skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$30 a month for the 3G data plan ($20 for the iPhone 2G)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/09/199-iphone-sure-with-a-...
$199 without a carrier subsidy? That's the straight retail price? Wow!
If you use long lived connections, apache simply does not cut it any more IMHO
interesting... care to show us this 'wonderful superwoman code' so we can emulate its style?
I guess it depends how many users you want to scale to :)
TC had it coming, that's for sure.
I would suppose that the Touch will stay at it's current price but get a size increase right after that "Buy a Mac get an iPod" deal runs out.
I used to like Warren. That was until he got so chummy with Bill Gates. Now I won't even watch Fox News anymore.
Speaking as a passionate vim user, If you're on dvorak, the advantages of vim are reduced quite a bit. The normal navigation keys are poorly placed, and the most commonly used keys are in hard-to-reach places.

However, at the same time, the statement "I feel trapped, like I can't see all my code at once, and I can't easily search around or explore." screams to me that you haven't even looked at the vim navigation.

I suggest you stick with learning vim, but look up cheat sheets and search for effective ways of navigating your code. Hint: ctags and ctrl+] is amazing for jumping around -- a tag stack is more or less essential IMO. the '*' (search forward for word under cursor) is also very useful.
Proposal: "Showing the whale" will now replace the terms "Epic Fail" and "Belly up" in the web 2.0 lexicon and become shorthand for any sort of transitory service failure of a web application.

I feel that the slightly rude tone of the term "Showing the whale" appropriately reflects the disrespect a user feels when I service they rely on goes down without explanation.
"Requires new 2-year AT&T rate plan, sold separately."
Who needs tactile feedback?

Business users and programmers, mostly.

I own a macbook pro. Its built-in keyboard is excellent. Yet I very rarely use it, because no matter how well designed, it can't beat an external keyboard for ergonomics.

Just because the laptop keyboard is a touch-screen doesn't mean you can't use a Bluetooth keyboard with it.
That's not a surprise given that requirement already existed. So Apple loses revenue sharing but gets the subsidy paid from AT&T. Seems like an odd trade off.

I also wonder if this means you'll be able to buy one for more money without the contract.
Apples stock price is ridiculous, and great news does seem to almost always drive the price down, especially if it is expected.

It is one of the strongest companies with the riskiest stocks (and counter-intuitive swings) that I have followed.
The beauty of vim is that the general paradigm is that you apply an action over a structured motion. For example, 'dib' will delete (d) the current inner block (ib), and put it into the paste buffer -- wonderful for pulling a block out into a method. Reformatting a paragraph works similarly -- gqap (gq = reflow, ap = a paragraph).

Vim's commands give you a language where you can refer directly to structured entities in your code, rather than being forced to speak in terms of numbers of lines, or cursor positions.
YouTube's monetization strategy: You Created the Content, Now Sell the Ads
The iPhone 3G Ad
It's "indifference" not Indifference or INdifference.
MacRumors had them all beat.
The folks at Twitter have embraced the term:

http://static.twitter.com/images/whale.png
I really like this DSL aspect of jQuery!

I wonder however if a plugin could define its own namespace, like:

$('blah').draggable().create({options}).css(..)...
$('blah').draggable().destroy().css(..)...

draggable() returns a wrapper that exposes only the dragging specific methods, but the underlying jQuery is passed through and returned by any method called on the wrapper. That way you don't have to add all methods in the same namespace.

On second thought I don't know if this wouldn't just be confusing :-)
Everything you need to know about a VC term sheet
Best Health Insurance Rates
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For MySQL Server 4 and below, simple indexes and compound indexes with three or less values are ignored. For MySQL Server 5 and above, the heuristic is more vague. Anyhow, if one or more columns has a combined total of three or more values then an index could reduce a table scan to a range scan.
I've found this to be true in a bad way. One female co-worker writes comments like this:

//Get the HttpSession from request.

HttpSession session = request.getSession();

To anyone who knows Java, that comment is just a waste of space that gets in the way.
for a unlimited-data-only package:

old iphone: $399 + $20/mo * 24 mo = 880 TCO

new iphone: $199 + $30/mo * 24 mo = 920 TCO

new iphone "business" user: $199 + $45/mo * 24 mo = 1280 TCO

RUH ROH
That's because the market already priced in the 3G announcement - I doubt that the price would have stayed up there unless there was a real surprise today.
It's the same strategy that any software maker has: get your software on as many computers as possible. Obviously, after that, Google can figure out how to make money off Android...probably through ads.

Given that the software is the most important piece (in my opinion), Apple has limited themselves by tethering it to one single device. In the future, that could be a serious constraint. They've done it in the past (OS X, etc.), and it hasn't worked out so well.
Works great from a PR standpoint. I think Twitter should develop tons of 'microproducts' so they can roll one out each time twitter goes down and say it was a planned outage to update their products.
Facebook app-maker RockYou raises $35 million
Found out that AT&T has killed their revenue sharing plan and will be increasing the data plan from $20 to $30. The base iPhone plan will now be 70 bucks instead of 60.

