skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about a tablet formfactor suddenly makes backlit LCD screens completely unbearable?

we're talking iPad here. I haven't used one in direct sunlight, only in a bar one evening, but I do have an iPod touch and new Macbook Pro with glass (or mirror) display. Few downsides to Steve's obsession with glass:

- as I said, no matter how bright is backlight glass becomes mirror in sunlight (M̦̆̆BP is mirror even in low light)
- thus backlight has to be driven at very high power, regardless of conditions
- baclights' low setting is still much higher than on similar non-glass devices which makes said devices painful on the eye in the dark (same applies to my HTC EVO, especially for you Apple fanboys)
Actually, it was - same specific cinema. But weeks / months apart which could impact things - good thinking.
You have it backwards. You are agreeing with me. Sorry 'bout that. I know you want to disagree, but you made a mistake, not nearly the first in this thread on my posts.

I gave a simple, mathematical example of how all but one person could be better than the average in response to the claim that this could not happen. You gave a way it could happen from how people might think intuitively, and I gave a mathematical way.

The people who wanted to argue with my math example kept claiming, based on quasi-mystical nonsense, that mean and median have to be the same due to various unstated, unjustified assumptions, that 'most people' mean median when they say average, etc.

So, sorry 'bout that, but here you and I agree: Most people can be better than the average. You gave one justification, and I gave a mathematical one. The people who want to argue with me want to go way out in fantasy land and claim that mean and median have to be equal in practice, which is total BS.

My example is dirt simple. It should be taken as funny. Alas, some people apparently got their Statistics 101 feathers and Gaussian religion in an uproar and wanted to argue.

A claim in this tread is that there is nothing worth learning in college. Hmm .... Looks like this thread is mostly high school dropouts self-taught in programming. Thankfully for US national security, our DoD is far ahead of such nonsense.

You guys are hopeless.

Also, this Web site doesn't work with Firefox 3.0.1.8 on XP 3.0 and, instead, keeps giving "don't match" or some such. The programming here sucks.

So, guys, on this thread, let's agree: The greatest 'business advantage' possible ever is to have some high gloss plastic case on some handheld consumer product from Apple aimed at teenage girls who want to gossip. Ah, of such stuff will be the future of technology! Gossip! That's the key to business! Who would have thought! SUCH progress!
Gmail filters should take care of that.
In addition to Gary's Guide, the nextny mailing list often has announcements, and Charlie O'Donnell sends out a weekly e-mail. Sign up for that one is on his blog.
Fring for android wasn't that bad, i found it quite alright to use. I used Fring for one main reason: Skype has no Android client.

Now that Fring doesn't do Skype there is no way for me to use Skype on Android. That is probably hurting their business just as much.
I give it the ultimate libertarian venture: Good luck with your startup, dawg.

The biggest obstacle to tablet computing doesn't seem to be the price, it's convincing the market that your product us worthwhile. Tablet PCs have existed for years now with a variety of price points. The price is not the main selling point.
"When you sign up for Amazon Student, you'll receive e-mail alerts for discounts and promotions. If you don't want any more Amazon Student e-mails, you may cancel your Amazon Student membership. If you do this, your Amazon Prime benefits will also end when the membership is canceled."

This is brilliant.
Less douchey doesn't = win. Compare Evite to any of its competitors (notably, the YC company AnyVite) in terms of traffic. Or check out eBay's competitors.

It certainly helped, I'm sure. But it's a tiny slice of the pie when compared to their initial burst of free leadgen due to fame/audience. It would have had a serious cold-start problem if they'd launched it anonymously.
As a native Pittsburgher and startup founder... we've got a great community forming, but it's still in the primordial ooze stage. Lots of user groups, great companies coming out of AlphaLab and other incubators, and an awesome, tight-knit community.

