skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i'm going to guess you work for some company (hopefully htc, samsung, lg, or apple) and i'll tell you exactly what i want from a smartphone and why it's a bad time to buy one right now.

first of all it seems like every month two new "iphone killers" are released. they all have the same functionality, they are all the same size, and they all require you purchase the same one of five service choices. until that changes, what's the point of upgrading.

in the recent past, the netbooks, then the kindle and then the ipad appeared and it made people realize that their smartphone was not everything they wanted out of their devices. so now there's a slew of new features entering smartphones and will be for the next 6-12 months.

but what i want is simple. it's not some way to turn a phone into a tablet and it's not some way to turn a laptop into a tablet and it's certainly not some way to turn a laptop into a phone. i want 3 devices that all sync:

(1) a laptop for development, storage, and other processing power needs (i have this one)

(2) a tablet that's smaller than the ipad but bigger than the iphone (dell streak?) it needs to fit in my pocket (barely) but not have to load the mobile version of many webpages

(3) a watch phone with very limited apps (phone, text, stopwatch, notes, etc) because i don't want my smartphone at the beach, on a hike, on a bikeride etc, but i DO want a phone.
Roald Dahl's darkest hour
I may mention those, but I think people with mental health problems tend to take them more personally than with physical health issues. It's very difficult to talk to someone who is depressed, has schizophrenia, has manic episodes, or is a drug addict. Definitely difficult with a blog.
Personally I've been using Blackberry handsets for years, including currently the Bold 9700 since it came out.

I use email a huge amount so that's a large factor for me, but I've actually not had any complaints in other areas. Browser isn't exactly amazing, but is easily good enough for what I need it for... I use twitter a fair bit and have a great app for that... I don't want to play games / watch films / read books on it... and all round it's just a really nice phone.
At TekPub we use Amazon's CloudFront, it includes streaming (using Adobe's streaming server) and also allows for authenticated content. We do about 1-3 TB a month through it with basically no issues and pay less than $500/month even at the high end of that range.
> My wife still laughs about the day I took half an hour off to go to the barber and then raved about the awesome social experience.

I had the same experience working for a company where I was on my own and the people weren't friendly. I ended up loving the staff in the nearby Cafe Nero because they were friendly and asked me how I was and sometimes had a little chat. When I finally left that job, I left them a massive tip... I actually wanted to leave a gushing thank you card but at least I still retained some sense of perspective to know that that would have probably weirded them out.

All day I was on messenger and forums and had music playing but having no friendly contact with humans for hours has quite an effect.
Even if its not well liked in the most tech forward circles that may be the most desirable audience for google, there should at least be familiarity with it. And I don't know about you but I can't think of any even halfway decent and plausible alternative google could have chosen.
We use Bitgravity and could not be happier.
Try living in Tokyo and Scandinavian cities :) I am currently living in Finland and just finished a small tour of the Scandinavian region. The costs here compared to London are not comparable. Other then rent, everything else is way out expensive compared to London. But if you are ready to travel a bit daily you can offset that rent cost. But then you cannot beat the rest of environment. For e.g. number of fellow hackers / programmers, etc ...
Jobs really spend a large amount of time on the Antenna during launch. And he ended up looking pretty bad, and someone must have been responsible for making him think he could go ahead and talk about in during launch. If he had known about these issues I am sure he would never have dedicated a full 5 minutes on this 'magical antenna design'. Perhaps he never said anything about the antenna, than the reports might have been different. Jobs himself put the this under the microscope.
Why you don’t want to drop your iPhone 4
Being a registered developer is easy. http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
This paragraph is wrong:

> Some analysts have expressed doubts that the EPR is the world's safest reactor. Their main concern is the spent fuel: The reactor's higher burn-up rate makes the waste more radioactive, raising concerns about proliferation.