$10 increase * 24 months = $240

$399 old price - $199 new price = $200

Nice, save money upfront to pay 40 bucks more overall. I would have preferred expensive equipment cost and cheaper monthly costs.
How about just saying you are going for a business meeting? The Canadian officials seem to find that satisfactory every time I go there, so I don't see why it won't work in the reverse direction.
Perhaps instant karma also refers to the karma the submitter expected for posting TC come-up-ins. A short title with much depth.
When all else fails you have to go look for a job.

I never really got emotional about failed startups. I just took the code and the experience and used it as much as possible when I went on to the next project.

This is one of the neat things about software development. When you are the coder you own the code regardless of any agreements that were signed. They can "sequester" the actual code on the hard drive. That's fine, but they can't sequester what's in your head.

If your startup is an internet business or a software product then the worst case scenario is that you will have a lot of code and a lot of knowledge for jump starting your next startup.
Yes - this looks to be a winner: reliable packages will make Lisp easier to approach, and easier to use.
Their classes are listed at http://techshop.ws/take_classes.html

"How To Cast Objects from Molten Aluminum in a Sand Mold" is always a favorite.
I got very lucky. A bunch of us in our office (seven of us in total) all sold our iPhones for $350 each over the past 2 weeks... I'm definitely glad we did, because it just became impossible to sell the old ones for even a third of that.
Loopt demos free location-based iPhone app
It's actually $60 for 450 minutes. If you think I'm nitpicking, making the same $10 mistake the other direction gets you 900 minutes for your $70.

$60 - 450 minutes
$80 - 900 minutes
$100 - 1350 minutes

Basically, for an additional $20/mo, you're getting unlimited data and 200 SMS - standard ATT rates with the only difference being that you don't get to choose data plan or no data plan.

If you got a smartphone/treo/blackberry, you'd be paying more per month for data. Unlimited data for a blackberry adds $30/mo without any messaging. The cheapest PDA plan is $50/mo (but includes unlimited messaging).

You just don't want to pay for data - neither do I, but this isn't Apple's fault. Data plans just add a lot to the monthly cost.
What's so cool about Sam Altman, and what does PG like so much about him? That's the real trick to learn - how to be so people friendly that people with money fall in love with you. Think about it - pg sends his essay to the 21 year old Sam Altman to be corrected. What's so great about that boy?
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html

shows sprint, tmobile and others...
for making the phones, LG, HTC and Motorola.

Note since you have to have a 2yr contract to get it for $199 I'm out; Im sick of closed, locked down mobile environments
Logged in just to upmod you. They were on Twitter, Plurk, IRC, not to mention their site showed no bit of the load they were carrying.
Risk is generally proportional to reward. If it was less risky to start a startup, the reward or chance of reward wouldn't be as great (more people doing it, less chance of succeeding or of an exit).
HN is definitely reaching a "tipping point" moment. The fact that worthless entries like this are making it to the front page is very telling.

I wonder if PG would consider shutting down new user registration for a period of time to see what happens with traffic and submission quality.

I have a theory that the types of users that HN (or reddit in the beginning) would like to attract and keep are the very same users that show up in the first 6 to 12 months of the site's existence. After that point, it seems like all of the social network sites begin to homogenize to the digg model (in terms of quality of discourse).
Anyone in the know about SMS plans with the new contract? Is it still 200 msgs included or did that change? I am very tempted to `upgrade' my Blackberry Curve, but I text a lot.

The $10 increase in price doesn't bother me so much after the DoD discount.
Unfortunately most people won't realize what's happening and will think "Price reduction!"
Yes, why don't we have the government promote our preferred group of people while penalizing the others? Let's help startup founders, and screw the large corporations!

We want it to be easy for us to fire people, but it should be hard for big companies.

We want other people to pay for our "safety net", to encourage more people to be like us.

Or, why don't we just play on a level playing field instead of legislating a blessed group of people? If starting a startup is really that great, then it should happen naturally, not by having other people pay for our success.
Your comment sounds more like a veiled swipe at the US rather than anything constructive.

Take an introductory macro economics course to find out why what you said actually doesn't work out in practice. It's much better if a country specializes in what they are good at rather than try to do everything. Given that the US has proven itself to be quite good at making software and internet, that would make it a pretty good place to be, regardless of immigration rules.
Is a data-only package really only $20 a month? If so I'd be tempted to get an iPhone with a data-only plan and stick with my cheap prepaid for voice.
To answer my own question, look here: http://tusb.stanford.edu/2007/05/sam_altman_founder_of_loopt...

