_rknLA's comments

Another thought here, perhaps more urgent than the rest: bandcamp or label site links where available, so that you can also promote buying and supporting artists. E.g. https://www.beatnikapp.com/music/514 should also link to https://bigbigbusiness.bandcamp.com/album/the-beast-you-are

This is a "FINALLY!" app for me; something that I've talked about for years among friends, former Rdio colleagues, etc.

The soundcloud resolution is hit-or-miss, and I would be interested to see youtube in there, but the "auto-redirect" option is solid; if you managed to figure out a "cookie-dependent embed", where the auto-redirect setting also decides which service's player to embed in Twitter or Discourse, this would be magical.

It is dramatically easier to send someone a bank transfer in Europe (and I'd imagine, the rest of the world) than it is in the US. All you need is the recipient's IBAN (and sometimes BIC, which is usually already in the IBAN), and boom, you can initiate a transfer from your bank to theirs, for free. It blows my mind that banks in the US still haven't figure out how to do this.

Does this affect custom domains, or is it only an issue with @fastmail.com accounts?

Re: the gotchas, it's possible that this is due to how the app is architected in combination with how the phone and OS are architected. The input rate of 3D Touch, for example, is tightly coupled to the display output frame rate, which, in turn, is tightly coupled to the things you do on the main thread. I don't know off-hand if the camera input is coupled to anything in this way, but it's something to look into, and Apple's documentation should indicate this sort of behavior.

Having done this (/ currently doing it), I would say: follow your heart.

Taking time off to nurture your own projects is a fine and reasonable personal endeavor, but not necessarily an optimal business or financial one.

In many ways, the time and space can help you explore and expand your ideas into something in the middle of the venn circles between "your happy with it" and "the market is happy with it".

But, don't expect to be done with day jobs after burning through "a few $k".

Depending on where you live, and who's in your network, you may be able to move to part time, agency, or freelance work after burning through your runway in order to keep enough time to work on your thing.

My operating assumption with all of this is, your current day job is preventing you (in one way or another) from focusing on your own projects. This is ok. Not everyone can handle burning the candle at both ends with the day job and night-work. Figure out a way to make space for both until the personal project becomes sustainable.

Beyond this, the other advice about 10-15% tech and validating your idea before hitting the code is solid.

I have a single-time-purchase iOS app in the App Store, and a month or two after releasing the app, spending one day investigating blogs and websites, and one day sending tuned press release letters to them did more for my sales than any new feature I could have designed or coded in that amount of time.

Relevant: http://www.wnyc.org/story/stingray-conspiracy-theory-daniel-...

Yes, but leaks of pre-release iOS software can't be installed on locked phones as a means of unlocking them, so the risk is not nearly the same.

If you really want to carry this analogy to term, fine, I'll concede that you can't be 100% sure that a physical key wasn't copied before you destroy it, but then you must take into consideration the complexity of manufacture and duplication - if the complexity of duplication is high, and you only make one, and guard it at all times, you can have a fairly high confidence (barring ridiculous film plots) that the key you're destroying is the only one.

With digital things, the complexity of duplication is beyond trivial. One copy leaks, and instantly there are tens of thousands, if not millions of copies in all corners of the internet. Physical objects simply do not behave this way.

Not to mention that decompilers exist, and if you're going to go to the extent of desoldering a chip...

To add onto this, in addition to the governmental threat, another point that Cook is trying to make is that security is hard. It's hard for the government, which he backs up by citing breaches, and it's hard for Apple (which he omits, but remember those iCloud breaches?).

I completely agree with your point about future governments and unchecked power, but there is also the point that, if Apple creates it, there is the possibility that organizations (or even just normal people) besides these anointed three-letter agencies may also have the same power to access a good chunk of your entire digital life (and the locations of your friends and family who use Find My Friends) if you were to lose your phone.

It's unclear if you're trolling, but assuming you're not, the analogy doesn't work because digital things and physical things behave in fundamentally different ways.

In the physical example, according to the FBI's "just this one iPhone" claim, one would reasonably expect that the company could then destroy the hypothetical master key as soon as it's used. This makes sense in a physical world, but the analogy breaks down completely in a digital world. [Returning your spider doesn't solve the problem](http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html).

In the digital world, you can't guarantee that the key hasn't been copied, and you can't guarantee that destroying the "original instance" of the key destroys all others.

The custom OS that the FBI is asking Apple to build will also take development time, and likely take more than one person to develop, meaning that if there's a security breach during the OS's development, any number of intermediate builds may also be stolen during development, before the FBI can even access the particular phone in question.

The crux of the issue in the article's title assertion, that "US Expats are toxic" isn't because US Citizens personally have to deal with filing extra taxes; it's because the foreign institutions are also required to file paperwork and go through the hoops. I'm a US citizen living in Germany. When I open a bank account, the US doesn't "just trust" what I report to them, they also require the bank to validate my filings, creating extra paperwork and costs for the bank. Some banks in Germany will refuse to open accounts for Americans because the extra cost and paperwork tips the cost/benefit equation to the point where it doesn't make business sense to serve American customers -- they cost more to do business with than it's worth.

To address the "why should you keep US citizenship?" question: If you move abroad, you won't be able to get citizenship in the country that you reside in for a number of years (depending on where you go), and in many cases, your US citizenship is what makes it easy to get a work visa or residence permit in that foreign country in the first place. So, even if you actually intend to renounce your citizenship, you still have about 5-10 years of living abroad and dealing with the tax implications before you can become a naturalized citizen in the place that you move to.

I'm not trying to argue whether it's fair or unfair to impose the tax on citizens living abroad, just that the logistics don't make the proposal of renouncing ones citizenship so simple.

This sort of thing really depends on the application, and the nice feature provided with the new "force" property is that you can actually distinguish between a "whole finger pad" light touch, and a "thin, firm, almost just the finger nail" hard touch, and most things in betwee.

Yep, I'm seeing the same thing -- a DOM attribute with values between 0 and 1. Interesting.

In my experience so far, yes, it will provide unique force values per-touch, though I'm not sure if the quality deteriorates, or at what point it might deteriorate.

I don't know how far apart the presses need to be, as I haven't done a "two fingers as close as possible" test yet.

> Finally, the article is also wrong to call Norman the biggest hero on the podium.

Completely agree with this. It seems to recenter the conversation away from the (black) folks who were taking the initiative to praise the (white) person acting in solidarity.

Unfortunately not even a shoutout to the nearly-identical Sparkfun project from over 10 years ago... https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/51

Not really relevant or helpful to focus on in the context of the overall message. Having been in both hardware and software, I've seen hardware technician positions (filled by "hardware people") that don't actually formally involve any engineering design in the job description. Soldering, assembly, and testing come to mind as tasks.

It's also likely that she was using the term to be more specific. For example, I have a degree in Computer Engineering, and have held positions in hardware (as a Firmware and Electrical Engineer), but now I write software (as a Software Engineer). I used to be a hardware person, but now I am a software person. I have been an engineer throughout.

Best ending ever.

Also mirrored here: https://gist.github.com/4517310