What we do have is a big problem with talent. I know of at least five or six companies that are hiring, but they just can't find qualified people. It's exactly what the article talks about; ModCloth for example pretty much has to go to the valley to find all that top talent. It's sad but true. Everyone wants to move to the valley, but nobody wants to move here.
Exactly. Why be "evil" when you have a community that would be very willing to support you on pure ideals.
Perhaps grellas might shed some light on the laches issue, but aside from that I think this is legit. First, I notice the response from Facebook was that this is "frivolous" not bogus, which implies to me that Mark did sign that document. Second, from scrutinizing the hardly legible document it appears the claims are accurate, including the 1% ownership transfer to "Purchaser" for every day of delay in project completion after January 1, 2004. Last, the contract timeline does make sense to me. It sounds like a very young college kid in 2003 with his mind on many things, including a hobby project to connect students met a more experienced business man who wanted some street software developed. The business man recognized the value in the hobby project already begun by Mark which he loosely referenced as "The Face Book". The business man then covered himself to be well-positioned legally if this hobby took off. He paid Mark 1K for it (and another 1K for the street software), explaining Mark would still own 50% of "The Face Book" in case it did become more valuable... All hypothetical, but not hard to imagine.
They did open a large datacenter in North Carolina recently for mobileme and iTunes hosting. Albeit for a 10 year tax break, but they would have received that from any state.
It's incredibly useful for ordering a lot of things on Amazon. Prime is quite devious, it's completely changed the way I use Amazon and has dramatically increased the amount of money I spend there. To wit:

1. I now order many things I wouldn't have even considered ordering on-line before. When I can order something off Amazon and have it in 2 days with free shipping, why bother buying it at the store?

2. The amount of time I wait before ordering an item has decreased. While before I would "batch order" anything I want from Amazon, giving me time to review everything I was thinking of purchasing, not needing to worry about shipping lends itself to ordering items one at a time. One Click makes it even easier. This makes impulse buys a lot easier.

3. Ordering something from Amazon is so much more attractive than ordering from other websites now, even more than it was before. Even when ordering from the Amazon site, I almost always buy prime eligible items which are usually items sold by Amazon itself, not a retailer. I'll usually spend a few extra bucks buying the same item from Amazon than from somewhere else just for the convenience.

tldr: Prime makes you spend a lot of money at Amazon
we can continue to debate if you insist, but judging by your other comments it may not be exactly pleasant experience.

also let me caution you that probably unlike you I have actual experience living in Soviet Union (not under Stalin, fortunately) and getting to know the "evidence" first hand.
By the way, the instructions also mention to let it for 5-8 minutes or in extreme cases for 11 so the time shouldn't be so long. Shaving takes at least 30 minutes for me.
Data centers usually don't have very many on-site employees, though. I think the idea here is to move the labor to the US.
I think the author argues from a position of near-total ignorance.

America is a laughably bad place to base a manufacturing operation. Labor laws and regulations are ridiculously strict. Laborers are paid more and work less than anywhere else in the world. The science of managing global supply chains would not exist if the collocation of development and manufacturing were so economically opposed to each other.

He argues that Apple "could then easily — and justifiably — charge a premium for American-made iPods or iPhones or products we haven’t even seen yet." I don't believe I have ever read anything so fatuous. Price is dictated by what the consumer wants to pay, not the need to make a profit as the trade with China so persuasively demonstrates.

The future of manufacturing is Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia. It will not be Detroit. It is hard to find anything other than wishful thinking in this article.
21 Laws of Leadership
A small flaw in your logic. I don't think Consumer Reports has an anti-Apple agenda.

I do think they have a Pro-"Get everyone talking about Consumer Reports again" agenda though.

How do you make that happen? Make a splash with a polarizing article making the case for why the object everyone is in love with sucks.

It's sensational journalism 101.

They show their hand by recommending people buy the now mostly inferior 3GS instead of the 4. It's like their way of saying "We still love the iPhone!" Because duh.. it's obviously already a huge success.
There's no doubt android will be everywhere eventually -- in a laundry machine, toaster, microwave, etc. However, whether android becomes an actual competitor to iOS is still undecided. App developers on the iOS platform still make around 40x more than android, so companies jumping on that platform right now will most certainly lose money initially.

