skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IBM and Sun Microsystems (one of the first workstation vendors, then seller of servers, especially to finance; now an obscure division of Oracle, a commercial database company) used to do something similar with their biggest machines -- ship a fully populated high-end server, and then sell activation of CPU and memory resources after the fact. I don't know how this was enforced; I think it was mainly done at the OS or firmware level, not at the CPU level.
So does my Droid 2. I assumed this was part of Android 2.2.
I had to do some accessibility QA for a large shrink-wrapped software application, and it's quite the ordeal. I liken it to trying to operate an application through a telephone interface. When you're digging through menus, you need to listen to every. single. menu. entry. before deciding which one you want, and I found it far too easy to get distracted and forget where I was.

I suppose users who are used to dealing with accessibility software are used to this kind of interface, but I think it requires a level of patience that sighted users are not accustomed to (at least when dealing with their desktop software).
They don't seem to be using the green light, at least.
The Vanishing Lunch Break
Of the things on that list "program a computer" comes after "pitch manure".

Jus' sayin'.
But this is no DRM-ful app store. The upgraded computer will run the same instruction set, just faster. The mechanism to disable the bigger cache until a code is entered inhibits nothing people would be doing with their Intel CPUs today. Perhaps the homebrew microcode scene suffers, but that's a niche.
Interesting. Can it be written during normal operation? Like giving up a couple opcodes for a better implementation of an important one?
Regardless of what school you go to, the education gained rests on the shoulders of the student and their engagement levels in their own learning.

Education has less impact these days because kids increaswingly expect to be taught, not to learn. Laziness and the expecttation of employability is just as much the problem as the university tuition rates.
I'm only starting to develop iPhone apps but as a user I find the review/rating process completely broken. Rating an app seems to take far too long and interrupts my work, so I never do it. The only time a user will be sufficiently motivated to rate your app is when they really hate it.

On the flip-side, when you search the app store the results don't appear to be sorted by rating so I wonder what effect it really has
When the Google market was new I remember reading views for a compass app that were many variations of "This game sux!!! all it does is spin around!!!"
You don't need a compelling web-site, you need a compelling reason for your customers to visit your web-site. I guess giving away something is a common choice.

Once they are there, give them an opportunity to scratch their itches.
With the exception that Photoshop Elements can't be "unlocked" to become full blown Photoshop, your comparison here doesn't work.
I remember that. I thought it was pretty contrived. During the morning rush, people really don't want to be late for work. I'm not sure that was a thesis that needed proving.

He'd have had a huge crowd during lunch hour.
I've never tried to rewatch childhood cartoons (somehow I imagine Scooby Doo may not quite hold up), however one thing that does stand the test of time: Police Squad... In color!
I wonder if the algorithm includes the taxes that people won't be paying due to sentences. That could get really complicated. For example, having a felony conviction on your record probably hugely reduces lifetime incomes. For certain people, the lost taxes might be much larger than the "direct" costs.
We'll, we're discussing the MPAA, which is an American organization, American civil disobedience with regard to Rosa Parks, Harpers Ferry and the catalyst for the American Civil War.

When you say, "Civil disobedience goes like this:", but are not American, don't live in America, and are unfamilair with the history of citizen's rights within the US, you are, for lack of a better phrase, talking out of your anus.
Ok, I can see why it may be fun to counter something that partially reads like a personal attack on Magaziner with something that's definitely a personal attack on Peters (insert discussion about HN as a forum for spectator sports here), but do you also disagree with the argument about planning vs. doing that he's actually making?
You're spot on - I have trouble believing that they're really going to put in all the effort to build an entire OS when they could achieve exactly the same end result by merely finishing their freaking Android app.

Thus far, Facebook hasn't even proven that they can competently develop a mobile app, let alone an operating system. Even if the issue isn't talent, but resource allocation, are we really to expect that they're motivated enough to develop a mobile OS if the mobile experience hasn't been important enough to them until now to even finish their app?
If the email was sent from a Yahoo/Google/Microsoft email account, it's IP was logged, meaning if the person was using their home internet, you can get a trace to their house with a warrant.

If the email was sent from a private domain, they're traceable in many more ways.

It might be a wasted effort, but you should still try. If the police don't want to give you the time, bring your lawyer in with you... they'll have the time then.
If they offered it as the premier messaging device, with all of your FB chat contacts auto loaded then it would surely appeal to the younger generations.

The only reason kids now days buy Blackberrys over iPhones is because Blackberry has BBM, a chat feature they want.

In terms of market share, this could attack the same user as the Sidekick did years ago. The ultimate messaging and social device.
Just how they could be having this ludicrous discussion over the roar of two motorcycles is never quite explained.

