kkowalczyk

Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/), which is a web-based outliner. Good because it's fast.

"as there's just no advantage".

So, orders of magnitude more top notch engineers is not an advantage?

An order of magnitude more VC firms is not an advantage?

The existence of YC is not an advantage?

Order of magnitude more tech oriented events and meetups is not an advantage?

Maybe you meant "for me, personally, for my very specific business, there's no advantage" but maybe you shouldn't make sweeping statements based on what seems like a strongly held opinion and not a reasoned position.

To be clear: I'm not saying that Bay Area is the only place to start a successful startup. Clearly, it isn't.

But just as clearly Bay Area is an epicenter of startups that generates disproportionately large number of successes, both gigantic (which Austin tech company is on the list of 500 biggest US companies, next to Google, Apple, Oracle, Yahoo?) and small.

So either we have some unexplained phenomena that distorts the probability of success here or there are very real advantages to being here.

<nosnark>

Maybe if we didn't have "critics" like you that are quick to rant and diss other people work while not doing anything themselves, highly-visible projects wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't require such steps.

I lead a fairly successful open-source project and I'm on the receiving end of this attitude of entitlement as well.

People don't realize how much work goes into developing of software and when you give it away for free, with source-code, it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" ?).

I'm sure Ubuntu, being vastly more popular and visible, receives vastly more "constructive criticism".

</nosnark>

There's nothing to clarify.

Creative work (including source code) automatically falls under "all rights reserved" bucket unless the author specifically states other licensing terms.

In this case the author didn't so his work is still "all rights reserved" and no-one can use it.

You're confusing "source code available" with "open-source".

"Open source" is a shortcut for: "source code available and under open-source license".

What license is an open-source license? OSI has a detailed checklist: http://opensource.org/docs/osd

(nitpicker corner: to the extent a vague term as "open source" can be defined; people disagree as to what exactly it means).

It's good software engineering.

The reasonable case for multi-person editing of a document is several people at the max editing the document concurrently.

Having thousands of people doing that is not a real-life scenario.

It's better to protect yourself from extremes like that by disabling editing functionality in that case than try to engineer a system that actually allows thousands of people editing a document concurrently (because it would be very expensive in engineering time and especially testing time).

There's literally no business case to be made for supporting thousands of concurrent edits - no one actually needs that functionality.

If free private repos is the only thing that BitBucket offers over GitHub, then they'll not be in business for long.

You cost them money.

Given your eager defense of US I doubt you see how dangerous this kind of reasoning is.

You basically said that US, in general, is a good guy and therefore it's justified in doing illegal, immoral things and then hunting down those who expose this behavior.

So exposing bad behavior of US government is bad and worthy prosecution but exposing bad behavior of other governments, those you deem to be worse than US, is good and worthy praise.

Please explain the rationale for that double-standard.

Please also tell me which which other country dropped two atomic bombs, fought a prolonged, unprovoked political war (Vietnam) and invaded another country based on evidence that is believed to be completely fabricated (Iraq) and destroyed the lives of many creative people during McCarthy's communist witch hunt.

This is not to say that other countries aren't worse but let's not blindly wave patriotic flag and pretend that US government is immune to immoral, corrupt behavior. This kind of blind patriotism is easily exploitable. One thing that the "bad" governments have in common is that blind patriotism is a main propaganda technique used by Nazi Party, North Korea, communist countries to build us vs. evil them (except to them it's the jews or US is the "evil") and explain away their bad behavior (because the other side is even worse).

It seems that Apple painted itself into a corner here.

Apple releases a new iPhone every year and it comes with major-ish OS update. They can't just not ship and wait until it's perfect - there's too much money riding on this upgrade cycle.

At the same time, Apple dropped contract with Google way before iOS 6 was ready.

Since delaying iPhone 5/iOS 6 combo was out of the question and they didn't prepare for the plan B (i.e. shipping Google's maps) their only option was to ship their maps regardless of how shitty they are.

My experience is the opposite. I build websites in Go. I find it about as easy as building in Python. Web programming is mostly about filling html templates with data and Go's built-in html template is excellent (on par with Django templates).

Comparing Go to C for web dev is ridiculous - no sane person would write the whole thing in C.

Even compared to Java Go wins by a huge margin when it comes to speed of development and conciseness of resulting code.

I haven't used use Ruby but writing web services in Go I'm as productive as I was in Python (using App Engine or Tornado).

There is a very good reason for disabling Objective C in NDK.

Objective C, the syntax, has very little value without Objective C runtime/standard library and Objective C runtime/stdlib is huge (compared to C and C++ standard libraries).

NDK has a very specific goal: if the code would be too slow when compiled to Dalvik VM, you can get speed with NDK, writing in C/C++, but at the cost of loosing access to almost all of the APIs that Android provides. This tradeoff more or less makes sense only for games.

