skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This entire article literally only says two things:

1. The Nexus One doesn't have multi-touch. (Is this even true?)

2. The Nexus One can only store 200MB of apps.

I've seen few articles that stretched further to find something, anything, to write about.
I've never had problems with Intel (and I have with AMD) so I am almost certainly biased. That said, if [1] the best AMD can do in a performance test is half of Intel (at any price), I would say AMD has a big problem and needs to improve badly.

For normal users, unless you are doing video-processing or any equivalently CPU intensive work, pretty much anything will do these days and the low-cost, whatever-performance-will-do market is highly saturated. If you want to make money and stay in the game, you need to appeal to the big spenders and they want more power.

[1] I hereby acknowledge that the test might be flawed or not representative for actual use.
"Most" functional programmers might agree that is a component, but that it is missing many other critical elements of a useful definition. Immutability is a recent one, for instance.

Then you get people like me who observe there really are two "functional"s: There's an old one that simply means functions are first-class objects and usually means you get closures. This is the definition whereby Lisp is the canonical functional language. Then there's the more modern definition that involves immutable variables, no side effects or carefully-isolated side-effects, all of the older definition's closures and such, and possibly a few other things depending on who you talk to. Note by this definition Lisp is no longer "functional".

C being C, it can do the older functional style with some manually-hacked-in closures, at which point you can squint and call it an old-style-functional language. Certainly more so than a Basic with no ability to have a function pointer at all, though lacking closure support. (Note I say "a Basic", I know some can and some can't.) No way is it a new-style functional language, and it never will be. (Modulo http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio... , of course.)
Here is a Method that is Helping Project Managers to Stop Wasting Time
Along the same line - GB/$ page for storage using prices from newegg:

http://forre.st/storage

Are there other aggregate sites like these?
There is also http://dailystamp.r09.railsrumble.com/ from Rails Rumble.
Or pymongo, which is really easy to use.
Reminds me of the old analogy of the blind men and the elephant.
"... Leone came right out and said they focus on people under 30 because people over the age of 30 can’t innovate. If you’re over 30, you can still be in management, Leone said, as a kind of consolation."

If true, I wonder how many missed investments and exits that attitude has cost Sequoia? Salesforce and Android were founded and conceived by people in their 30s. Steve Jobs' company released the iPhone, OS X, the iPod, and many other products while he was still in his 40s and 50s.
Yeh I never considered it that way before - it is quite a natural motion though (unless it is just practice :)).

I was thinking, personally, more about it's general usability. Like the easy tabs on the phone app (contacts,history,voicemail,dialer etc), the text messages layout, how accesible the contacts db is (and syncable with Google) and all the other bits.

It's not something specific I can place my finger on but lots of little neat bits that make it a really usable phone.

(edit: if you think about getting into contacts and dialing a number the swipe scroll and touch makes that probably faster/easier than a standard phone)
This article shouldn't be surprising to anyone with their ear to the ground for Apple news, but it certainly was nice to read from the former Senior Marketing Manager for Apple.
> And the Nexus One lacks the convenience of being connected to iTunes.

So... the only phone that will ever appease you will, by definition, need to be an Apple-branded phone.

Also, Apple purposefully breaks this compatibility if it's there.
Yes, that's it! Thank you.
The Magic Bullet System
The Magic Bullet System is a brand new product being released on January 11th from Amish Shah and Jay Styles.
Its typical discrimination - which is common because it works. MOST people are unwilling to give up their notions. People over 40 have more notions. They have a harder time adapting to new notions.
Those sound pretty cool. I'll look into them.
Yeah, sorry, I'm going to fix this.
Thanks for this - helped my understanding of the original article.
I wonder if these long distance connections in the brain can be formed through a specific studying technique? For example drawing analogies between seemingly unrelated subjects.
except Google has a strict policy against sites like that, and smacks them down the second they find them.
No, it means that if you give people items instead of a service that you will have to charge them for those items.

Free physical goods does not scale because you can't guarantee that a freely given physical good will not be put to uses that you did not envision.

The people that can do that are the mobile carriers which is why they will be able to offer you a 'subsidized' phone, they'll take it back over the time that you have the phone in your possession. It's the whole reason for all that sim-locking and jail-breaking that people do.

Offering a service and selling a piece of hardware are two fundamentally different things and have nothing to do with recouping development costs, it's just another way to make a profit and to ensure that it scales.

Have a look at the cuecat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat fiasco to see what could happen otherwise.
That's a very strange/sad way of working. At work, I have always known the end product toward which I am building. I can't imagine working with so many firewalls.
I know hindsight is 20/20, but I have a hard time envisioning the thought process that led to such a declaration. The damn thing costs as much as a good used car and offers few benefits over walking or riding a bike but comes with a host of limitations. I still don't understand the appeal.
OS upgrade solves the multi-touch issue. Not sure on the 200 mb app limit, seems like that could be fixed with software as well.
It won't really matter though.

