kaolinite

It really is incredible how the opinion of Uber has dropped. I used to love Uber - and still do love the Uber service - but now I can't stand the company. I used to buy in to the whole corrupt taxi industry narrative, but now I feel like a fool for believing it (even if it was true at the beginning). It's a shame that there's no alternative, at least that I'm aware of, to UberEXEC/UberLUX.

I feel like Uber could have been a great, albeit smaller, company had they concentrated on their upmarket service. Aiming to be cheaper than taxis is just a race to the bottom - but there are many people who are willing to pay more in exchange for a better experience.

They made iAd so they would control the major advertising network on iOS and as a result could limit the privacy implications. iAd is by far the least intrusive major advertising network.

As ever, I'm not a lawyer - you should talk to one. However:

I suspect that if you ever become big enough to start getting legal threats from those sites, you'll already be in a pretty good place. I wouldn't worry about legal stuff yet, the main problem is actually building the thing. That said, make sure you set up a limited liability company and, as far as I know, you should be safe.

As you're scraping 500-1000 different websites, if one or two complain, you can just remove them from the website. They probably won't want to anyway if their competitors are on there too.

You should probably make sure you have a link on the website to a complaints/takedown page too.

Gun.io is another.

Oh the Model X is definitely still a luxury car, no question. I imagine it'll be more affordable, though. The next model they announce - as you say, the Model 3 - is supposed to be their first truly affordable car.

They are planning to eventually release a more affordable Tesla, just as soon as they can scale up enough that it's viable. The first car they made (the Roadster) was a very expensive supercar, which they sold in low numbers. Then they made the Model S, an expensive, luxury sedan, which they're selling a lot more of. I'm not sure if pricing has been released yet for the Model X but I suspect it'll be cheaper than the Model S and will sell in even greater numbers.

Elon doesn't really seem to be in this for the money or the luxury status - he seems to just care about building great cars that are good for the environment. As soon as he can make really good, affordable electric cars - I'm sure he will.

The Lisa incident was pretty much the lowest point for Jobs, in terms of him being an asshole. It's often brought up as an example of how horrible he was. However, he was young when it happened, he later regretted it and he did mature over the years (some people say that when he was fired from Apple, that was what fixed him) so it doesn't feel particularly fair to use it to characterise him later in life. That said, there were more recent incidents showing him to be a bit of an ass too.

I bought my TV just before smart TVs became popular and am dreading having to replace it, with - from what I can tell - all of the good, high end TVs now being "smart".

I really wish the trend was TVs becoming less smart, more like a monitor than a computer, especially now that TV "pucks" like Apple TV, Roku, etc are gaining popularity.

I feel that the grid of icons works great for the TV but the problem is the unimaginative remote control. Instead of a plastic remote with arrow buttons, a better solution is using a phone or tablet which shows a UI based on what is on the screen. You tap through apps on the phone and pick what you want to watch. Then, you hit play and it starts showing on the screen.

TVs aren't really great for interacting with - so a better approach is not to interact with them at all and do the interaction on a different, closer touch device.

That seems incredibly forward - I honestly don't think I could bring myself to do it. Definitely sounds like the best approach though.

How tricky is it to get a ProductHunt invite now? Does every user only get a few invites or are invites replenished frequently?

I've heard that you can get invited by participating in the community for a while but I don't really like the idea of having to put effort in each day in the vague hope I'll be invited, when it's quite possible I'll be helping a community I'll never be invited into.

For competitive reasons, they rarely share information on new products. It's a brand new market and they don't have to share information, so they don't. Analysts are estimating around 2 million sold, but feel free to take that with a grain of salt.

It's worth noting that before the release he said that Apple wouldn't release numbers, this isn't a reaction to poor sales.

I think you misread my comment. I wasn't comparing Edition with a gold Rolex, just a low-end (perhaps second hand) stainless steel Explorer / AirKing / etc. If you see someone wearing a fake stainless steel Rolex, there's a genuine possibility that it's real (assuming you can't tell it's fake). But with Edition, the chance of it being real is pretty low. Thus, wearing a gold plated Apple Watch is pretty obvious.