Sam comes across as intelligent and trustworthy. Compare him to the facebook guy, who comes across as very nerdy. Or to Matt Maroon, who comes across as arrogant. Sam looks like he gets girls, which frankly, is the best quality a person looking for startup money can have.

So I answer my own question - I now see what's cool about Sam Altman.
But this isn't axiomatic. Risk isn't always proportional to reward. Sometimes risk is just pointless risk. Risk can be just one of many factors in how valuable something might be to the world.

Furthermore, wealth isn't a zero sum game. It's possible that there's some limit to the number of conceivable successful companies in the social networking sphere, but there are a billion other things worth working on. As PG has pointed out, health alone is an like an infinite want.
iirc, yeah. i'm unsure if you can get it separately, as i've never tried to, but i think its a good point of comparison.
Well, there are a lot of reasons: the simple ones being he understands the importance of technical skills in startups, he's mature beyond his age, and he is smart and articulate in a focused way.

I think these resources help you understand why he's so cool:

http://tusb.stanford.edu/2007/05/sam_altman_founder_of_loopt...

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/sam-altman-at-startup...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95857
Barely getting by without working, I think, is a much different version of "barely getting by".
InSuggest - website and image recommendations
You can't order data plan by itself.
Credibility of the Tech Echo Chamber
Ask HN: iPhone as WiFi base station?
Given that the iPhone has WiFi, how hard would it be to use it as a (semi-)broadband connection bridging to a laptop or desktop computer? This would enable me and probably quite a few others to scrap their current ISP's.
Just go watch his SS08 presentation at Omnisio. I'm 36, and if I had a tenth of the intelligence and drive as that dude at his age, by now I'd have my own kingdom protected by a robot army.
If you want to do 3D gaming, Panda3D is a great framework for rapid prototyping. And it's in Python.
Stories that aren't 100% accurate are on YC fairly regularly; deleting just the inaccurate stories that affect YC companies would be quite unfair.
Well, I should have said risk is correlated to reward. While wealth might not be a zero sum game, if 5x the number of startups existed that exist now, it would just be harder to be successful on average. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's different than what is out there and probably a worse scenario for everybody that is willing to take the amount of risk required today.
What? Twitter went down? I'd demand a refund immediately ...
Taking The Leap: Don't Just Be A Wannabepreneur
I wish there was a way for me to downvote something to show my displeasure :(. (I upvoted your post of course.)
Apple posts details about Snow Leopard
Most customers would definitely prefer cheaper upfront cost and more in the long run. It's a consumer credit economy.
A simple matter of programming. Just add AP mode to the wi-fi driver and enable NAT routing in the network stack. I have a feeling AT&T wouldn't allow it, though; they'd probably prefer that you get a more expensive plan if you're going to run a stompbox.
Congrats to Sam and Loopt from Heysan! This is great news! Is Loopt going to be free cross-platform from now on?
The problem is U.S. tax breaks for health care if your employer buys it, and laws that ban health care competition across state lines. We should have a robust consumer market for health care services and insurance, and we don't, and that's the limiting factor. Expanding government control over major parts of the economy is hardly a recipe for expanded economic activity or start-ups. Also, I think the post is factually wrong-- America has three or four times as many start-ups per capita. And the pool of capital here is much bigger, thanks in part to lower taxes on income (yes that matters, the VC industry didn't exist until Reagan cut the top rate from a confiscatory 70%) and lower capital gains taxes.
An office full of shysters. You should start selling the ice from the freezer to eskimos. Congrats on the sales though, that's pretty bad ass.
You're responding to a vim/emacs comparison so I'll be the first to say you dont need to use the mouse in emacs just as you don't need it in vim. Hit ctrl-space to start a select. Move the cursor until your text is highlighted (you can skip to line if you know the number, also easy in emacs with setnu+), and then hit tab.
It's not proper etiquette to downvote or upvote because you're displeased. That's not what the moderation system is meant for.
I didn't realize. I'm sure I saw a 'select with the mouse' somewhere in there. I didn't.
There are already massive, artificial advantages for large corporations. Large corporations can bring foreign talent in quite easily compared to startups, which must constantly battle for the right to keep their employees or founders in the country. We know this because it's our #1 distraction right now. Being poor? No problem! But we're not even allowed to legally be in the country without a job working for a company that's not our own.

Large corporations have access to the public markets and hundreds of other financing options. Startups need to rely on knowing friends, fools or family to fund initial efforts, and then perhaps squeeze into the insular silicon valley VC environment, if they can successfully justify a multimillion dollar investment. Furthermore, since IPOs are so incredibly painful now, M&A is the only exit for startup entrepreneurs, and so the practically only companies able to acquire others (and thus, hopefully, benefit down the line) are those already linked to the public markets, which are those which are already big.

