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stoneyon Apple Relaxes iOS Restrictions On Development Tools, Publishes Review Guidelines

Would you change your mind now? I decided on Monday to buy an Android phone (HTC Desire), but haven't got around to going to the store yet.

stoneyon Little known iTunes 10 benefit

I've got around this in the past by importing the bizarrely named files into iTunes and then telling it to automatically organise my library for me. It then uses the metadata in the mp3s to rename the files back to how they should be. Not sure if it still does that these days.

stoneyon Don't make your Android app free for 1 day

This is in spite of the fact that the Android phone sales are apparently equal the number of iPhones phone sales.

From what I understand, Android sales are currently similar to iPhone sales (in the US) in terms of phones being sold today, but there are a lot more iPhones already out there than Android phones (because the iPhone has been selling for longer I guess). Which means at the moment there are fewer people to buy Android apps. This also varies considerably from country to country -- for example, apparently Android sales are tiny in Australia compared to the iPhone.

stoneyon Ask HN: Should I ignore a cease and desist letter from our competition?

Or maybe the Google cache can give you what you want...

http://www.mapmyride.com/view_route?r=488106908

Becomes:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_kV756J...

stoneyon Ask HN: Should I ignore a cease and desist letter from our competition?

Maybe make the desktop application open source? That may remove a lot of the headache for you if you can find a keen customer to develop/support it.

Good luck taking on mapmyride. Mapmyrun (the runner's equivalent) has got worse and worse over the years, I'm sure you can do better!

stoneyon Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance

I completely agree. Excel is the thing that keeps me tied to Windows (and no, the Mac version of Excel isn't the same). It is by far the best software I have used for small to medium complexity data analysis (at some point you have to pull out the really heavy lifting number crunching tools, but they have even less open source competition), and it is the only software I have used that meets most of my needs and is also approachable to relative beginners.

stoneyon I'm not a spammer, I just need to blast these potential customers

The law referenced is Canadian, but I've often wondered which set of laws cover something like an email list (and things like affiliate links on blogs). What if my potential recipients span several countries? Should I abide by my local rules? The local rules for my email list provider (if I'm using something like Mailchimp)? The union of all of the recipients' local rules?

stoneyon Is Android Only Surging Because Apple Is Letting It?

There was a lot of noise about that, but in reality the internet "filtering" proposals have not (yet) been enacted and thanks to the latest election result look pretty much guaranteed to be unpassable now.

stoneyon Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?

Don't start with the professors - start at the bottom and work up. Find a large-ish existing community of PhD students (e.g. all students at a certain lab) and build up from there.

stoneyon Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?

Mendeley has been mentioned a few times already. I'll just point out that it has some kind of API. I have no idea what it enables, I've been meaning to look into it, but it might be useful in terms of getting citation information for new papers, etc. In other words you might be able to build the system you want on top of Mendeley.

stoneyon Scotch as a Diet Hack

That depends on my starting weight. If I weigh 120lbs then I'll take the muscle. If I weigh 220lbs then I'll take the weight loss.

stoneyon Death in Space

I highly recommend the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's fiction, so the science is suspect in places, but it raises a lot of fascinating issues - the main one being that the science and engineering behind keeping Martian settlers alive might be the easy part. The politics of what happens on a new planet is the hard part.

stoneyon Ask YC: Have you ever ignored Paul Graham?

Even considering YC companies, who's to say how many would have succeeded anyway? There's no control, so no experiment.

I guess you could look at rejected applicants as a sort of control group (not perfect though)? How many of those have gone on to be a success (I have no idea)?

stoneyon Ready for Zero (YC S10) wants to help Americans get out of debt.

I don't completely agree with your 5th point. By the same argument, auto manufacturers make a profit, so don't buy a ready made car - you can make it cheaper yourself! (Maybe the part about auto manufacturers making a profit is a bit shaky these days)

Sure, going to Starbucks is not a good use of your cash if you can't afford it, but where I am some of the cheaper restaurants can give me a decent meal for around the same as if I cooked it myself. They get their ingredients cheaper than I could and they make their money from the wine that I buy to go with it.

stoneyon Ask HN: Requiring FB Connect, Will This Kill My Startup?

I'm surprised that the HN community seems more averse to using FB connect than I expect most normal users are. Either that or people that are critical of FB Connect are more apt to respond to this.

You're probably seeing both effects here. As a moderately tech-savvy person, I've got just enough information to be dangerous -- I know that there are/have been missteps with facebook sharing information (and there was that business with sites automatically publishing purchases to your feed) but I don't know enough to know exactly what is/isn't safe. So I err on the side of caution. Someone who hasn't seen the headlines in the tech press might not be as cautious.

stoneyon Ask HN: Requiring FB Connect, Will This Kill My Startup?