I'm well aware of the costs of a Rolex (and most watch brands, I'm a watch enthusiast). You can pick up a Rolex for a few thousand pounds in Britain. New, they start at around £4000ish. Gold watches in general cost a lot more, especially if they have a gold link bracelet, and you're right that Edition is priced fairly competitively.

A stainless steel Rolex is, whilst quite a bit of money, affordable if you decide that you want it. I don't live in a major city and yet I'll still see a few on the wrists of people if I take a trip around town. Edition, however, would be quite a sighting - similar (in terms of required wealth), in my opinion, to seeing a complicated Patek on a wrist. (Whilst the prices are different, I'm saying this because of the upgrade issue, i.e. a £100K Patek will last many lifetimes, a gold Edition will be useless in less than 5 years).

Whilst there's nothing really wrong with gold plating an Apple Watch, to me it feels on par with wearing a fake Rolex.

The difference is, whilst a Rolex is reasonably affordable, the Edition is clearly out of the price range of most people - so wearing something like this will be so obvious.

However, I would love to see some companies coming up with custom Apple watches. Not to make them look more expensive, just to make them look different. For the first time, I might actually buy a customised Apple product if it weren't too expensive (maybe a wooden Apple watch case might look nice, for example.) We'll definitely see this with custom bands (really looking forward to that) but it'd be cool to see new watch bodies too.

As an aside, whilst I understand (and mostly approve of) the reasoning behind Edition, it's a shame that the only gold Apple watch is so expensive. I wish that Apple had created a gold coloured watch in addition to the solid gold Edition - similar to how many watch companies produce the same watch in stainless steel and white gold or platinum. Or how watch companies sometimes put a diamond on the back of the watch but none on the front.

Do you have anything to back that up? Personally, I feel developing for Apple platforms has never been better. Companies are still, for the most part, launching on iOS first and I don't know who the developers you're talking about are, but there are a hell of a lot of great developers still in the platform: Panic, OmniGroup, etc.

As for your comment on the 30% fee, that's industry standard and few serious developers complain. The $99 fee is nothing compared to the amount of time it takes to build and design a quality app.

Moving Android development to Go makes the most sense, if they plan to abandon Java, which I doubt.

Finally, people often make the mistake of thinking that programming languages are the problem in mobile development (or in GUI development in general, frankly). You can pick up a programming language fairly quickly, even in a weekend to a reasonable level if you're good enough. Learning a UI framework, however, that takes time - no matter your skill level.

Four years ago, I fell in love with the idea of not needing to go to college. It's a meritocracy, they said. If I work hard, spend time learning on my own time and get experience then a degree won't matter at all. It's just a piece of paper, after all. And so I didn't accept the place I had at a decent (UK) university.

Four years later, I'm doing ok. I recently left my job to start a startup. And I was right, I didn't need to go. But honestly, I really wish I had. I'd like to move to the US to work, but without a degree that's very hard. There are a number of jobs I'm interested in that haven't "caught up with the times" and still require a degree. Maybe they'll change with time, but maybe not.

I was in Silicon Valley a year or so ago and was invited to a dinner at YC, with other attendees of Startup School. The second question almost everyone asked me, after "what are you working on?", was "which school did you go to?". And that was at YC. College isn't obsolete, no matter how much we wish it was. Not even close.

You're right - definitely a bit too vague at the moment. It explains some features but doesn't explain why you want the product itself. I'm going to spend some time thinking about how to alter the copy (as well as trim it down a bit). Thanks for taking a look, really helps a lot.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to write all of that. Really helpful.

I'm going to go through all of the copy and trim it down a bit, you're not the first to say that there's a bit too much. Thanks for saying that it communicates integrity, etc - I'm trying to build a good company (products made with care, giving money to charity, pricing fairly and helping other businesses, etc), so that's really great to hear.

> If the landing page previewed the current issue e.g. list of topics, and the selection demonstrated excellent curation then I might.

Good idea, I'll add a link to the latest issue on the homepage of into.technology.