Implementing Objective C runtime and standard library would be huge undertaking and the code, when used, would occupy more memory. Also, this code would mostly duplicate C++ standard library, just with a different syntax.

It doesn't make sense to allow people using Objective C in NDK.

Seriously? What is "cryptic" about db = sql.Open(...); db.Exec(); db.Query(); db.Close() etc.?

From https://github.com/bmizerany/pq/blob/master/conn_test.go:

  func TestExec(t *testing.T) {
	db := openTestConn(t)
	defer db.Close()

	_, err := db.Exec("CREATE TEMP TABLE temp (a int)")
	if err != nil {
		t.Fatal(err)
	}

	r, err := db.Exec("INSERT INTO temp VALUES (1)")
	if err != nil {
		t.Fatal(err)
	}

What is it exactly that you tried and failed? Because looking at conn_test.go the API is dead simple and pretty much like any other db API of this kind.

Unless you're extremely poor, spending twice as much at McDonald's won't affect you (and, consequently economy) in any way but it'll affect people working at McDonald's.

Even if the total amount of money in the economy is fixed, the distribution of that money among people matters a great deal to the health of economy which is something your simplistic argument doesn't address.

In the most extreme example if one uber-rich person has almost all of the money and the rest of the country has just enough to buy food, it doesn't matter how much money that uber-rich person has - the economy will be in the shitters because uber-rich person only needs one house, one car, can eat out only in one restaurant per night etc. but if no-one else can afford a car, the cars will not be made (it's too expensive to make just one car).

If there are millions of people that are only one millionth as wealthy as our uber-rich person but wealthy enough to afford a car, a house, a tv set etc., the economy can develop - if there's market for million cars, someone has to be employed to make those cars, tv sets, serve food to those millions of people and a virtuous cycle develops where people employed to create things and services for wealthy people become wealthy themselves.

So the question is: is raising minimum wage creates more over-all wealth (by transferring more money from rich people who have excess of it) or less over-all wealth (by making services of poor people too expensive for rich people).

I don't know what the answer is but you certainly haven't proven that 20% rise of McDonald's prices would cause McDonald's collapse because of massive "I make my own sandwich" movement. Even if that was purely a matter of price (and not, say, convenience of getting a hamburger and fries in few minutes in the middle of San Francisco), McDonald would probably beat you regardless of what minimum wage is due to massive economies of scale, not to mention that making your own sandwich is like using Linux: it's only free if your time is worth nothing.

EFF doesn't ask companies to ignore patents but for the people to voice the opposition to patents so that the government has some incentive to reform the patent system.

And in your "fair play" analogy you should be explicit about which party do you think doesn't play fair. There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement but if you pay attention it's also about Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation.

And if you pay further attention, Apple has just been found guilty infringing Samsung's patents in Korea so "Apple good, Samsung bad" seems to be a simplistic view of the situation.

We know one thing about this war: Apple fired the first shot.

There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code, none of which were copied.

Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone walking into Verizon store can walk out with a Samsung phone thinking that they bought an iPhone and that's why there's no "counterfeiting" involved. Android has a very distinct look and feel to iOS and again, I don't see how anyone could confuse the two.

The gravest error in your comment is assuming that Apple is in it for the justice. Apple is scarred of the runaway train that is Android. They are having Windows flashbacks and faced with loosing in the marketplace they go for legal blitzkrieg.

I can't describe how hilarious it is when a company built on ripping off other people's ideas (Apple I/II was a mass production of a motherboard inspired by hobbyist home-made motherboards; Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with) suing other companies for using one or two ideas out of tens of thousands that are present in a modern smartphone (including those that Xerox Park came up with).

Jobs himself is on the record pontificating about how Apple is shameless about copying other people's good ideas which he apparently doesn't find in any way conflicting with suing everyone else for allegedly copying Apple.

Seems like a massive mis-attribution error and I worry people will learn the wrong lesson here.

The OP's story is:

1. learned to program iOS (hard, completely under OP's control)

2. wrote and published iOS app (hard, under OP's control)

3. the app failed so wrote a blog post about his experience (easy although often neglected by programmers, under OP's control)

4. HN picked up the story which led to interview (total crapshot, not under OP's control)

5. a round of of interviews which led to job offer and "completely changed life" (hard, under OP's control)

I understand why claiming step 4 ("HN picking up the story") was responsible for "changed life" plays well on HN, but it's irrational.

The hard things that OP did and were under his control were: learning iOS programming, publishing iOS app, writing a blog post about it and doing well during an interview. Steps 1-3, 5 were necessary and responsible for his getting a better job.

Step 4 is the only one that wasn't under OP's control, involved pure luck and is not even necessary.

As an example, I get several interview inquiries every month but not because I post on HN (I do) or because occasionally what I wrote ended up on HN (it did) but because I have a website, github account and a portfolio of non-trivial projects.

