skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that you're satisfied with AT&T, I'd recommend the iPhone 4. However, Linux support is non-existent. You can use iTunes via WINE, but experiences have been varied.

Luckily, you don't really need iTunes all that much. You only really need iTunes for activation, and that can be done for you at the Apple Store. Media and app purchases can all be done on the phone itself. As for synchronization of data: I recommend Google's services, which integrate nicely with the iPhone --- Apple's MobileMe works best on Mac and Windows.

If you decide to go for Android, I'd recommend the Samsung Galaxy S, which on AT&T is called Samsung Captivate. It's the closest thing out there to an iPhone 4.
They put ZX Spectrum loading sounds (kind of like a modem except totally audio), on this LP, XL1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Shelley

It is software which, when loaded into the Speccy's audio In port, does funny lightshows in time to the album's songs.

BTW, the LP speed doesn't matter, the Speccy picks it up anyway.

Pretty innovative. And the best thing is you can now get the LP in a TAP-style emulator format! So it survived over 25 years.
My desk doesn't permit that and I like it higher anyhow, so I lean back in my chair and simply put the keyboard in my lap. Once you're used to it and relax, it meets all ergonomics criteria I've seen; flat, comfortable wrists, no stress or strain, etc. It's a Microsoft split keyboard, which helps, but my non-split laptop, which I use in the same position, is fine too.

(Also, I think switching to Dvorak may be helpful. My wrists move a lot less with this layout than they do with QWERTY. Touch typing is a good idea but where QWERTY discourages it, Dvorak makes it simply the best idea; you don't have to try, it just happens. YMMV; please note I said "I think", and I mean exactly that, not "It has been proved that".)
Microsoft Research shows off a prototype 'Menlo' mobile phone
I would assume it would work similarly to how extensions update - or perhaps how the "Update Notifier" addon works.

The way I configured it, it checks for updates to addons every few hours, and if it finds one, installs it silently. The next time Firefox starts, it's ready to go - basically, it does the same thing as a manual check, install updates, but instead of clicking the "Restart Firefox" button, just leaves me alone.

I hope that's basically how they do it... it really would be background - except for those that don't restart Firefox every week or so... but at least for me, addon memory leaks still cause me to restart Firefox every other day or so (I have -- oh, this is great! I just counted - I have 42 extensions installed. hehe)
1) Buy 5-10 different brands of hard drive and make a copy of the data on each.
2) Invest $100K dollars in very long-term inflation-protected investments
3) In 50 years, use the proceeds (around $1m) to offer a prize to anyone who can decode the disks to a current format
Plenty I'm sure, after all aren't there firms doing this work right now (in that the world never stopped building nuclear power plants? I've read that this approach is used by Airbus for dual redundancy.

Given my very limited understanding of the requirements, isn't nuclear reactor control a lot easier than fly-by-wire avionics? And somewhat safer, in that good designs (e.g. not the RMBK) are designed to safely passively fail as Three Mile Island Babcock & Wilcox design quite nicely did in a near worst case accident (about half the core melted with 20 tons of uranium flowing to the bottom).
Has samsung stopped more or less requiring that you also own a windows PC?

I had one of their slides for a very short while and almost every operation that involved putting data on the phone or taking it off required a Windows only program to communicate with the phone.
Gah, anti-procrastination settings prevented me from correcting this, but it's too stupid to let stand. At least this post demonstrates once again the important principle that a smart (computer) calculator is no match for a dumb (human) calculator.

Of course, n bytes can store a number up to 2^(8n), not up to n. Thus, the number we'd be recording has order of magnitude (50 terabytes/bit)×log[2]/log[10] ≈ 1.20e+14, so we'd need to distinguish that many digits after the decimal point.

Conversely, as bayes pointed out (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585498), if we have a resolution of 10 digits after the decimal point, then we can handle about 10*log[10]/log[2] ≈ 33 bits.

(EDIT: To be clear, it's the same person posting; I just can't stand to wait 154 minutes to correct the error.)
This is excellent, assuming it works like Chrome.

The updates are silently downloaded in the background, and applied the next time you restart the browser.

This behavior can be disabled fully. It doesn't interrupt your work at all, never even alerting you that there is a new version it's downloading or a new version that's running.

This is primarily for security updates where you shouldn't have an option to browse un-patched for months on end.
The site I'm working on doesn't address your linux constraint, but it exists to help you make exactly this type of decision:

http://www.measy.com/quiz/category/smartphones
The Ultimate Explanation of Inception
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci9...
Given any method, memory diamond[1]. It's incredibly dense (25 grams of the stuff stores a bit over half a Yottabyte), and quite durable. If restricted to existing methods ... a metric fuckton of hard drives in raid arrays, outsourcing backups to cloud storage providers where possible, and investing as much money as possible in getting a way to use memory diamond worked out.