The imagination of a 12-year-old boy is generally not so hampered by skepticism. Ridiculous, implausible stories are the most fun to read, anyway. Ironically, the parts that the adult Weingarten find to be the best are the parts I didn't like as a kid. I always found Aunt Gertrude to be boring.

The comparison with Little House on the Prairie interested me, as I read both when I was young. I probably could have identified LHotP has superior fiction, but in terms of enjoyment I most certainly did not care. Reading the Hardy Boys did not ruin my ability to appreciate Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Now Pentium can be a low-end i3.

Intel doesn't want people to really compare which chip they are buying. They just want people to feel dirty for buying low-end chips.
I doubt it. It's rare politicians consider costs past the next budget year.
White Temple of Northern Thailand
This is one of the big problems with app reviews. The ones who are satisfied for the most part won't bother. Unless you start experiencing problems, you likely won't even think about leaving reviews. (I suppose developers can try to counter this by adding a review link on their apps.)

I use the free weather.com app and always thought it was amazing but never left a review until the latest version which had a slower UI. Still gave it 4 starts, though.
Grey mixes well with neither black nor white. Please stop!
Reading through the comments from developers on Reddit, I'm shocked at the cavalier attitude towards users.

One comment talks about a Monkey Island update that destroyed users' saved games. The comment remarked it didn't seem fair to rate the game down from 4.5 stars to 3 stars for something that would get fixed on the next update.

The app may have been 99 cents, but the user's saved game represents a significant investment of time (the most fundamental unit of value since all of us have only a limited supply).

The app may be only 99 cents but costing a user hours or days of investment is going to get you ranked down, and should.

The other point devs miss is that the absolute ranking of their app doesn't matter. What matters is that all apps are in the same system. If users rate your app on delete, they rate everyone else's app on delete too. If you're getting a lot of bad reviews from that, perhaps more people are deleting your app than other apps.

This is one reason free apps rank lower -- they're deleted more often, hence ranked more often, and ranked at delete time, so ranked low. But even so, free apps are ranked against other free apps, so your stars are only relative to the other free apps' stars. A star itself is meaningless. How your app does within the same system as the other apps is what matters.

TL;DR: Delight your users or at least respect their time.
Julian Assange free to leave Sweden
If we can predict that, shouldn't we also be estimating the cost of the crimes they won't be committing?

A burglar maybe steals $52,000 worth of stuff every year, and it winds up being worthwhile locking him up. But a child rapist has no major impact on economic productivity, so... yeah, I'm starting to see the problem with this mercenary approach to sentencing.
I agree with this. A lot of people probably consider me arrogant and stubborn. Honestly, I don't care though. Arrogance and stubborn are only flaws when you're wrong. On the other hand, being arrogant and stubborn about the truth is a virtue in my opinion.
It's odd, because I don't get the same sentiment from reading the two articles you've cited (I haven't read the book).

Essentially, you're upset that the man's predictions have often been wrong. Big whup. Show me one billionaire or nobel prize-winning scientist who hasn't been wrong hundreds of times and I'll show you a liar.

What you should get out of Tom Peters' manic style is, if anything, that you should always question business as usual because shit is going to keep changing. That's it. If you're taking his (or anyone else's) advice as a prescription for how you should think, act, or feel - you're a fool. Advice should merely serve as fodder for thinking, for shocking us out of doing things just because we've always done them that way.

If you form your own opinions, there's no need to go foamy at the mouth when someone else's turn out to be wrong.
I'm surprised how many comments on the App Store could have been emails reporting bugs to me instead. There have been some very nice bug reports too. But way to many people seemed to think that blasting me with a negative review was the best thing. It really sucks because it's a very public way for things NOT to be fixed.
Yes, agreed. While I have known some very smart people who were arrogant, I think, contrary to what a lot of people are saying here, that intelligence and arrogance are actually orthogonal. There are plenty of people in the world who are not so smart and are still arrogant. Arrogance is an emotional problem, not a natural function of intelligence.

While your definition of arrogance is not bad at all, I will offer a variation: refusing to consider the possibility that one might be wrong.

I used to be one of those smart, arrogant people myself (arguably smart, anyway; certainly arrogant). I have found the conscious practice of humility to be very valuable.
Easy and Secure Large File-Sharing With Droopy
Check out the 'save my life' thread.
Arne Duncan, U.S. Education Secretary on Xbox: "Not a fan. No, absolutely not."
Yeah, that's the least desirable of the outcomes, but it's still not a bad deal for the business.

You have to figure that there will be some customers that want to be able to come in and basically rent space (plus, usually, a restroom and wifi) from the business for a couple of hours for the price of a cup of coffee. Although there's nothing really wrong with a customer wanting that, it's not a good deal for the business and they have no motivation to support it.