Unless I specifically wanted your startup to be putting stuff into my facebook feed, I personally wouldn't log in to your (or any) site using a facebook account.

I'm a bit paranoid about the potential for 3rd party apps to publish stuff to my facebook account that I don't want them too - the whole facebook privacy thing is just too murky (I don't really understand what you could or couldn't do if I logged into your site with fb connect), so in general I just play safe and keep facebook separate from everything else.

stoneyon Things I've Learned from Traveling Around the World for Three Years

Very true, the historical architectural/cultural side of the UK (castles+ruins+very old stuff) is incredible. Going around old towns like Cambridge and York, and seeing stuff like Stonehenge is a pretty stunning experience the first time around. Of course, having lived in the UK for most of my life I completely take all of that for granted!

stoneyon Hey, Guys, It's Totally Okay If You Don't Get Rich

If you don't mind me asking, what sort of short contract do you take? How do you get them (advertised jobs, through contacts)?

stoneyon Things I've Learned from Traveling Around the World for Three Years

Your first point is a big one - the US has an incredible variety of places to visit. I'm from the UK, and while there are some amazing places to visit in the UK, there is a lot less variety than there is in the US. I spend 10 days driving from Denver to Vegas and saw far more scenery than I ever have in the UK. If I lived in the US I could easily imagine not leaving it for years (when I lived in the UK I'd go abroad at least twice a year).

stoneyon How a call girl can earn far more by actually working far less

Increasing the size of the workforce will tend to put downward pressure on wages. So if you double the workforce I expect you'd see pretty serious downward pressure on wages, maybe to the point where previously one partner working could support the family (historically the norm), but now you need both partners working. Though of course adding women to the workforce has had lots of positive effects, so maybe the overall improvement in the economy cancels out the downward pressure on wages. I am not an economist.

stoneyon No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

It's interesting how the calculation is quite sensitive to your initial capital - if you start with 6.2 million then at age 70 you have about 4 million remaining. Which you then burn through in the next 7 years.

stoneyon GNU Social - diaspora already has a clone that's usable and free software

Cool, I look forward to it!

I guess the trick will be to get people to view their social network as more like email (decentralised, everyone has accounts with different providers, etc) and less like facebook/twitter/etc (centralised). At the moment people see the network and the host all mashed together as one thing (I go to facebook.com for facebook). Maybe there are some parallels here with the early days of AOL...

stoneyon GNU Social - diaspora already has a clone that's usable and free software

I don't think the average non-techie user is going to get very far past:

You will need PHP5 (including the OpenID, gd and curl libraries) plus MySQL 5 or later. Apache 2 or later, or lighttpd are supported as web servers.

I guess the project is still in the very early stages, so it's probably a bit unfair to criticise them for that at the moment. Hopefully someone (or many people) will offer hosted versions.

stoneyon People have no bloody idea about saving energy

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't -- Robert Benchley

stoneyon OhLife: A Personal Journal You Might Actually Keep Updating

Store it locally on your computer? (being careful to back it up of course)

stoneyon Ask HN: Opportunities for Structured Data?

In the UK several of the national newspapers publish university league tables - not sure if you get the same thing in the US? Might provide some inspiration for you.

See http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/stug/universityguide.php for an example.

stoneyon Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

Interesting idea, but I wonder how many copies of my data would need to be stored across the system to guarantee that at least one copy is available when I want it?

Many people don't leave their personal computers switched on all the time, especially if they go away for a few days, then there are network outages, people deciding to leave the network, ...

stoneyon Good-bye to Dubai

As I understand it (though I could be wrong), the port in Dubai is one of the freight hubs of the world, which is where the Emirate gets a lot of its wealth (it has little/no oil - Abu Dhabi has most of the UAE's oil). So there was some economic activity there at least.

stoneyon Good-bye to Dubai

I interpreted the comment that I replied to to mean that Dubai being a strip along the coastline meant that it didn't look like a real city. I would say that it's probably more of an indicator that it's got nice beaches than anything else.

Miami was the first strip like city that sprung to mind as a counterexample, but as you say, it is huge, so it probably wasn't the best comparison.

stoneyon Good-bye to Dubai

How about:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

Also bear in mind the relative populations of New York, Beijing and Dubai. No surprise Dubai looks "tiny".

Not that I'm standing up for Dubai - I didn't like it at all when I went there and it has some very serious problems. I think the demographics don't match the form of the city very well - the city is too large and the buildings are too grand to match the people who are actually there (who are mostly construction workers it seems).