[1] Charles Stross describes it: "Memory diamond is quite simple: at any given position in the rigid carbon lattice, a carbon-12 followed by a carbon-13 means zero, and a carbon-13 followed by a carbon-12 means one. To rewrite a zero to a one, you swap the positions of the two atoms, and vice versa." See http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...
Nothing stopping you from making a much larger one! Or a lot of different ones, if it's automated.
I definitely agree that there should be options to turn the silent updates off...

There are several companies I disable: Winamp, for a while, was updating WAY too often; I used to have trouble with Quicktime - but, in my humble opinion, that software is just... ugh. bloatware and badly written. Thank goodness we've moved on from it as a standard... Adobe's updater is another one I turn off - I really dislike the companies that add a "quickstart" app to my startup - I don't need update checkers from ten different companies stealing my resources....

But there are some smaller names that I do think get it right: Filezilla - even though they tend to update more than I'd like, the update process works pretty well and doesn't take too long; uTorrent is another, as well as VLC does okay...

I definitely think that different classes of users will have different experiences. For Gramma and Grampa, autoupdating is generally better, because they never will. For us geeks: well, we can turn it off for companies that don't do it right; and we talk about our experiences - companies develop reputations...
Are you basing this on facts ? Cost of living is indeed high (much lower than London though), but taxes are not so much higher than in many other countries in West Europe. You will need a French account manager from time to time so that you benefit from various tax cuts, especially in the first few years.

I am curious about the banking issue as well. Never heard of it being that difficult. Working visa are indeed becoming increasingly difficult, but I am afraid this is a trend that is not restricted to France.

I think the issues in Paris are much closer to the toxic environment mentioned by the OP. I know several people who founded their own company just to avoid the usual IT job which consists in being a semi-slave for one of the numerous consulting companies.
Nexus One. I'm surprised you're even asking. Fully Linux-friendly, hackable, powerful and doesn't have any crapware from carriers or hardware manufacturers. Buy it at full price and sign up for a $59/mo month-to-month plan from T-Mobile. Enjoy built-in tethering and guaranteed upgrade to the latest version of Android.

I own N1 and iPhone 4 and I believe that N1 is a superior phone. It doesn't need to be plugged to a computer for everything and as a phone it works much better on TMobile than iPhone does on AT&T: the reception is worse on the iPhone, it wouldn't accept MMS or SMS with non-English characters in 2010. WTF. The software (Android) is totally in a different league too: integration with Google calendars, maps and contacts is truly amazing, and you quickly get used to your phone automatically recognizing phone numbers and addresses in arbitrary text.

Another huge thing is Google Voice: you can dial any number straight from your address book without even worrying which country you're calling to, that's mind blowing to me (and I use it daily).

I bought both because we're doing software development for both, but I'm not proficient enough to comment on their APIs and programming environments. I do prefer Objective-C to Java though
Thanks for the downvote, define other problems:

- not brushing your teeth can lead to caries, which in turn can cause your teeth to degrade, gum trouble and can even cause you to literally lose your teeth

- not washing can have dermatological implications, including fungi and infections

Between the toothbrush, running water and penicillin we've probably increased the average lifespan of humans by a measurable amount.
But don't you end up angling your head downward to see the screen? Or angling your forearms upward to reach the keyboard? All the ergonomics material I've read suggests keeping these on the level, or possibly even angling your forearms down a bit into your lap. Almost impossible to do with just a laptop.
Trip generators suck. I want a Startup builds this Automatic Trip Planner.
Photography: What are your easiest beginner tips?
In the summer, it's not easy to fix. It's been quite hot here this summer, around 25-30℃ through June—August. Hot weather = sweating.

Taking a shower doesn't give you an edge over it for more than an hour: as soon as you've walked for a while or sitting in public transportation for more than five minutes, you're as soaked as before. And then you're smelling again.
I was fortunate enough to be given a Nexus One at a Google developer day and really love it (not just because it was free). My wife now uses my iPhone 3G and, playing with that handset from time to time, I wouldn't go back to it. If you're in the UK, I know Vodafone supply them. Or, if you're in the US, you can just buy one as an unlocked developer phone: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/08/nexus-one-dev...
> You will never reach the same quality in HTML5 because the iPad has issues relating to CPU, RAM, and bugs or missing features in Safari that Apple doesn't seem too bothered to fix.

But those are known (or knowable). It's not like you're dealing with 5 different browsers in 10 different versions here, you're dealing with a single browser in a single version (well two by the end of the year with iOS4.x on iPad) on a single, uniform hardware platform.

So the CPU and RAM constraints are well known (and I don't think the BBC app is taxing there), and the bugs or missing features in Safari Mobile can be worked around.