That's why the interaction from the wait staff should be really low-key. If the customer really isn't OK with being offered something once an hour or so, then that's just not a good customer for the shop. (My local co-working space charges $20 per day for anyone looking for a place to work; I use that as a yardstick for what's reasonable at a coffee shop. If I'm going to be there for more than a couple of hours, then I'm treating it as a co-working space and I owe them $20 of revenue.)

Most other people find it fair and convenient to get another cup of coffee or other treat delivered to them, and regard it as good service.

I suppose that if the shop thinks there are a large enough number of people in their area that are just looking for a place to work, and are willing to pay for it, but just don't want to be bothered at all, then they could offer something like a "day pass" -- $10 for camping out for more than a couple of hours without being interrupted by the staff, plus a discount on their coffee or other products.

But I'm not sure that would have enough takers to be worth it.
I believe that prison for non-violent crimes is an absolutely antiquate concept and it doesn't belong to a modern society. There are far more effective ways to prevent crime and educate people. How much good could be done for society if we had millions of people doing community work instead of being imprisoned? But I'm afraid society is not ready yet for such a liberal stance, and there are powerful interests working against it as well (think private prisons).
Most coffee shops aren't staffed for table service. Even when it's quiet, customers are arriving in dribs and drabs. Payroll is their largest expense; adding a headcount is probably untenable.

This also assumes that if you gently asked a "customer" if they wanted another cup of coffee that they would buy. Customers interpret this signal in restaurants because there are social cues and a meal progression. When you get done with dessert, there's an expectation that you're going to clear out and free up your 4-top for someone else.

Clearly, some people have developed different expectations about coffee shop tables.
If there is one inanimate object that will teach you with great patience and to devastating effect how often you are wrong it is the computer.
I actually put some text in my description asking people to email when they have problems. It has resulted in about 10 responses (all useful) out of 20k+ users.

The App Store just doesn't promote any kind of reasonable engagement between the users and the developers, which is a totally different experience from desktop app development. Maybe it is the form factor, or the type of user.
Or if anything, they're just rewriting the Facebook Android app.
Use the library.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758722
I thought "Wow, only $37,000 for a three-year sentence? I thought it cost more than that per year!" But apparently I was looking at California standards. Compare:

http://nicic.gov/features/statestats/?State=MO average cost per inmate $16K to

http://nicic.gov/features/statestats/?State=CA average cost per inmate $45K.

At the extremes, New York pays $55K per prisoner and Montana just $11K. This is insane.

It looks like California should be looking at solving its budget problems by outsourcing its prisons to Montana. This would save approximately four billion dollars a year.
...depending on the presentation.
Thanks for posting it. It was morale boosting for me as I am currently a single founder. Does give me hope in spite of the heavy odds I know that are against me :) ( at least with respect to YC funding, not for the long term prospects though)

I do agree that one can't wait to build the perfect team to start a project. If one knows enough experts experts in the required domains for the project, has good working rapport with them, by all means build a team with them. But if you don't know such people, then just get on with it. You will likely meet such experts at least for your next project if not for the current project

At the same time, from experience, I would have to agree with the Big P, that he is right about the chance of success being low for single founders. (Provided it is not an absolute statements and is instead a generality, there are alwasy exceptions)

Startups require lots of decisions that can make or break a company if not done right, often done very fast. And the right decisions are mostly a result of comfort or reasonable enough grasp of different domains such as finance, technology, programming, customers/marketing, to just name a few, and applying loads of common sense on that grasp.

Its very rare to have one person who has enough of a grasp on these different domains to not just be comfortable making decsions on them quickly enough and under ennormous stress, but keep making GOOD decisions critical to the sustainance and growth of the company. Yes, one can learn them fast, but then its a matter of can one person learn them fast and deep to keep making continuously quick and reasonably good decisions while still working on the development.

Thats why teams can often be more successful. Teams can access expertise on differnt domains of differnt team members(if that was the basis of builing the said team). Even if they do not have the domain expertise, the learning can be delegated to different team members and more can be covered than one person can. And there is nothing more beautiful or capable than a highly integrated and coordinated team that can move and react together to changing circumstances and keep delivering.

But thats just one side of the team coin. Along wtih bringing strengths to a team, team members also bring their weaknesses to a team. Unless the team has a way to deal with those weaknesses or have enough rapport with each other to recognise those weaknesses and find solutions to them, the weaknesses can just outweigh the strengths causing the failure of that team.

Not to mention, what about the other dynamics, ifs and buts that a team brings in? Do they really have one unified vision that they can stick to inspite of ups and downs? Can they stick together when the vision has to be modified? And so on...

I wonder, if PG and the team at YC, have any metrics/analysis on how many of the past founder teams have failed due to bad team dynamics inspite of great ideas.