A few friends of mine run their own ISV producing around 5-10 apps for the iPhone a year and are able to make a decent living (around 100-200k a year). If they focused on android, they'd only be making around 3-5k a year, definitely not enough to be independent!

I think it's too easy to pirate and return apps on android, plus the App market not quite as globally available as iOS. Users on android are too accustomed to downloading free apps -- if it's not free, users don't download it. There are too many steps involved in buying an app, there needs to be far less steps involved so it can be an impulse buy. One also can't do fancier sales models like in-app purchases that the iOS is capable of doing.

I really wish well for android, but I feel like Google just doesn't know marketing & sales like Apple does.
So that I can spend 99% of my time doing something I'm bad at, and 1% of my time doing something I'm good at? No thanks.

As an employee, I spend at least 80% of my time doing my best work -- no billing, no taxes, no finding new clients. I wake up, do some programming, chat with coworkers, eat lunch, do some more programming, then go home. And oh yeah, I get paid even if the company has a slow month or year.

Don't get me wrong; in many ways, I would love to have my own company. But I am pretty sure I will make more money, be less stressed, and have more free time not doing that.

(Anyone want to pay me to implement whatever random useless ideas interest me? Exactly.)
That is not something that Apple would ever do (while Jobs is alive, at least).
Maybe Ceglia will claim that he was abducted by aliens in 2003 and just got back now.
I agree. This says only 50-100 direct employees, once operational: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/maiden-nc-now-home...
No. The deal here is that ownership interest is gained in lieu of prompt performance.
They're trying to hook them early. It's just like giving college students credit cards. (I am a massive Prime user myself.)
Hold a meeting
There are a few systemic issues preventing this from happening, but otherwise it would be a great idea for apple.

1) The Chinese people are impoverished by the Chinese government and kept that way by the dollar peg.

2) People in China would kill to be paid what we call minimum wage here in the USA... that is, if they were allowed to have guns.

3) The main expense in a modern manufacturing operation is not manpower but rather the automation in the manufacturing facility itself.

4) Most of the know-how to build these factories and the companies that manufacture automation equipment are located in China.

5) Making iphones in the USA would probably cost 5x as much as making them in China, and at most Americans would pay 20% more to have a "Made in USA" stamped on the iphone.
This is a duplicate of another story that's already much higher up on the homepage.
Yea but who graduating college thinks about home ownership?

I left Philadelphia for CA shortly after college 6 yrs ago. I still rent here and I know that if I stayed in PA I would probably own multiple properties at this point. Honestly I would rather rent in California than own a mansion in Pennsylvania. My life is just infinitely better here.
Agree. I will go out of my way to avoid shopping in stores. I think I probably make half or more of my required and discretionary purchases on Amazon, simply because Prime is so friggin' easy.
If this is a true story, wow. Without any confirmation, he just shows up with a suitcase? That's quite a lot of effort without first confirming the transaction — good thing it worked out.
Even though I'm European, I would feel a lot better purchasing goods manufactured in the States, or really anywhere in the Western World. I would be prepared to fork out a bit more money (within reasonable limits) for such products.
In a world where it's the 1920s and not the 2010s?
> Spare yourself this yammering rant. They chose Python because that's what everyone else at the company was cool with. End of story.

I don't think it's a bad idea to evaluate the alternatives, even if you are very comfortable with a specific language. Granted we were pretty cool with Python and that is definitely a major factor in the decision, but it can't be the only one.

For example, we were all very comfortable using SVN (another technology Facebook uses and is now locked in with). But we didn't use Subversion; we decided to use Git, because the advantages of using a DVCS outweigh our personal sense of comfort.
He's doing a damn fine job with This Week in Startups: http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/
Do you really view Israel as the only one in the wrong in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Just a little anecdotal evidence here, but I also saw Alice, Avatar and Clash of the Titans, and both Alice and Clash gave me headaches, but Avatar did not. Actually I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar's 3D experience.