Furthermore you can easily rely on proprietary stuff such as custom JS or CSS rules for transforms & stuff, which is a much bigger issue on the open web.
The way you are using those words leads me to believe you don't know how they work in these languages; I feel you are using them synonymously with the operating system's idea of threads and forks. In fact that is not true; both Haskell and Erlang can run in a single OS process, while handling threads internally to their own runtime. They don't all the time, but they can. In more conventional languages this is called green threads, in the functional world it's simply how it is done.

I did say "I feel" because I could be wrong, but there are still a lot of people who think that the operating idea of a thread is still the only possible meaning of the term (I meet them every time Node.js comes up and the Node.js partisans argue passionately against operating system threads), but those days are long gone. So even if you do understand this, there are others who don't.
The part that uses the Social Graph API: http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/ is based on crawling XFN rel="blah" links from all over the web. The canonicalisation layer that's used is opensource: http://code.google.com/p/google-sgnodemapper/
Great point. I love the auto-update feature on Chrome but I share the same fear as you if Adobe was to start doing it.

Only software companies with mature software, good release management and clear product vision should go down this road.

Google earned their rep here. There are white papers about the binary diff algorithms they developed to push down Chrome updates as efficiently as possible.

I can see Adobe trying to "silently" push Reader 10 down the pipe, with the installer weighing in at 600 megs and throwing up tons of horrible dialogs and thrashing your CPU as it's "automatically" installed and resulting in a broken Reader.

Hyperbole of course, but Adobe has long been banished from my computers because of their awful updater agent and performance regression in new versions of software.
Q: why not do an offline application? As far as I can tell, you don't talk about manifests and "offlining" it as if it were the normal BBC application. Any reason?
The thing with caffeine depends entirely of the person and the flavor of coffee. A more accurate advice would be to suggest quitting anything you're even slightly addicted to.
If rumours are true, there should be some iTunes cloud support soon.

Software upgrades require iTunes, but I guess as long as you have access to an iTunes equipped box sometimes. As you point out, if you're dependant on adding Music and Movies frequently it would become a pain in the ass.
My eyes used to be my weakest link. Then I got a pair of Gunnar Optics computer glasses. They soften the contrast of bright screens with their yellow tint, cut glare, have a slight corrective factor, and reduce airflow around my eyes keeping them more moist.

They work wonders.
I have had excellent luck with my Nokia E72. It does not have iphone app capabilities, nor android, but it makes an excellent smartphone, and I love the hardware.
If it's like Chrome, which I hope it is, it's completely transparent.

Your browser session is never interrupted, and in fact no update alerts are ever shown. Just once in a while when you start Firefox it's the new version that it installed sometime during your last session.
I'm an iPhone user & Linux-only person for the last 2 years and my experience with the iPhone has been great.
Get an iPhone 4. You're already on AT&T, and you'd like to stay there.

I love my iPhone 4. Nothing out there is nearly as good, especially when you're looking at the screen on this thing!
Agreed on almost everything (as a Cambridge guy with entrepreneurial tendencies).

It's worth knowing that the average house price in Cambridge itself is now higher than the average in London, though, and that the local authorities are almost religiously anti-car, which makes the city centre area much less attractive (in a business sense). If I were planning a start-up with funding for significant numbers of staff, I would probably aim to be based on one of the business parks on the outskirts, or in one of the smaller towns/villages close by. That way, you're still within easy reach of the people, industry and support services, but day-to-day running costs and accessibility for local employees who don't want to walk/cycle in every day and for professional visitors driving to your premises are better.
Cambridge is a great place to hire smart people, but it's not the only fruit in the UK as far as starting up is concerned. Oxford, Reading, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds are all good places to start up each with their benefits and drawbacks. Oxford (1 hr), Reading (20 mins) and Cambridge (50 mins) are probably best for proximity to London. Bristol has a couple of good universities and it's own ecosystem. Manchester and Leeds are cheaper and can be good if you work with financial institutions.

Having said that Cambridge has a long history of innovation and tech startups.

EDIT: Forgot to mention Cheltenham. Chelly's an interesting place, if you're looking at dealing with certain areas of UK government it's a good place to start up, but getting to/from London/anywhere else can be difficult.
But was that because they were programmers or because their mind was already wired that way? If they had become physicists, would they not have ended up living more or less like hermits?

Lets suppose that they are self-taught programmers: would a section on mental health in the introductory works they read, warning them against the dangers of loneliness and seclusion, have helped? Would they have heeded the warnings and would they have been able to socialize, or were they already the kind of people that didn't socialize anyway?