Large corporations have the risk of making the wrong hires aggregated over thousands of people. Hire the wrong person in a large company, and maybe nobody will even notice. Hire the wrong person in the startup, and the entire company might be sunk.

Large corporations have the ability to massively lobby themselves to other large corporations or the government, encouraging massive kickbacks and corruption. The recent credit crunch bailout is an example of this.

The major disadvantage that large corporations have is that in many areas they're not particularly suitable for creative work. But this is a natural disadvantage. If society encouraged organizations more able to produce useful and novel work, our civilization as a whole would benefit.
I don't actually think he gets that many _girls_...
In any case, it wouldn't work. How long would people tolerate a significant percentage of people just plain mooching off the state? I don't think that would work anywhere, Europe or US. Even in European countries that provide that kind of assistance, you're supposed to be at least looking for a job, or in training, or be seriously disabled enough that it's clear you wont' work productively.
The learning curve of vim is indeed steep, but it's been incredibly well worth it for me. The key thing to remember about vim is that it's very much oriented towards editing text, not so much creating it. (In general, writing lots of text is easy and there are few differences from editor to editor.)

But fast editing using only the keyboard is where vim really shines. In my experience, the biggest wins are the uniform command structures and the huge number of movement options. Since most commands in vim take the form of <number-of-repititions><command><movement area>, you need master only the various movement types to effectively start using a large number of commands. Movement areas (called "motions") can be word-by-word, long jumps within a sentence, going between paragraphs, matching code structures (braces/parenthesis/functions/etc.), etc. Learning these motions lets you quickly jump to exactly where you need to, resulting in super-fast editing.

Of course, there are all the usual search-and-replace type of commands, multiple buffers/screens/tabs, very easy macro recording and playback, and plugins for project management, source control, etc., but none of these particularly distinguish vim from other good editors.

The one 'weakness' of vim is that it's much less of an "OS" than editors like emacs. Instead, it has a few well-chosen external commands that are built-in (grep, make, etc.), and otherwise lets you run shell commands directly (piping input into the current file, if wanted) for everything else. This, IMO, is more in keeping with the unix mentality of piping together lots of small programs that each do one thing well. So for example, you can sort and keep only unique lines in a text file by simply selecting them and running the standard 'sort' and 'uniq' commands (exactly as you would do on the command line). Your personal preference is what decides whether this is a weakness (as emacs users would probably feel) or a strength (as I and many other vim users feel).

Finally, I would recommend learning vim as you would learn a new language: use it all the time and slowly pick up new features (not all at once) until you become proficient. I use it not only as my editor for all text and programming on my machine, but also for editing text boxes in firefox and editing emails in thunderbird. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152170 for more information.
I'm not so sure. In many respects it's been easier for us (in these first few months) because of startup culture, which might not exist if we were five times fewer.
The Smalltalk community takes the spelling of Smalltalk with a captial T as a sign that the writer is a PHB. This is not absolutely damning, but it is a bad sign.
I answer to a higher power: conventions of English capitalization.
A few years ago I went to work in the Valley on a TN visa. You couldn't get that visa as a programmer (though programmers were what the US needed). Programmers, in fact, were explicitly off the list, and if you said you were going to write code it was cause for immediate rejection. Your job had to be "systems analyst". That was on the list. So I got a job offer as a "systems analyst".

I have a math degree not CS, and was expecting that to be a bit of an issue. It did indeed come up. The INS officer looked at me in that suspicious way that minor security officials have and asked, very slowly: "How does your degree in mathematics qualify you to be a systems analyst?"

I replied, very slowly, "The company wants me to use my mathematical background to analyse their system."

His response: "OK". That was the end of the interview.
Well, every phone we sold went to someone on T-Mobile who wanted an iPhone. Since we had no problem jailbreaking & unlocking the phones, I suppose that added to the value.
The iPhone (and Mac) are great because Apple makes the whole package.

Jobs likes to quote Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own software"

(of course the converse isn't true: there's countless phones with awful software made by the hardware manufacturers)

I doubt we'll ever see serious innovation on Android like we saw with the iPhone for exactly that reason.
When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery

[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Snow_Crash]
i got modded down because a $199 iphone with exchange and push support essentially spells doom for other smartphone companies?
The history of this function: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

Finding the original author of the function (Greg Walsh): http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/
You can select with a mouse too. In my opinion, if you're using Emacs OR Vim you've already won. Apples and oranges, sure, but still fruit where notepad is kinda like a big mac.
It's not that hard to read. Plain is good - though it does look rather awkward on my widescreen.

Copy and paste the text into Word or OpenOffice if it's that bad :)
I prefer "Twitter is throwing the Fail Whale"
Hey, what part of unlimited data do they not understand?

PS: thanks for the word: I'd never heard of stompboxen before, neat stuff.
What about the pdf popups?