Just my .02 cents
So, you are saying that I have to choose between a smartphone and something I can make calls with?
What do your stock options look like?

If BigCo doubles revenue this year (probably impossible if it really is a big company) how will it affect your life?

If BigCo gets acquired next year will you be popping champaign or worried about your job?
Hopefully once Apple "opens" up facetime, they will also enable calls outside the Facetime network. Otherwise the who's and what's of connecting to their registrar will probably be no better than the App Store situation today (eg, I'm sure gateways will be forbidden).

edit: Although the identifying info from those screenshots is scrubbed, the comments say the R-URI is basically user@ip:port. This is interesting: there's no SIP proxy in between. No wonder it only works over wifi.
The article isn't written too clearly on this matter.

Ceglia bought a 50% share for $1000 and capital to pay for domain and hosting expenses with the stipulation that he would get an additional percent each day after January 1st 2004 that it was late (and presumably it was 34 days late).

Zuckerberg was the developer, Ceglia was the wallet.
One problem is that a few countries and phone makers havent jumped on and enabled paid apps in the market. I had to wait a few months with no paid apps before my mobile carrier allowed them. Even now, because I'm in Australia, I cant release an app that is not free.

I hope this is rectified soon, it will give me more incentive to become an android app developer. A little money , even a dollar, for an app would help me support and develop an app.
I don't think your average Consumer Reports reader would be an iPhone owner anyway.
Wow, this article is terrible. While its thesis (China will rule tech eventually may be correct), the arguments are very weak.

1) The US' :"Great Engineer" president (Herbert Hoover) was among its worst. While it is a low sample size, I'm not sure how much evidence there is that leaders with engineering degrees = better for society.

2) Everyone wants to out-innovate the US. Sheer R&D investment helps, but other factors play a large part.

3) Outright misleading. Bleum is hiring a US workforce to work in China (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178913/Chinese_outso...); of course the workforce is orders of magnitude smaller. (Hint: IQ tests are illegal to use for employment in the US).

The number of engineering degrees is also misleading, as the US typically has higher standards to get them than in China.

Besides, the US has a huge talent pool advantage in that it accepts highly skilled immigrants from all countries, something that occurs far less often in China.

4) This argument compares US high school to Chinese undergraduates. While the US certainly has its weak-spots with education for everyone, the top 10% (who probably matter the most) get an excellent education

5) The strongest argument. Tech transfers have been going on for more than a decade. It definitely helps China a lot (and helped the US massively in the early 1800s), but China still does have awhile to go.
Gotta wander off on a tangent here — scribd is a beautiful site! I'm probably the last one around here to find out since this is the first time I've looked at their site since they dropped Flash (which I ignored) but wow, what a difference — if you found scribd not to your taste and haven't been back since, it's time to revisit it.
Wait, you mean this was a serious comment? Not a comedy routine?
How to Design and Build a Mobile Website
In this era of globalization, what does it mean to be made "in America"?
I always cringe when I see this on a new Apple product after I purchase it: "Designed by Apple in California. Manufactured in China."

How powerful would it be if they were able to say "Designed and manufactured by Apple in California"...
Mine too. :P
Pycon Au 2010 Sydney Session Videos for Python and Django
How have your experiences with web.py been? The disadvantages I saw with it are that it just doesn't have a really large community, plus there are features I just don't want to build myself. Django's built-in admin/ app, for example, or Pylon's error page.
No stock options, they just give us cash instead. Bonuses end up being a pretty good percentage of the base salary.
Of course, that feat of producting millions of a product in a short period of time is also because of how much harder laborers for lower pay over there.
Easy - they have a twitter account.
Chrome OS Engineer Leaves Google For Facebook (GOOG)
It's actually manufactured in Mainland China(Not Taiwan), but it seems to be getting expensive there, so it is making more and more sense to move some production back to the US.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2429f498-82fd-11df-8b15-00144feabd...
I agree wholeheartedly. Apple charges what people will pay already. They aren't going to pay an extra 20% to have it made in Detroit.