The problem may be the other way around: programming attracts people, because it's a profession where you can be working alone. If that is part of the attraction, no amount of offtopic warnings are going to help. Only someone physically near that cares can help and then we are still supposing that these people are unhappy. Mechanical_fish needs company and social interactions, which is pretty normal. However, that doesn't mean that everyone needs it. You run the risk of imposing your moral standard about 'socializing' on others, that can, and want to, get by with little social interaction.
I even used the SIM card from my iPhone in my N900, it doesnt get 3G (only 2.5G, due to At&t's lame network) but that doesn't matter to me since I use bandwidth intensive programs on WiFi anyway.
iPhone 4, if like me, you think user experience and ease of use are the most important factors in a device you use 20-30 time a day while on the go.

Droid 2 on verizon (out in about a month I believe) if you have philosophical objections to Apple or want freedom from syncing with your laptop. The original droid is still a great phone and was pretty well designed. Droid 2 will have better hardware and battery life than the original while keeping the same design.
> Such stories are extremely varied

That's true.

> You're now arguing that people in general, not programmers specifically, commonly face mental health problems.

No, I mean to imply that programmers, contrary to people in general may be at a higher risk to develop mental issues, mostly related to work pressure, personality related issues that tend to surface earlier or more serious with people that are regularly under stress and people that deal with abstractions that they can not easily talk about with others leading to isolation, and isolation is the exact wrong thing to do for people dealing with pressure and stress on a daily basis.

But if you're not talking about your work anymore (or even about why it matters to you) then alarm bells won't ring until it is much too late.

Now I could go and dig up the HN references I was alluding to earlier but I think the memories of some of those would tear open wounds that are best left to heal. Anecdotally, for the size of the community the number of people that have come forward here out of their own accord and that have testified to having 'issues', and very serious ones at that is something of a surprise to me.

It would be good to prove/disprove this by pointing to some study or other that has listed mental health issues and their occurrence by profession but either my google fu is failing me or such a study does not exist.
Contract with the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project to put the data on their 'Rosetta Disks', readable by any civilization with high-powered optical telescopes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

Supposedly one holds 13,000 pages of text in human languages. If we assume your data is similar text, and one page is 58 lines of 66 characters (as are plain text IETF RFCs), you'll need:

(5TB / (3828 bytes)) / 13000 = 110473 disks
>> It's not like you're dealing with 5 different browsers in 10 different versions here, you're dealing with a single browser in a single version

If you're only targetting iPhone/iPad/iPod, then what's the point of doing it as a HTML5 app? The implied advantage of HTML5 is portability.

The main downside of HTML5 for iPhone apps is that they don't appear in the App Store. How many installs has the BBC News app got because it's been featured in the App Store? Thousands, I bet.

The 'app' culture is pretty ingrained in iOS users now... if it's not in the app store, it doesn't exist. Notice how major services like Facebook have both native apps and iPhone optimised web apps.
I never saw anything even approaching YC while I was in Syd. Two questions:

1) What's stopping you from moving to the US?

If you wanted to, you could be here on an effectively permanent basis in a matter of weeks (we have an unfair advantage in the form of the E3 visa, a version of the H1B for Australians). Get in touch if you'd like to chat about this.

2) Are you making the most of a community which isn't formalised/mature enough to support a YC equivalent?

There are some real kickass entrepreneurs in Sydney, who I'd say are more approachable and helpful than their equivalents in cities with a more mature startup community. Get in touch for some names, or just show up to Silicon Beach drinks and talk to as many people as you can.
Carrying Forward the Academic Collaboration Banner
The first SSD tested reaches 130MB/s reading and writing. IMHO it is running in SATA-1 mode (jumper? BIOS setting?) and that's what kills its performance. Any SSD should reach a much higher read throughput.
Anecdotal evidence makes me believe the absolute best thing for an engineers brain is a full night of sleep every night... that means no alarm clocks.
Of course you should see a doctor to rule out diseases like multiple sclerosis.

Autoimmune (e.g. Lupus) diseases are another important set to rule out.

The good news is that, though not curable, many of the inflammatory ailments are easily and cheaply treatable.

My advice: have your doctor consider the old NSAIDs first.Ketoprofen is my favorite, though Wyeth pulled it off the OTC market[1], so the lowest single-pill dose is pretty high[2]. Among friends and relatives who've tried it, it consistently counters inflammation, even though its pain relief varies down to nothing. Being old, it's cheap, too.

[1] shortly after buying the company who marketed it under the brand "Orudis KT". The cynic in me says it's because Advil has a much higher profit margin.

[2] 50mg compared to 12.5mg. Sometimes, 12.5mg once a day is all I've needed. Especially with the recent concerns over the safety of NSAIDs, needlessly quadrupling the dose seems foolish, so I hack the dosages. I could probably get a compounding pharmacy to do this for me, but that would eliminate the "cheap" advantage.
Academic Term Paper to Scholars in the Field
The students starting college and writing their first college term paper has to realize that there is a world of difference between high school essays and academic term papers. This article explains the difference between high school essays and academic papers.