! There's a UITabBarController that is used in many apps, such as iTunes, for this exact purpose. You can switch between sections of an app without losing your place in each section.

I'm only talking about renting, not sure what it's like when buying, so I'm talking about quality of appliances, care taken when painting (often places have obvious paint marks where scuffs have been painted over) and the overall decor - not the actual quality of the building, windows, etc.

This is all just anecdotal, of course, and just something I've noticed locally - perhaps other places are much better. After my partner started working, we started looking at places roughly double the rent of our previous place, but in the same area - and we found that these places were pretty much the exact same, just a lot bigger.

Hadn't heard of MOG, although I had heard of Beats Music, but unfortunately neither were available in the UK.

Something that has always annoyed me in my local area is that, when renting, the cost of an apartment is relative to its size, not to its quality. So you could have an apartment that is twice the cost, twice the size, but still has the same crappy washing machine and no dishwasher.

I would happily pay double the rent for a similar sized apartment but one with lots of nice touches, such as luxury appliances and such. I've often thought that if I ever rent out a property, I'd fill it with nice things and then charge more - high end coffee machines, in-wall speaker systems, nice furniture, etc. Perhaps there's a reason that landlords don't do that, though.

I was very excited to try Clementine after spotting this, but having done so, I'm afraid I'd recommend using the Spotify client over this. Unfortunately, the UI is dreadful and it misses integration with some more recent additions to Spotify (e.g. My Music).

Ping was a complete failure but apart from that, what else? iTunes was their only other attempt in the "war" and it absolutely dominated.

Regarding reach, inventory and ecosystem - I think Spotify should be very worried by Apple. The iTunes library is one of the biggest and it seems that most of it is available for streaming. Apple Music will be coming preinstalled on all iOS devices (with three months of the service for free) and, to top it all off, it'll be available on Android too. I'd be very concerned if I were Spotify.

What's more, iOS users tend to be some of the more valuable customers, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a higher portion of Spotify Premium subscribers on iOS than other platforms. I suspect that Spotify Premium memberships will take a big hit after it launches. I know I'll be leaving for it.

To me, Spotify is a perfect example of the power of a good UI (or rather, how damaging a poor UI can be). I have subscribed to Spotify since pretty much the beginning - for years and years - and yet I am completely disloyal to them. I can't think of any other company, besides utility companies and such, where I haven't become somewhat fond of them having been a customer for so long. I can't stand Spotify. Whilst the service is great, the UI is awful and the apps are slow, don't feel native and are annoying to use. That's why, having only seen screenshots of Apple Music, I know I'll be switching to it from day one. A good user interface is king.

(In case anyone brings it up, I've tried many competitors to Spotify, including Rdio, and haven't been able to find anything better. Rdio looked promising but their Mac app is actually even worse.)

My partner found his first job through Who Is Hiring working at an American firm (we're based in the UK). He's on considerably more money than he would be if he were working locally. I'm envious that his first job was so good - mine was working for a pretty awful web dev firm, highly underpaid. Things have gotten better since then (I run my own company now, for one), but I can't thank Matthew enough for enabling him to not have to go through a bunch of poor quality, poorly paid jobs before he found something he really enjoys.

Thanks Matthew.

Couldn't agree more and have considered building something similar in the past. Seems like such a gigantic project though.

I'd probably host my own mail if it were a matter of installing one server, hooking it up to a database (much prefer the idea of storing email in a database than mbox files) and giving it a few details. Even better if it came with a simple web interface for viewing email and for configuring.

I've set up mail servers in the past but I've always been left a bit uneasy, as if there's a possibility I've not quite set it up right.

Wow, thanks Colin - really cool information. Where do you get the contents of 'records' from? Do you have a script that crawls occasionally?

If we merge bbc.com and bbc.co.uk, we end up with 125 / 10,000. I suppose that isn't that many compared to others, but it's still higher than I think it should be. ArsTechnica (which often runs the same articles, such as this SpaceX one) only has 68 / 10,000 and the articles are written with a lot more technical detail.

Nevertheless, I'm not really sure what can be done about it. We can't ban the BBC from HN, as with BuzzFeed, because that's over the top - there's some good content. A nice solution might be to remind people, on the submission page, that it's better to go to the source - or at least a good, technical write-up - rather than a news post that is written for the general public.

Is anyone else becoming a touch bothered by the large number of BBC news articles that are being submitted to Hacker News? I love the BBC and BBC News is - for the most part - very good. However, the articles on their website are often lacking in detail and when talking about technology, they are often wrong or show a misunderstanding on the behalf of the reporter. The BBC News definitely has a place - I'm just not sure that it's on Hacker News.

I don't mind one or two articles - and I don't mind articles from mainstream news publications - but there are a lot of articles being published from the BBC. Here's the past 24 hours:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc&sort=byPopularity&prefix=f...

All of that said, they keep getting upvotes - so enough people clearly want them on Hacker News.