So I started innocently enough with a fairly simple app that would be able to display stories and details of those stories. It was unstable, but it worked and it was good enough for me and since I had no plans to release it I wasn’t inclined to make it any better. I stopped working on it at this point, but I will save the details of this period of time for another post. A few months later I decided to pick up this app again and learn a few more things about making iPhone apps, so I went through a few more iterations, each time making it a bit nicer.

Finally I had an app that I liked quite a bit more than the original. Some friends of mine encouraged me to put it on the store, if only for shits and giggles, and I figured why not maybe somebody else might enjoy my take on this problem space.

When I launched the app, it was very much about how I read HackerNews, the app reflected my use-cases and my tastes. I think the biggest difference between myself and pretty much the rest of the world is that I don’t like in-application browsers. I like Safari, so when you clicked on a story it would open up in Safari.

This discrepancy between myself and the rest of the world was made loud and clear the morning my app made it into the store. Alot of people had opinions about the app, a friend had submitted a link to the site, but nobody was as elegant in explaining why I should align my behaviour with the rest of the world as my friend Ed. (whom I was spending my day with on my bachelor party. -yes that’s right, I spent my bachelor party talking about the defects of my application with my friend-)

So that weekend I coded up the in-application browser and submitted it to the iPhone App Store. (an although this fix was done days after the first mention of adding an in-application browser it took 3 weeks to get it approved)

Another choice I made that deviated from others expectations was the fact that I kept an About button in the tab-bar. My primary reason for that was to put a few links to YCombinator and applying to YCombinator. Although it’s fairly unlikely to buy this app without knowing what YC is, I like YC and I want to encourage as many people to apply to YC as possible. (in fact, I know of at least 1 case where somebody who didn’t know what YC was bought the app and so the About page was useful to him. -he isn’t my father if that is your first thought)

The way the comments are displayed is also a contested choice. On the site the discussions are nested so that you can see the threads of conversation. I struggled with this, and how to best display it. I was playing with various ways to try to replicate it, or mirror it and all of them were complex and ugly. Patrick suggested that I do something simple, code wise and display wise, so I gave it a shot. It worked well enough and Patrick pointed out that it makes it actually easier to read since the spacing was consistent between comments and that usually you can determine the context of comments based on the previous and next comments. I’ve learn from doing this that, certainly nesting is a nice aspect of HackerNews discussions, but it’s a feature you can strip away for a mobile reader and retain most of the readability. Overall I think it was a good compromise between different requirements.

Reading reviews or comments about the app was umm…..unpleasant is the best way to put it. Alot of people either don’t like that it has a price or the choices I made. A few people mentioned alternatives like iCombinator, and to be honest if I had known about iCombinator before I started I probably would have never started YCNews. Oh well live and learn.

Some things that I try to keep in mind, after the YCNews app.
Release early and often, and listen when it makes sense. It totally makes sense to have the in-application browser and I have completely adopted this use-case. Ed (and everyone else who said so) was right, and the app is far more useful now.
You won’t make a killing or even a living with a HackerNews reader, but you don’t write these types of things for that. It was fun and it is a solution to a problem I was having, also it turns out a few other people like my solution as well. (although it may not be perfect, nothing ever is)
You need to develop a thick skin because people will write things that they wouldn’t say to somebody in person, or at least they wouldn’t deliver them so. (of course some of them will, but these people probably live lonely lives because if you always deliver bad news to people in this way nobody will want to be around you)

A few friends have shown me people who create beautiful things, I admire what these people/companies do.

• Sofa
• MetaLab
• People of Resource

Having a conversation with a friend the other night, I realize if I were to ever to return to school, I would never go back into computers. I would do anything but, and I would probably do Design or something like English Lit. (it’s funny in that when you are young, people will say “you are good at X, you should go study X in school”, and how poor of a choice that is however you can’t blame them for making such poor suggestions as they are just as uneducated as you are. It’s the blind leading the blind.)

When I read things like this, it makes me want to become a teacher. I don’t know what I would teach, does it even really matter? Do I need a specific topic, why isn’t knowledge just viewed for what it is, knowledge. The truth of the matter is, it’s all connected and these artificial barriers we put up just confuse and disconnect people from the reality of everything being connected. Chemistry is just the physics of molecules and atoms, Computers are just big boxes of switches manipulating electrons (or rather their flow). In fact, my number one hesitation about teaching is the fact that I would have to adopt the current system which would essentially destroy any possibility of actually teaching something. If I could participate in some form of teaching outside the conventional school system, I would actual give it a shot (at least then there would be a shot at some actual knowledge transfer).

Seriously give it a read. It’s worth it.

Although a business and its business model are closely tied together, they are not one in the same. IBM used to be in the business of selling mainframes and personal computers, but as that business model dried up they restructured themselves into a services company. (Having sold their desktop and laptop operations, hard drive manufacturing, and I believe their mainframes now account for a small part of their overall revenue.)

One thing that has become clear is that as old media sees its business model dying and revenues dropping, you can see its desperation.

Instead of having a long term new business model (or at least a plan), you see outlets trading their reputation for a quick sale. Money now at the cost of long term viability. This manifests itself in the way they appeal to the lowest common denominator. Extreme and attention getting headlines (disproportionate to the magnitude of the story) in the hopes of getting you to buy in, or very fast trendy topics but with little substance.

The coverage of the H1N1 influenza strain is a good example. The conventional strain of influenza kill about 36 000 Americans a year, however there has not been a single death due to H1N1 in America yet. World wide, I don’t believe the number of people killed from H1N1 has reached 1000. In conventional media outlets however, we see words like pandemic and talks of world wide outbreak. Some people even talk about the possibility of H1N1 being some form of biological attack.

In fact there is probably a lot more danger in the fear and panic that is being generate by this hype machine than the actual virus. Much like the year 2000 bug, I was many times more worried about how the people would react than how the machinery would.

All this disruption and unjustified fear, only to get a few more ratings or sales. This trick can work for a while, but eventually it will be like the boy who cried wolf. People will just stop listening, and then what business model can you have as a media outlet when nobody listens to you.

Because of the parallels I see in good essay writing and good program writing, I’ve often wondered if this goes for human languages as much as computer programming languages. Are there ideas that are just not expressible in certain human languages but that are expressible in others?