Step 4 is not necessary because in this market a competent iOS programmer can pick and choose. The OP would be better off if he pro-actively applied for several iOS positions in Silicon Valley (of which there are plenty) and picked the best offer, instead of passively waiting and accepting the first offer.

I'm not saying that good things don't happen because of HN but in this particular case the lesson shouldn't be "write a blog post, hope it ends up on HN and then further hope someone will contact you with a job offer" but "learn a marketable skill (like iOS programming), produce a proof of your skill (write iOS application), market it a little bit (write a blog post about it) and then go on a job shopping spree (by applying for iOS jobs)".

True but assuming the future is that of mostly robo-taxi companies (and not individually owned self-driving cars), there will tremendous business pressure on robo-taxi companies to make their cars as efficient as possible, as the cost of gas (or other energy) will be part of their cost of providing the service.

Today car companies sell cars based on many criteria. Fuel efficiency is one of them but when gas prices aren't too high, individual customers don't care about that very much.

Someone who operates a fleet of 10.000 cars will make fuel efficiency their top-most priority because that will drive down the cost of their service and the cost will be a major reason why customers will pick one provider over another, not how stylish the car is or how fast it goes from 0 to 60.

E.g. if they realize that by putting solar panel on the roof of the car they can save money in the long term, they'll immediately put solar panel in every car. The progress in making cars more efficient will be much faster.

Sure, but how hard would it be for Google to create a wholly-owned subsidiary that is an insurance company, which only happens to insure Google?

Patent troll Intellectual Ventures reportedly created hundreds of shell companies. Amazon creates tens of subsidiaries (e.g. Kindle is technically created by lab126, owned by Amazon but a separate company) etc. Whatever the legal roadblocks insurance companies might try to throw, I don't see how they can stop new insurance companies from being created and that's a simple loophole against any anti-self-insurance laws.

This a very context-free analogy.

The biggest reason why it took a long time for cars to replace horses was high price (simply stated: most people couldn't afford a car even if they wanted one) and lack of infrastructure (it takes years to build roads).

We already have the infrastructure and the price will favor self-driving cars.

The laws heavily favor safety in cars (not everyone likes seat-belts and yet we have laws requiring people to use them; we have laws banning using a cell-phone while driving, driving while drunk; cars have to build in a way that withstand crashes etc.).

As long as it can be demonstrated that self-driving cars are safer (and they are), there will not only be pressure to allow them but to require them and eventually ban human drivers altogether.

Once the self-driving cars are allowed, the lower price and greater convenience will make it a blockbuster. I don't want to own a car, I don't want to operate it, I just want to get from Mission to SOMA fast and cheaply and self-driving cars will be able to offer that.

My theory is that we'll see the rise of what the author calls robo-taxi companies e.g. Uber or Google can provide car-as-a-service, for a monthly fee or

1. robo-taxi companies will self-insure. Insurance is just spreading the risk. If you have a fleet of 10.000 cars, self-insurance will be cheaper

2. by "death" he means "significant decline", not "disappearance". A company that buys 10.000 cars has a purchasing power that a single customer doesn't. They can dictate the specs to a car company and they can pit several companies against each other to get the best deal. They can even co-design the cars for their own metrics (e.g. fuel efficiency, reliability, maintainability is super important for someone who has a large fleet).

Car companies will have no choice but to play ball, some of them will go bankrupt and the remaining will service a much smaller market.

3. You assume that self-driving cars need a lot of new regulations. They don't - they just need to be allowed on the road. The rules have already changed in Nevada in California. When the technology is proven, the states will have a hard time justifying not allowing technology that is proven to save a significant number of lives.

4. robo-taxi companies will bring repairs in-house or outsource to existing companies. Again, they'll have upper hand in negotiations due to providing a lot of business and the overall market for repairs will shrink dramatically. Google could bring all their statistics knowledge to predicting what and when will fail and use the past data to improve the parts that fail the most.

5. not sure what you're driving at

6. agreed, probably overstatement on the author's part

Google (or some other robo-taxi company) doesn't have to make their own cars, they'll have enough pricing power to pit multiple car manufacturers against each others to get the best deal, drive down the margins etc., just as Apple does with iPhone parts manufactuers (where Apple gets most of the profit from the phone).

They can self-insure - the liability never goes away but will be manageable from revenues.

As to people who insist on owning a car - most of them will change their mind because of price. If you leave college with $50k in student debt, are you going to spend $10k on a new car + monthly insurance + gas + cost of garage ($100/month in San Francisco if your apartment doesn't already come with it) + hassle of owning a car or will you pay $100/month for much more convenient car-as-a-service deal?

There is non-insignificant fixed cost to insurance business: people, advertising cost immediately come to mind.