They got this exactly backwards. Higher burn-up rate makes the spent fuel even harder to use for nuclear weapons, by screwing up the isotopic mix. The way you make weapons-grade plutonium is to construct special reactors designed for very low burn-up. And then I come to this gem:

> Despite its higher temperature, the reactor operates at one-fifth the power of a PWR. That reduced power density enhances overall safety. What's more, additional heat naturally increases the carbon's ability to absorb neutrons, so the carbon acts as a passive safety mechanism capable of shutting down the core.

First, the power of a reactor depends on its size and power density. Phrases like "one-fifth the power of a PWR" are meaningless. It's confusing power with power density.

Second, they say "additional heat" when they mean "additional temperature". Heat and temperature are completely different things, and you'd think the IEEE would know that.

Third, high temperatures make the non-fissile U-238 in the fuel more likely to absorb neutrons, not the carbon. The carbon is there as a structural component of the fuel, and to act as a moderator to slow down the neutrons.

Finally, it's not so much that it shuts down the core, as that it keeps the core at a roughly constant temperature. If you stop coolant circulation, then sure, the core is going to reduce its power output drastically; in some pebble bed research reactors they do this to turn it off at night. But the true beauty of this negative feedback loop is how it regulates the temperature, not some hypothetical "What if there's a stupendous accident?" application.
It's nice to work with standard things when you're talking archive. A physical modem is a lot more standard than a custom one-of program.
Doing a sequential write to the entire disk probably made the SSD think the disk was full of data. Unless you ran the ATA secure erase command after each benchmark or turned on TRIM, that will hurt performance. http://www.anandtech.com/print/2738 explains why, around page 6.
I think mentioning the British/American disparity does a disservice to demonstrating how truly ridiculous the argument was, because it distracts from what the "are" user was actually arguing, which is that "are" is correct because the subject is is named by a phrase comprising two things join by a conjunction, "and".

Reading the actual "discussion" is both hilarious and depressingly frustrating. The Alex 101 user had to have been trolling, 'cause, I mean, come on.
OneExtraLap Launches To Public, Wants To Reinvent Social Quizing
So proud of my friend stephen Ou for launching this. It's really impressive and quite addicting. :)
You probably installed a theora plugin to quicktime :)
If it's solar radiation that flips the bits, why not just stick it in a lead case?
http://isitnormal.com has a pretty ordinary internet audience. Certainly not designers or developers. Regular folks.

Here's the resolution data from GA for the last month (roughly 1 million visits):

1280x800:	19.62%

1024x768:	16.88%

1366x768:	9.54%

1440x900:	7.45%

1280x1024:	6.75%

320x396:	5.24%

1680x1050:	4.30%

320x480:	3.56%

1920x1080:	2.10%

1024x600:	2.01%
I'm pretty sure it is free to register as a developer, so there isn't really much of a hindrance in registering to get one.
Startup Idea: Automatic Low Cost Flight Trip Generator
tv has an essentially higher cost to stop watching (getting up from your couch is a lot harder than alt+tabbing back to emacs)

On the other hand, it's physically more difficult to come back to the TV once you've gone away.
Try this real quick:

1. Get a friend and ask them to help you. Take your index and thumb and touch them together tight as you can then have your friend try to slowly pry them open. Try to remember how weak or strong your hands were. Try a couple fingers to get an idea.

2. There's two bones in your forearm that join at your wrist. Take your other hand, and squeeze these two bones together at points along your forearm down to your wrist. Squeeze really hard for about 10-20 seconds then relax and shake your hand after each squeeze.

3. Now relax for a bit and do your other arm equally, then do those wrist exercises I gave you. Rotate them, warm them up, and do the stretches very carefully and slowly. Rotate your wrists after every one and shake them.

4. After you're done, have your friend come back and try the strength test. See if it improves. If it does, then do this every day, no matter what, before you do anything with your hands.