The basis for the article is charity not profit. How does manufacturing their device in Detroit provide any competitive advantages. Apple does not have the margin or expertise to build semi-conductor fabs in Detroit, nor does the expertise exist to run such a plant in Detroit.
I had a trial Prime service and i was thinking getting one. I am so happy. : )
I've never quite understood why Chinese people are somehow less worthy than Americans of having jobs.

That aside, labour costs are not actually a large proportion of the cost of manufacturing electronics. The main reason goods like this are manufactured in the far east is that all of the components are manufactured there, so it makes sense to assemble them nearby. Detroit is pretty much the worst place you could imagine for that - think of the lead times.
Nintendo 3DS Hands-On Impressions & Reactions
I haven't had a chance to go through the paper yet (http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785), but it seems that he does make some derivations and proof sketches. Can someone verify this?
They couldn't have done this a few months ago when I was still a student?
Would you mind emailing me so we can chat for a few?
ca /at/ cubedcompanies dot com
Or Android app makers should focus more on ad-revenues.
This really isn't possible since the product assembly is only a small portion of the "made in the USA" part. There's hard drives, flash chips, LCD screens, and other components that are made overseas as well. Some components (like hard drives) are 100% outsourced and Apple just puts in an off-the-shelf (though relabeled) unit.
Since US cards are "dumb", the ATM doesn't need to send PIN information to it. The ATM card # can be stolen, however, that's not enough to complete the transaction.
This is much more a case of budget advantage than knowledge advantage.
Questions to ask before taking a job
In defence of SQL
What kinds of software development are in high demand? (Greg Kuperberg)
Putting aside the other issues I have with this story, Detroit seems like a pretty bad choice for locating manufacturing. The workers that the article alludes to being there are long used to being in a union that guarantees them ludicrously high wages and and untold benefits. The only way I can see new manufacturing in the US being viable is if it's unencumbered by unions (as implemented by the UAW, etc)
Ok, here is an idea, figure out what that percentage is, every time you buy something not made in your locale, tack that percentage on, and then give it to some guy on the street. It's the exact same thing, paying something extra just because they reside in your locale.
I don't get any money, but I'm happy that you bought my book. Thanks very much!
Don't forget about Ive.
> And lets get honest here - Pittsburgh is great but if you're finally making it to the big time, why would you want to stay in a declining rustbelt city?

Luis (the reCAPTCHA founder) wrote a blog post about this recently. Basically to summarize, staying in Pittsburgh helped picking up CMU talent, and Pittsburgh doesn't suffer from a lot of distractions that come with the Valley.

http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2010/06/startups-and-cmu.html

Very importantly to note though, Luis has a professorship, a fiance, and a life built out in Pittsburgh. Similarly, I've heard that a lot of the Google Pittsburgh engineers are family men/women who don't want to leave the area.
Actually, this is super-weird.

This feeling of 3D "coming out" of the screen is caused by a thing called "negative parallax", and things receding into the screen caused by "positive parallax".

Avatar actually had a comparatively mild amount of negative parallax, compared against things like Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol, which was LOADED with it.

Negative parallax can look really bad and cheap very easily. It takes a light touch to make it look good. Avatar did it really well and used it sparingly, so that when it DID happen, it surprised you - the "duck and cover" moment. Other, shitty movies use it everywhere, to the point where you no longer notice it - the maximum negative parallax becomes your 0-base (subjectively).
Why is "unencrypted" considered a good thing? I find it kind of scary especially for a video conference app.
Just updated my post after I realized that, thanks.
Apple has a video on their website showcasing the unibody. The milling machine that the unibodies are being made in is covered in Chinese characters and the factory workers all appear to be asian.

So probably not.
True, but remember that most startup founders are not just graduating college.