But I see another scenario: traditional insurance business will not be willing to insure self-driving cars rationally (i.e. at much lower cost due to much lower incident rates) and robo-taxi companies will self-insure. That will deprive traditional insurers from a lot of revenue and since they are publicly traded companies, they won't just accept that and scale down to match smaller market. Instead, they'll try to prop up revenues in short term by rising prices which will make self-driving cars even more attractive to more people, fueling their own decline.

He addressed this point: you'll be able to drive yourself but it'll cost you much more than giving the control to the car (due to cost of the insurance) and much more than today (insurance spreads risks and in order to work, needs a lot of buyers, in this case drivers; if most people switch from current "person driver", expensive insurance to much cheaper "auto-driver" insurance, the "person driver" insurance will become more expensive because there will be no benefits of scale).

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you will do, but what majority of people will do and his article is about those big-picture changes. Cars replaced horses as mode of transportation, with many consequences to society. Very rich people can still ride horses as a hobby, but that doesn't nullify the magnitude of changes brought by replacing horses by cars.

We hate TelCos who lower the prices and even apply them retro-actively? That's news to me.

But more to the point: the logistics of making refunds on purchases like software are complicated. Most payment processors don't even have the notion of partial refunds.

Making a full refund is costly to you (payment processor took their cut of the transaction; they aren't too eager to give it back to you so either they charge you (and now you have a loss) or they swallow the charge but will kick you out of the system if they have to do it too frequently).

There might be more bad will generated by contacting the customers and offering them refund because that makes them aware of some event that they might not like.

Most people don't monitor the price of software they bought over time so they are not aware of changes so they are not upset about changes. I've bought a bunch of software over time and I can't tell how much any of it cost - I just don't keep track.

You know what's worse for Google than "antagonizing" Apple?

Being at complete mercy of Apple.

Google has Android, which has a bigger market share than iOS. If Apple kicks out all Google's services from iOS, Google still has Android.

If Google didn't have Android and Apple kicked them out of iOS, they would have nothing.

This is a long term game for both players. Google's strategic plan is to advance Android. Apple's strategic plan is to advance iOS and don't be dependent of Google, which is why they are kicking out Google's maps and invest in their own solution, even though I'm certain it's way more costly for them to do it compared to licensing Google's service.

Both Google and Apple act perfectly reasonably given their long-term strategy.

"We took a small friends and family round"

That I do not understand. Why are people so desperate for funding, any funding?

An ex-Zynga engineer should be easily able to save enough money for at least 6 months, while he's working on an mvp.

Pre-emptive note: I do understand the value of idea validation, expert advice and connections that comes from getting a small investment from YC or a well-connected angel investor like Kevin Rose.

But "friends and family"? It seems bad for both parties.

If successful, the founders will loose a significant portion of the business for insignificant help (small amount of money but no expert advice and no network to help them in the future).

But most likely they'll fail which doesn't seem fair to their friends and family.

Incubators like YC and angel investors are sophisticated. They only invest money they can afford to loose, they understand that any single investment has 10% chance of succeeding so they hedge their bets and they also have a much better understanding of what has a potential to be successful enough to offer enough ROI for the investor.

Compared to that, an average person is naive and over-confident about investing, just like the author of the article was ("I quickly learned that unless your product has mass appeal and traction, or you are Kevin Rose, high profile Angels are not going to throw money at you.").

Both parties are victims of confirmation bias: reading TechCrunch one reads mostly about successful investments and exits which makes inspiring entrepreneurs think that an investment is normal and inevitable (reality: it's extremely rare and only awarded to those who stand out from the crowd) and makes naive "friends and family" investors think that making 10x ROI is a sure ticket to riches (reality: only the top investors make significant returns).

There's no "religious" law in the context we're talking about.

In both cases it's just law, enacted and enforced by the government of each country.

All it means that at some point we'll evolve to be really good at sitting. I'm doing my share to make that happen.

Propaganda is always easier if you fail to mention all the facts.

Like the fact that it was Motorola that used their patents to negotiate with Microsoft long before it was acquired by Google. Or the fact that Motorola did it only after Microsoft blackmailed Motorola, using your rhetoric, with their patent portfolio in order to destroy Android not by making better products but by patent bullying.

Yes, a completely open-sourced, royalty free and patent-free WebM is "proprietary".

Patent-laden format for which you have to pay multi-million royalties is "industry standard".

An "alternative" doesn't mean "has to be as good or better at everything that C++ does".

Most programs don't have garbage collection latency issues. Look at Android or Windows Phone - all the user-level apps are written in garbage-collected language and they work just fine.

Look at web - all the interaction is written in JavaScript and Gmail works just fine.

At this point in the discussion people usually bring "real time" applications. Approximately no-one writes those applications.

Go is an alternative to C++ in the sense that many (but not all) programs that you had to write in C++ you can now write in Go.

Also, I noticed that there is no source code in the source repository (a few .xib and .png files but not source).