That squeezing of those two bones helps relieve pressure in there and takes it off of nerves in your wrist. Give it a try but as usual don't do it if it hurts too much.
From dannyr's link: "There is a one time $25 registration fee. We charge this fee to encourage higher quality products on the market"
Cool game technology
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro. Small enough to comfortably fit in any pocket while still offering all the smartphone and android goodness you want. Plus it has a real hardware keyboard for easy text entry.
Well, you know they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures are quite good at lasting for eons, when put upon proper substrate
I have an HTC Desire and I'm really happy with it.

Recently, the Google Maps Navigation has been activated here in Italy (with voice search, which I thought was available exclusively on the Nexus One).

Last week HTC released an OTA update with android 2.2, which also added an app for tethering over wifi (tethering via USB was already available) and 720p video recording.
Still, everyone should use f.lux at night: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/ :)
What's Edinburgh like? I was under the impression that a few companies had started up there from the university.
Why you don’t want to drop your iPhone 4 
This is what happens when you choose form over function.
Probably a combination of iPhone's traction and the general negative sentiment towards Java. I personally feel Objective-C is a good fit for mobile development, because its so easy to drop down to C at any time. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks its conceptually simpler than Java (The Obj-C all just C structs and functions under the hood).
Don't let them know. You aren't a factory worker. You can sit there with your eyes closed for a few minutes once in a while.
How did you activate your phone with Linux only?
Anyone read the book, and can comment on its contents?

Here's a conference talk-sized approximation from Shirky himself: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for...
Convert the data to a string of letters.

Have a child.

Name your child that string of letters.

Now preserving your data is the government's problem- they have to produce a birth certificate and keep track of him/her in their databases.
Physicists don't as a rule work from their houses with
curtains in front of the window to block out the daylight
and nothing but food ordered by phone.

But neither do most programmers. What you're describing is the stereotypical hacker, but that's a far cry from programmers in general, programmers here (it seems to me an interest in entrepreneurship doesn't correlate with seclusion: you should be enthusiastic about a product and intent on talking to actual people to sell it to), all those people working together on open source projects (and being encouraged to meet each other) or even actual hackers.

Rather than warning prospective programmers of the mental health risks that stereotypical hackers run, I think it would be better to stop glorifying that lifestyle in the first place. If you describe the health risks of that lifestyle, you are still suggesting that it is the proper lifestyle for a programmer. Instead, it would be better to, for instance, stress the importance of communicating with colleagues, because no matter how brilliant you (think you) are, you will overlook things and not come up with all alternative solutions for a problem. It would be better to stress the importance of other hobbies, because of the cross pollination that would never happen if the only thing one has mastered is computer related. It would be better to stress how every computer program ends up being used by people and those people are quirky and different from you, which is why you need to know stuff about people to be able to make programs for them. Even if those people are other programmers.

I don't think it's a good thing if introductory texts in our field start include a section on the mental health risks of such a tiny group, while that risk should already be mitigated by other advice that is nicely relevant, because it makes them better programmers. I think it might make matters worse by once again making it seem as if 48-hour-Dr.Pepper-and-pizza-fueled-codathons are a normal thing, a good thing, a cool thing, something people should aspire to. It should be crystal clear to everyone that you won't be productive, that what you do produce will be sub-your-standard and that the seclusion was a bad idea in the first place, for all the reasons listed above.

BTW, I'm upset at the way you're being downvoted [..]