The 3rd party clients can all just get together and setup their own backend. Most people are using 3rd party clients anyway.

If a few influential people with tons of followers were using twitter client X, and that client decided to stop using the twitter backend, and instead use something else, you'd likely see a mass exodus (As long as the client was good enough and available on multiple platforms etc).

I guess my point is that the valuable bit, the bit people care about, is the client, and who they can access from it. The network, protocol, backend etc, meh.
It is interesting that people would accept such working conditions voluntarily.

Reminds me of the movie 'the cube'.
Google Alternatives
Presumably this is because of that pesky Apple patent on multi-touch gestures. Google are steering clear of anything close to the patent claims to avoid lawsuits, but if app developers want to test how close they can cut it, they're free to try.
My spouse, being a scientist, watched one of his presentations and was astounded by the lack of real examples that would support Everett's world changing (in Linguistics) thesis. If he has made so much effort to try to convince others, why hasn't yet simply recorded enough data to support it?
Or maybe that's how the "system idle process" naturally looks like - and as soon as mind is focused, all connections get clustered together.
Prevalent Persistence for Clojure
Could you get the $40/month unlimited data only plan and then use Skype for calls?
As nickaugust says below, the hardware and the OS support multi-touch. It's just that Google's bundled apps don't use this support.

As to the 190MB limit, this is true for executable bundles, but apps and games are free to use the rest of the storage for resources (datastores, textures, models, etc.). Also, at the Nexus One event yesterday, it was noted that Google is working on the ability to use the SD card for app storage.
Google versus Apple
> In short, what Google announced today wasn't just the Nexus One, but the world's first carrier-independent smartphone store; the Google store is now the only smartphone store in the US where, for every phone on offer, you first pick which phone you want, and then you pick a network and a plan on that network.

Except for all the other stores that do the very same thing. What a strange article.
It's truly a mysterious paradox that you can only innovate when under 30, but finding and funding innovation can be done at any age as long as you are over 6 feet tall, white, and male.
Have you ever tried running your low-latency stuff on an environment more real-time oriented ?

C on QnX would come to mind a long time before I would start to make anything with those requirements in Java on top of a JVM on a 'regular' (non-hard real time) unix.

There are simply too many layers on top of each other to be able to make any hard predictions about worst case latency.

I think you picked the wrong tool for the job, and no expert outsider is going to be able to undo the consequences of that decision. You are looking at a fundamental flaw here.

On a side note, I do hope that you have at least configured your garbage collector to work incrementally, that will decrease overall performance but it will significantly improve your worst case.
OTOH given Apple's track record, employees can probably just tell themselves, "Whatever I'm working on, someone smarter than me is overseeing it. I'm sure it will be awesome."

That's got to be more encouraging than knowing exactly what you're working on and despairing as a result.
Intel Arrandale: 32nm for Notebooks, Core i5 540M Reviewed
I've been doing this with a series of daily habits for years. It's extremely effective. I'm approaching 75 days on my current round and I'll do pretty much anything to make sure I do the daily habit and keep the streak going. When I've broken the streak in the past, it's frustrating, but the strength of my habits has grown over time, so it's easy to get started again.

The problem with the statement: "If you want to write every day, just write every day" is that it ignores the fact that "you want" is highly dynamic over time. There are many days when I don't want to work out, but in the long run and in hindsight, I definitely want the benefits that come from being healthy. The main point of building habits is to overcome the daily lack of motivation that keeps you from accomplishing what you really want to accomplish.

Anyway, I find it amusing that you dismiss this so carelessly without having tried it, when it's pretty clear that it works for a lot of folks.
Apparently they didn't apply that recipe to this link.
Ignoring the concerns about AES256 cyphers for this response...

The site that I use for my passwords is called Clipperz. (www.clipperz.com/beta). They encrypt everything in JS like the others, but they've fully released their source code for inspection. I know JS, and it looks legit, although I can't speak to their encryption technique (although they did everything else so well, I use that as a proxy for their competence).

The other cool thing is that they allow you to download an html/js/css file so you can open your passwords even when offline (big file, 1.5MB or so, but handy to keep your encrypted passwords around offline).
If it's in the 10 ms plus or minus range

High frequency financial trading requirements are closer to 10 microseconds than 10 milliseconds.
Yes, exactly! (I love that movie) I had a similar reaction when I first heard this, but I could also see myself enjoying working on a mobile multitouch interface prototype circa 2005 without necessarily knowing that it would be used in a phone. I'm sure there are some pretty cool upsides.
For the record, here's the letter I wrote to Allan that this post is responding to:

Subject: what happened to TextMate?

