Hacker News Reader

lukasbon Netflix Loses Toy Story 3, Tron and 1,000 More Movies

Good luck getting people to pay for plastic discs in boxes.

lukasbon Ask HN: What is the secret of Reddit's success? Early adopters?

The UI is easy to use, but I wouldn't call it simple. There is a lot of information, and there are a lot of ways to interact with the content. Every comment has at least seven clickable links and three pieces of metadata, compare with HN (four and two.) They just did a good design job so it doesn't seem overwhelming.

The UI probably has something to do with the composition of the userbase. reddit feels not just interactive but malleable. That appeals to geeks raised on videogames.

lukasbon No New Accounts Today

See MetaFilter for an example of a community site that suffered a decline in quality (starting around 2002) and then recovered. I'm surprised that MeFi's "MetaTalk", which segregates talk about rules and norms in its own sub-forum, hasn't been more widely copied.

lukasbon Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

Metafilter is an interesting counter-example to the rule that communities degrade over time: it was a total shitshow for a while in the early 2000s, and then repaired itself.

lukasbon The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

“There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

Write once, run anywhere. Why didn't anyone think of this before?

lukasbon New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing

Ways in which the old system was superior:

- You interacted with that subset of your friends (and their friends) that cared enough about reading to use this weird software.

- You could read your hand-selected feeds, share items and read others' shares in the same place. It was social reading. Now the reading and the social aspect are divorced.

lukasbon 24 year old student lights match: Europe versus Facebook

The "excessive processing of data" claim, if valid, would seem to make any social networking service a non-starter:

"Facebook is hosting enormous amounts of personal data and it is processing all data for its own purposes. It seems Facebook is a prime example of illegal 'excessive processing'."

lukasbon Ever missed an SMS on your Android? Here's why. (long-standing bug)

"Once things start to settle down"

Ah right, when Apple stops innovating, then?

lukasbon Push Pop Press

As long as there are non-trivial differences between hardware platforms, there will be room for native apps.

lukasbon Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

lukasbon Ex-Programmer at Goldman Found Guilty of Stealing Trading Code

I thought Goldman had a proprietary language called slang?

lukasbon Dear Steve Jobs: You're wrong again.

The "Apple makes more profit" angle is nice, I guess

51% of profit share, $238 of profit per phone sold. If market share was all they cared about, they could drop the price of the iphone by $200.

http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/31/making-it-up-in-volume-how-...

edit: formatting

lukasbon Mac OS X.7 "Lion" preview

I wouldn't be surprised if someone looking at Launchpad for the first time would be surprised that their macbook "has apps now", even though they are looking at the same applications that have already been on their mac for months.

Exactly. They needed Launchpad because (1) the App Store means that people will have more apps than can comfortably fit on the Dock and (2) average users aren't comfortable finding the Applications folder.

lukasbon Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

Given that different OSes have different UI idioms and capabilities, it's not clear that "write once, deploy everywhere" is the right strategy.

lukasbon Evercookie: A cookie that undeletes itself from 8 different storages

So we need a stateless browser and don't have one.

lukasbon Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system

"If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there."

Did he just ask commenters not to disagree with him?