(Feeling sheepish for the long post, Couldnt' help expressing myself on this topic)
I always thought snakes didn't seek out and consume prey that was already dead but apparently that isn't so from this tactic.
You say, My local co-working space charges $20 per day for anyone looking for a place to work; I use that as a yardstick for what's reasonable at a coffee shop. This logic is totally broken. Your co-working space has a different cost structure than the coffee shop. In particular:

* Your co-working space doesn't need to factor in the cost of baristas and managers into the value of a table/hour.

* Your co-working space isn't set up in a super-expensive retail property, so the inherent value of a table/hour their is lower.

You've been underpaying your coffee shop.
JSON Serialisation with GWT
Anyone who's ever done freelance or retail sales will tell you that customers who pay more - who are willing to pay more - are, on average, way easier to deal with, more respectful, and more grateful than customers who buy only cheap or inexpensive items. There's only the odd tyrannical rich person outlier, who thinks they "own you." They don't come close to balancing out the hordes of cheapo customers who think you owe them.

That's just one part of the issue, of course. The App Store is horrible in so many ways -- the intelligence of the audience, the savvy, the inability to communicate other ways, the likelihood that any given App buyer has probably been screwed by other, lesser quality apps before. Etc.
Facebook phone using Android "for sure"
As long as distribution and manufacturing are outsourced to an experienced third-party, I think a Facebook Phone that has service and hardware priced below the iPhone can be successful. It also doesn't have to sell a lot (a small sliver of the mobile pie is massive), would have a lock-in advantage, and would offer considerable advertising potential.

My gut says Facebook wouldn't do this because they seem to have very high product and engineering standards and want to deliver high-end experiences which would require high-end devices and software.
This is actually a bit more interesting than merely providing judges with the costs. FTFA:

The concept is simple: fill in an offender’s conviction code, criminal history and other background, and the program spits out a range of recommended sentences, new statistical information about the likelihood that Missouri criminals with similar profiles (and the sentences they received) might commit more crimes, and the various options’ price tags.

The fact that the system actually gives info about likelihood of committing future crimes is pretty neat, if it's done well. This is one of the first practical moves I've seen towards data-driven sentencing, and if it spreads and grows, it could be the start of a major tidal shift in our entire philosophy of criminal justice.
Android Code: How to obtain the WiFi's corresponding NetworkInterface
I believe Schwarzenegger wants to do exactly that, but has been prevented by prison guard unions.
http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/status/21757786483
I regularly track down thieves, theft rings, and other criminals on the Internet, so I can probably give good real-world advice here.

Do all of these steps today. Do not contact the sender until you have filed a police report, if possible.

Step 1.) Collect all of the evidence you have. Intact email messages are important.

Step 2.) Grab a pencil and piece of paper and title it "For the overworked detective".

Step 3.) Gather any unique identifiers in the email message headers. Get the originating IP address, geolocate it, find out which ISP owns the IP block (via arin.net) and write all of this down on your piece of paper.

If you have a mountain of evidence, print it out and number it page by page, so you (and the detective) can cross reference your notes with the evidence easily.

4.) Google the sender's email address, write down any decent info and rate it (solid/likely/unlikely). Do the same with just the username portion of the email address.

5.) Bring your notes, and your evidence, and file a police report, preferably in person. The CSO will either pencil whip the report into the system or add some of your evidence to the report. No worries, if you have your notes cross-referenced, the detective will be very interested in it.

Many police departments are overworked (or claim to be), so if you do the initial legwork and it can be reliably cross-referenced to evidence you'll have more chance of getting your stuff back.

Oh and the guy who emailed you has knowingly purchased stolen equipment, which is a crime. My hunch is that he isn't the thief, but personally knows the thief. So, you grab him and you get the other. These guys have probably victimized a whole lot of other people, so good luck.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions or need assistance (my email is in my HN profile)
I've never delved into this domain before, but why is it that it is so hard to create multi-master replication for Postgres? We were considering it at work, and it seems the only solutions that provide that are unmaintained third party scripts written in Perl/Ruby, etc. MySQL has the NDB cluster solution, but that is way too restrictive as everything must be kept in memory.
Being stubborn about the truth sounds reasonable, but why is being arrogant about it a virtue?
It's called an ad hominem argument, and it's one of the many well-known logical fallacies. For more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
If we are committed to the mercenary approach, we would have to define how bad a murder is "in dollars".

If you think we should be focused on justice instead of a cold cost-benefit analysis, may I suggest defining how valuable justice is, in dollars? (I'm joking, I think...)
I am big fan of consistency (not saying I am), makes for great team members, employees and advisors.

But consistency with no regards to the outcome or circumstances, thats plain crock!