When TextMate came out, it was the most fun application I had ever used -- to this day, have ever used, in fact. I subscribed to the cutting edge updates and it seemed like every day I'd sit down to my computer to work and my editor would be filled with brilliant new features that I hadn't even considered were possible from a text editor. Indeed, who would have ever thought that one's text editor could be a source of joy or entertainment?

But since TextMate 2 started, there hasn't been a single change. Why not let people use TextMate 2 the same way? Why not let them experience the joy of watching the day-to-day morphs of new features and changes and rethinking. You could declare it was only for those who wanted to live on the edge with breakage and the rest, that TextMate 1 was always available for those who just wanted to work. But don't we deserve the option?
What would be really smart is if they just allowed Python code there.
The Best Salesman in the World
Mike Moritz said something similar at a forum with Guy Kawasaki once. His take was a little different. Basically big success are common with the under 30 crowd because they can take more risks, swing for the fences, not worry about feeding mouths, etc.

He put a finer point on it quoting Evelyn Waugh who said something to the effect of "the greatest impediment to creativity is the sight of a pram (baby carriage) in the hallway"

I'm sure there is some age bias, but also a lot of it has to do with risk profile.
> It's a friggin' phone. It is to make calls with.

No, it isn't. It includes a phone and you can make calls with it.

> What would be more important to me is very long stand-by time, reliability and the ability to roam across the globe without switching phones.

I'd like to think that if a company like Google decided to focus their efforts on a device that really was "just a phone" it'd have this feature.

> Probably I'm not a typical consumer.

Probably not, but there's probably a market for people like you that seems woefully underserved.
I'd say that you are a very typical consumer (in a global sense). The thing is that this phone is not aimed at the typical consumer. It's aimed at a small niche of consumers whom are willing to spend a lot of money for a phone with a lot of features, and whom consider making calls almost a secondary feature.

There are plenty of phones that fulfill your main requirements (long battery, quad band GSM, robust design), but they are cheap, have a low profit margin and thus the company that make them would rather you bought something else. So while they'll make the phones they won't go out of their way to market or hype them.
Was android really that innovative? I was under the impression that it was written by ex-Danger people, in a style similar to their previous OS for the sidekick.

Open sourcing it doesn't make it innovative.

Likewise, OS X, especially in the beginning, was NeXT with the benefit of hindsight. Not innovative, polished.
I agree with the article. There are three choices for the Tablet: iPhone OS, Desktop OSX or a whole new variant. It makes no sense to me for Apple to expend effort on adapting a whole new OS and Desktop OSX just isn't suited for the tablet environment (which is why they had to adapt a new version for the iPhone in the first place)

Also, does anyone really think Apple isn't looking at leveraging the app store's momentum for the tablet? Many of the tablet stories (most notably the WSJ) have even suggested Apple is actively courting iPhone developers to adapt their apps to the tablet.

So again either they adapted a whole new OSX variant just for the tablet AND went to the effort of having it emulate the iPhone OS or they're just using the iPhone OS. Which one of those sounds more likely to you?
I'd say that's the obvious result, actually. Where there is competition (in the low to mid range), the smaller vendor generally has to pick the lower price point as a growth bet (because they're not the "default" choice). Where there is no competition (at the high end), Intel gets to set whatever price the market will bear without worrying about what AMD does.
Price-performance ratios for CPUs are completely bogus, because you never run a CPU by itself. If your case/power supply/motherboard/RAM/disk collectively $400 and you have a choice between a $100 CPU with performance X and a $200 CPU with performance 1.5 X, the faster CPU has a performance/price ratio which is 25% worse -- but using the faster CPU gives you a system with a performance/price ratio which is 25% better.
What Makes an Entrepreneur? Cojones
If I were a VC, I might be suspicious. This is a company whose clients pay them up to $1000/hr for consulting (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677799), and presumably they pay their own consultants less than that. So they have a cash flow-positive business that scales more or less automatically (get a new long-term client -> hire a new person; get a short-term project -> add freelancers).

So they could fund expansion themselves, but they're looking for outside capital. One way to look at this is that they want to grow as fast as possible. But another way to look at it is that they're abandoning a profitable, easy-to-understand service business in order to pursue a potential product business. Those 80% margins are for the successful companies, not for everyone.

