I noticed this effect very early on as a kid, where I was often hacking away at some new project or trying to undermine some system.

Some of my ideas were pretty exciting, so usually I'd be bursting to pass on my excitement to someone else - usually my parents. (As any entrepreneur can confirm, coming up with a great new idea is very rewarding) However, I never failed to feel like I lost some intrinsic level of motivation whenever I explained to someone else what I was working on.

It felt like holding a secret only you knew and then letting it out spoiled it. After awhile I learned to contain my enthusiasm and direct it toward making a functioning product before telling anyone... this probably explains why I tend to be much more independent when it comes to my startup ideas...

Working in secrecy makes you feel like you're about to pounce a revolutionary new idea upon the world and take it by storm.

The iPhone is a terrible platform for the vast, vast majority of developers. The process of getting on board, promotion, and success is a total black hole. First movers such as ngmoco and Tapulous have done well; people with better apps - for free - have failed. Maaaaaaaybe 3.0 makes it easier for niche plays to work; certainly, as far as I can tell, add-on payments aren't supported in Palm's marketplace. I do think the Apple folks are improving the platform. But they act like jerks.

Apple can fuck over iPhone devs, and they do. Frankly, it's what you would expect from them. An abuser doesn't stop beating when you confront him; he stops beating you when you leave.

img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic} This is why I read HN! One line of code to fix one of my sites!

This looks promising and seems to address a lot of the objections I hear to compass and sass. I do really like the superset syntax approach where css is legal syntax in a less file.

So I will be following along the development. There's still a lot of features that would be required of less to support a framework like compass. There's currently no arguments for mixins, no way to extend the language with functions that call out to code, no macro syntax allowing branching/looping and generation of selectors and properties. Such features aren't needed by your average user writing their own content, but they are absolutely core to building reusable design that can be configured and applied to your code using a simple and intuitive interface.

Anyways, it's really great to see new ideas and innovation in the css compiler space. We all win as these ideas mature and gain acceptance in the web development community.

-chris eppstein (sass core team)

> The iPhone is sold as is, why should we expect to use it any differently?

Wow. It's almost sickening to see the inversion of the principles of software freedom that Apple is able to get away with and not get criticized in the fanboi community. Geeks have been lambasting Microsoft for merely having proprietary formats for 20 years. They even got fined for billions of dollars just for not documenting their protocols well enough. Now Apple plays god and controls every single application that can ever even run on a platform. They make developers sign NDAs that prevent them even talking about technical details of the platform publicly. They do these things that are the antithesis of everything the open software community have been trying to achieve for the last 15 years and not only do people like yourself give it a pass, you go out of your way to stand up and defend it. I find it breathtaking.

I always respond this way, and I always get scorned here. But, the iPhone platform has worked for us. Updates have been a bit slow, but we feel like we have been rewarded for our work.

Some things are tricky and unintuitive, but that's the way it is in any market. Selling a product just isn't easy. You are always fighting against smart people, and there are unknowns.

I feel like people shouldn't get into the App Store market thinking that they will make a million dollars their first app. Only a few people can succeed like that at any time. But, if you jump through Apple's hoops, listen to your customers, and try and serve a real need, you can make a living on the iPhone.

People expect launching an iPhone app to be like launching a website, which you can do in a single day. They expect to be able to push whatever code they want, and push releases whenever they want.

Well, the App Store isn't like that. And while my website is fun and cool, it doesn't make much money. My iPhone app does.

We need more acronyms, I was hoping for an exciting story about how prisoner of war with access only to firefox was able to hack into a webserver and post the details of imprisonment, thus leading to his eventual rescue.

Isn't making an NDA for a conference talk about publishing to the app store quite a big fat fuck you too?

Seriously, how much more of this Apple-flagellation are you peeps gonna accept?!?? (Yes _flagellation_.)

There are several.

Slicehost has been doing Xen hosting longer. Linode is older, but they were using User Mode Linux (not nearly as good as Xen) for a long time. Slicehost got the mindshare by getting to Xen hosting first.

Slicehost is local to all their data centers. Whether in St Louis or Dallas/Ft Worth, their employees actually work there. Linode's employees all work in South Jersey, 2 hours from their Newark data center and inaccessible to their other data centers. Kinda indicates that they have other people setting up a lot of their stuff.

Linode is often out of stock or having limited stock. This might just be that Slicehost doesn't tell us how the sausage is made and Linode does.

Linode tops out at 2880MB. Slicehost offers instances going up to 15.5GB. That's a major difference if you want to try scaling up easily and there is a huge difference between trying to get your site to handle traffic on a 3GB server and a 15GB server.

Backups are a nice touch.

The Rackspace name lends a "they're the big game in town" to their service.

They aren't that much more expensive. Linode charges a constant $0.0555. . . per MB of RAM. At the 2GB level, Slicehost is charging $0.634 per MB of RAM. That means that if you were to get 2GB servers from each, the Slicehost would cost you $130 and the Linode would cost you $114. It is cheaper, but it isn't so significantly cheaper.

Slicehost can more easily upgrade your plan. Linode has to switch your box should you want to move plans. Often Slicehost can move plans while keeping you on the same box.

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Now, none of that may matter to you. It doesn't to me and that's why I'm a Linode customer. However, for many these are considerations. If you're running a business, having instances top out at 3GB is a concern. Would you pay a 13% premium for Slicehost just for the knowledge that you can upgrade beyond 3GB of RAM should the need arise? If I had a person project where downtime for migration would be embarrassing, I would.

Likewise, some might care that the Slicehost people actually work in the area rather than colo-ing boxes with places like The Planet.

I'm very happy with Linode, but I can see why many would choose Slicehost.