Don't be; so far, HN runs fine even when someone is being downvoted in threads like these.
I've been drooling over the Desire for a long time, but now, with rumours of the HD Desire coming out soon, I might wait for that...
Isn't this a relatively common idea people have? Why hasn't any one build it yet?
If you're totally on the fence and any modern smartphone would suit your needs, I would (and did) go with the iPhone 4 (caveat: having mac/pc access would make it much easier). It's sleek, it's smooth, it's got the X-factor and you'll probably have a lot of fun with it. The screen is stunning, the video and still cameras are great (I've officially retired my digital point-and-shoot), FaceTime is a fun gimmick, iOS is incredibly smooth and responsive, and then there's the app store. You can also sync the calendar to your google account, just to clarify, since old_gregg implied that you couldn't. And yes, it also automatically identifies phone numbers and email addresses in text. In fact, it picked up "wednesday at noon" in an email and gave an option to make a calendar event out of it.
Unemployed = 21st century draft horse?
Omitting the paragraph breaks from writing doesn't turn it into one paragraph.
Dublin is insanely expensive, and not to put too fine a point on it, but every Irish investor will hold his breath until you get the much-required Enterprise Ireland seal of potential approval. As a place to live, Dublin is actually more expensive than either London or New York. In both London & NY you have the option to go down market. Cheaper digs, more suppliers, more options. Dublin is a small city with few options on many levels.
I'd be very interested in knowing more about your experience in Paris. As a French who has grown up in Paris but wants to start a startup, I'd like to know if I should leave and try the adventure somewhere else.
It's not the coffee, it's the fact that many people drink everything _but_ water. Coffee's got a lot but you can't drink that much of it, so if that's all you drink, then you get dehydrated. People also drink too much soda which doesn't help, and people also just don't drink for long periods of time.

If you get headaches then try drinking some water. Pretty simple.

Also, man you're a giant douche. Did someone piss in your fucking coco puffs today little boy? Shit.
Java isn't ideal, but I much prefer it to ObjC. You can also "in theory" use any language that compiles to the JVM, like Scala: http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/scala-ide/Developing_for_A...

Thanks for the Python APK link, last time I checked you couldn't deploy standalone Python apps but now I can play with it.
Hmm the js is rather slow! I wonder if there is any startup in computer graphics that is trying to make ray-tracer as a way to render real time apps and games.
My HTML5 Brief in one sentence:

HTML5 is a buzzword like AJAX and Web2.0 that encapsulates the most exciting improvements to the web platform in the past and next few years.
You forgot to mention the great hand-made fudge.

The only real down-side is the focus on hard science patentable IP - which makes it a bit more difficult to get noticed if you're not in that space.
I got my iPad over the weekend. And this was one of the first apps I installed. So far I have been loving it. Currently you can only have 9 sources. Maybe they will charge for having more than 9 sources or maybe they are trying to keep the ui nice and simple, since Evan Doll is a former apple employee and instructor for the iPhone classes at Stanford.
I've been working professionally for a long time and have seen way too many programmers with these issues. I haven't met someone with all of them at once, but I have met plenty of people who have had one or more during their life. I've just been lucky to have had all of them, but not severe at all.
That sounds like a challenge to me!
Prague? That's insane, its close to being the worst place to be a startup: http://www.praguepost.com/business/3757-venture-capital-hard...

I also have a hard time believing Geneva, have you actually been there? In Switzerland I would understand Zurich or Lausanne, but Geneva does not even have a technical university, compare that with ETH and EPFL.
Also, having worked in a (very) well funded Dublin based start-up, I would add that the infrastructure isn't great.
Any thoughts on carrying the message to Newcastle &/or thedifferenceengine.eu
Well that'd be no fun.
so does point a) imply that scaling/load balancing is easier with subdomains? Is "adding a DNS alias" easy to do on a localhost or would it require a different scripting than on a live server?
Edit: Okay, I probably should have just let it go.

Original: But who decides where the paragraph breaks go?

Edit:

okay well the above comentor obviously wins, but my point was that their is no compiler for english that can point out my syntax errors, and that we each develop a sense of english, and rules are fluid, and can be broken.
The other (or 'fast) SSD did not have this issue though. I re-ran the raw read / write test at least 15 times over two days and I got very consistent (and very good) results.
So HTML5 isn't a w3c spec?
A SSD (flash-based) doesn't need to be powered. Finding a computer that has a SATA/IDE interface to read it back out after 50 years is an interesting problem, however.

[update]

Spansion quotes 20 years minimum. Under optimum conditions (whatever they may be) and with an adequate amount of redundancy, 50 years should be achievable.