Which is kind of a weird paradox. SEOMoz is a better, weirder story than a VC might expect. Rand could have more luck if he disguised himself as an SEOMoz employee who was quitting to do his own (product) thing, and looking for funding. That way, the risk/reward would make a lot more sense.
Microsoft about to unveil their own tablet
500+ Massive Collection Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials
You forgot hitting the home button a second time if you have an app open. This is where a 3G can get really slow if the app is unresponsive.
You need to factor in the other costs too. If you buy a computer you need more than just a processor. If the rest costs $200 you have an extra cost of $400 + processor costs for two AMD's against $200 + processor costs with Intel (assuming two AMD's are equivalent to 1 Intel).
Does it not violate ycombinator etiquette to just vote someone down past 0 without explaining why? My comment wasn't remotely snarky, nor something I wouldn't say to anyone's face.
This seems to be kinda missing the point. Yes, you can do functional programming in almost anything that supports recursion and function indirection. But the essence of functional programming is not simply using a function pointer for everything. Those "if and switch statements" are perfectly functional concepts. It's the avoidance of side effects that generally distinguishes "functional" idioms from imperative ones.
I am trying to think of a time that a project has gone dark like this to develop the "next awesome version" and succeeded.

I can't think of a time where it's worked, but I'm sure there's at least one example of it happening, right?
Isn't this like saying "Orville and Wilbur wright really didn't do anything that great. Thousands of hobbiests could easily build an airplane that is safer, faster and more maneuverable than the wright flyer, and in their garages on weekends!".

It is the nature of tech to build on what was done before. It's hard to remember that something that now might be laughable, was at one point considered impossible.
But they've been exposed to other concepts, perhaps these new concepts don't become important because they don't understand them. :)
I run into that all the time. Even opening a big file takes TM to its knees. I keep TextWrangler on the Dock for when I need to open big files or search large projects.
While probably not as fancy, I just printed one of the templates available at http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/yearly-calendar.html on an A3 sheet, only because I didn't have access to a plotter for some bigger sizes. Looks good enough, though.
This is absolutely awesome, thank you for building it. No surprise AMD tops the list here.
Using a synthetic benchmark is not exactly very accurate in order to determine price/performance, as not everyone is going to buy a processor to do Passmark's benchmark all day, not to mention the fact that certain processors might not contain the same features as others (ex: virtualization support).
Working with SVN - how to start?
Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs
Rejection letter from the NY MOMA to Andy Warhol -- for a gift
Reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson.

I'm just finished a book on Jefferson, and I can't help but draw that conclusion.
Totally off-topic: Does anyone else miss the kuro5hin peak days? I can't seem to find any single community to capture the soul of what it was. HN and Reddit are close, but something is lacking. Anyone know of such places?
Since I didn't get many replies I would suggest that an opportunity exists for someone out there to build this and disrupt the market :-)

The hard part will be differentiating yourself in a very noisy market - but products that deliver value always find a way.

Cheers
If you run an incorporated company, at least in the UK, you have to submit annual accounts which will contain manny of these figures anyway. Although they won't go into as much detail, anyone can get access to the accounts if they want.

You can bet that investors will do this, as will interested competitors and even larger companies you do business with may well dig them up.

Posting figures on a blog is more public, you're drawing attention to them, but given that the data is available anyway, it might be better to reveal them on your blog.

(Of course, accounts don't get filed until after the first year...but then you would only be publishing the last financial year's stats.)
I am writing this standing here, waiting for the train. It is couple degrees below zero. Stylus alllows me to keep my gloves on - I see that as a HUGE bonus.
Possibly this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180204

It's based on actual data, not what sounds like a clueless VC's musings.

Statistically, the VC may even be right that people in their 20s innovate more, on average. But their problem is to figure out whether a specific person will innovate, not what's happening on average. Using non-causal correlates like age (or, for that matter, race, or citizenship, or a bunch of other things) is a bad mistake, in my opinion.

To be a bit more concrete, proportionally I'd guess that more whites than blacks have built silicon valley companies that are successful, by any measure you like (say, IPOing). But to use that fact as the basis for judging a potential founder wouldn't just be discriminatory and unethical, it'd be lazy and stupid.
> I can assure you that openly talking about your revenue if it's not mind-blowing is going to turn off investors. If you show that your company did $100,000 a year in revenue last year and increased to $150,000 this year, then fewer investors are going to be interested in chatting with you.

I don't get that. Does he mean that those investors will not find out in due course what your turnover is? Surely that would be a part of any - even preliminary - talks.

And if it is because VCs wouldn't want to be associated with such small companies then it might hold some water, but not a whole lot in my experience.

What is more important is that if you are successful in some niche that you don't want to be too lippy about it simply because you are waking up a bunch of would-be competitors. That's mentioned too, and I think that is one of the only really valid reasons for holding your cards close to your chest.

But even then, looking at a company from the outside in and having some stats to work with you can usually get within the ballpark of what a company is making.

Also, in many countries you do a public filing of what you are making anyway, usually with the local equivalent of the chambers of commerce. Anybody so inclined would be able to find out in a heartbeat.

The ground rule to me seems to be don't blab but act as if everybody will know it anyway.