> Does Pleasant have any unique strengths you can make its primary focus?

Pleasant is a tricky one, it took me a while to try and describe even to myself why it's different (really not a good start when building a business, I know). There are two main features. The first is the simplicity. I'm aiming to get people using Pleasant as little as possible: you login, you immediately see statistics relative to previous days/weeks/months and can get an idea as to whether things are trending up or down. If you need more info, there are more in depth pages, auto-generated user reports, etc. I've found that even Google Analytics is very complicated - I'm hoping there's a demand for a simple, cheap analytics service.

The other feature is the user identification. You can add a few meta tags / form attributes onto your site and users that have identified themselves (i.e. logged in, signed up for a newsletter, etc) will show up in your analytics, along with their gravatar, etc. I think I need to emphasise this feature a bit more.

> If your niche was "analytics for when you serve VIPs not crowds" or something...

Interesting idea. I'm currently targeting regular people, small business owners, etc - people who don't need the power of a full on analytics service. But you might be right that this could be worth investigating. I'll give that some thought.

That's a very good point, will try and work on that next week. Thanks.

Does anyone have any feedback for my two sites? http://pleasant.io/ and http://into.technology/

Have tried to make them as clear as possible but it's harder than I first thought.

It was the logical choice, really. I'd been programming since a young age, it was logical that I'd become a programmer.

I often wonder if there's a job out there that I might enjoy as much or even be better at. Only other profession I might be interested in is watchmaking (sounds crazy but there's actually a huge demand for watchmakers), but the cost of tuition and the risk I might not be good at it means I'll probably never give it a shot.

I stumbled across Doorbell.io recently and am using it on Pleasant.io quite successfully. It's free (with a paid plan that gives you additional users, etc) and very simple: first one I found that wasn't cluttered with fields and features.

I left my job at the start of 2015 and started a company, which I've very recently launched: Pleasant.io. It's a website analytics service for humans, basically. Really simple, straight forward UI with an emphasis on useful data. If you're not a fan of Google Analytics, you might find Pleasant to be a breath of fresh air.

Clickable link: http://pleasant.io/

Something I'm having trouble with in Atom, having recently switched too, is undo. Unlike in Sublime, where undo is very granular and predictable, I can never really predict how much text it will undo. It often removes entire lines of code.

Having skipped Instagram, Snapchat and such, I'm surprised to find myself incredibly enthusiastic about Periscope and Meerkat. I really think they're onto something here.

I've watched a number of streams of people showing things they're working on, streams of events people are at, etc. It's incredible - you feel like you're there, participating even. Live streaming has existed for years, but it has never been this easy to create streams and view streams. Just hit a button and you're showing what you're seeing to your Twitter followers. Or, if you're browsing Twitter, tap a link and you're seeing what they're seeing.

I'm especially looking forward to events such as WWDC, Google I/O, CES, etc: will be fascinating to get realtime access.

Apparently it's a limitation of the chipset. It can only support 8GB when soldered onto the board (16GB when unsoldered).

Can't find the reference for it on Intel's website but it was discussed at length on the Accidental Tech Podcast (atp.fm) by John Siracusa.

If "Epicenter" is referring to anything in particular, which it quite possibly isn't, I would guess that it could be referring to a new Apple TV[1] being announced that will serve as a hub (i.e. the device in the center) for HomeKit.

[1] Could also be an updated Airport but Apple TV is more likely as 1. it makes more sense overall and 2. it is very likely there will be an update (Apple website currently says that it starts at $69 but there are no other models / configurations).

Personally, I find Hacker News to be a breath of fresh air in that regard. Every other discussion area on the Internet is full of jokes - some funny, many not - and it frankly becomes tiresome after a while, everyone trying to come up with a witty comment. There's definitely a place for that (I love a good joke too) but I think it's great that there's a place for mainly serious discussion. If you want a laugh, there's everywhere else on the Internet.

Well, not exactly. At one point you were able to, but the flaw has been fixed for over 5 years now. It affected cameras on some Macs sold between 2006 and 2009 I believe.

Here's the paper describing the flaw: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...