Spansion single-bit-per-cell floating-gate flash devices are designed to provide 20 years of data retention after initial programming when exposed to a 125° C environment.
Spansion two-bit-per-cell MirrorBit flash devices are designed to provide 20 years of data retention after initial programming when exposed to an 85° C environment.
Both MirrorBit flash and floating gate flash are guaranteed to provide 20 years of data retention after initial programming when exposed to a 55° C environment. MirrorBit flash is guaranteed to retain data for up to the minimum guaranteed cycles (10,000). [F]loating gate is guaranteed to retain data after the guaranteed minimum of 100,000
cycles.

http://www.spansion.com/Support/AppNotes/EndureRetentn_AN_A0...
All of this because people are too lazy to install software? Why not just run compiled binaries in the operating system?
Ask HN: We realised one of our pet projects. How to market this?
We have been working on a small iphone app on the side, and we have just released it. We have done this project entirely for fun and gaining exposure to the app store(frankly, it wasn't that bad - compared to the horror stories we've heard). We released two of versions of the app, free and pro. We are not expecting any profit from this, but it would be nice to have some users and get some feedback. Do you have any pointers for marketing this?

URL : http://www.grammarfungame.com/
I don't watch movies on it, but I get music from iTunes (on the phone), my NPR radio app, and Pandora.
"* In my experience it's easier to mod-rewrite and pass $1 than a DNS and parse a hostname" You lost me there. Can you explain? I like your points in favor of URI components.
"After this version there will be no more versions of html"---that's a pretty bold statement..
I would love to see a comparison and details what framework to use when. I can't decide, as well.

Someone with more insights reading this?
Lack of friends and inability to get along with others leads to mental health problems though.
For beta users you can... I installed Flipboard about 2 weeks ago and have been able to use Twitter and Facebook for about a week. They seem to be letting people in to use Twitter and Facebook at a pretty fast clip.
I wonder if anyone has actually attempted this and seen how dense you can pack it and reliably recover. I imagine you would need measures to counter small misalignments when rescanning and imperfections in the physical media.
I would stick with Stock options. You need to find compelling investment scenarios (Biotech FDA approvals, Quarterly Earnings, etc.)

This is very risky, obviously. There are not too many ways to double your money with a lower risk profile without actually working..

To me, this is much less risky than straight gambling. My last time I answered this with a Stock recommendation (ARNA) it has already been up 3x. So it can be done (see my previous comments)
the AT&T store activated it for me - the fact that I didn't have access to iTunes didn't even come up(that I remember).
A lot of people are talking about 50 years like it was a super long time, and propose solutions that are really intended for hundreds to thousands of years. I think it's overkill. [Also I think a lot of you are under 30 :-) ]

For only 50 years, I'd probably risk making many thousands of DVDs and CDs, using different manufacturers and drives. Store with tons of redundancy and ECC, don't use inner / outer tracks for anything important, etc.

Also, are all of the data equally important? You can afford to store the more critical pieces in more expensive and less compact, but more robust formats.

I think the real enemy is obsolescence, and that keeping the data simple (and providing decompression programs and indices in easily understandable formats) is likely more important than worrying about bit-dropout, which seems largely manageable over your specified time.

For 500 years, I'd print it, or micro-inscribe it. (One problem with printed matter is that it has other inherent value, e.g., fuel for heating the yurts of cold barbarians).

For 5K years, micro-inscription and (if you are worried about technological crashes) an archive in the sky. You could populate a host of satellites in various orbits, timed to re-enter at intervals of (say) a decade over a few thousand years (hard to be exact with atmospheric drag and climate change, but you get my drift). Getting something from orbit down to the ground is not hard, getting /noticed/ and picked up as an interesting artifact is probably harder.

For 5M years, add a metric buttload of ECC and stick it in the DNA of some critter that doesn't get out much. A bottom-feeder in a radiation-shielded environment would be cool. Say, a lobster.