skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are many non-web app YC companies, including systems management products, mobile apps, installable apps, etc.

That said, you've specifically mentioned infrastructure, and I don't think an infrastructure company would be possible in the YC model. It would take a vast amount of money to start a new hosting provider or cloud provider, if you aren't building on existing infrastructure (which a few YC companies have done, building on EC2 and other cloud provider products, including recently acquired Heroku and Cloudkick). YC invests a few thousand dollars. Building infrastructure costs millions of dollars. Building software is what YC companies do, and the best place to build most software today is on the web.
I rarely enjoy 37 Signals posts, but I heartily agree with Jason Z. (new guy?). There's so much negativism on the net in general; everyone seems threatened by everyone else. And you find it here, too, a place where you'd expect to find nothing but support and encouragement. (To be fair: HN is full of supportive people; there's just more negativity than you'd expect. I'm probably guilty of that, too, although I'm making a concerted effort to do otherwise.)

All criticism is not constructive criticism. If someone's trying, they ought to be encouraged to keep trying. That may sound naive and pollyanna, but ask yourself: when was the latest time a hater changed the world for the better?
Are Any Verizon Apps Preinstalled on the Verizon iPhone?
High ebooks prices are mostly due to the 'agency pricing' model adopted by publishers specifically for ebooks. In a nutshell, publishers do not want retailers like Amazon to discount ebooks too heavily and ultimately force publishers to accept lower profits.

In the agency model, publishers force retailers to sell ebooks at pre-defined (and usually unjustifiably high) prices. All the large publishing houses are quite uncomfortable with the rise of ebooks because consumers expect ebooks to cost less and increased ebook adoption would mean lower profits for publishers.

This article goes into more detail: http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/why-smashwords-moved-to-ag...
I know your comment is basically part of the central premises of "Getting Things Done" but your words "This way when I let go of work for the day.." resonated with me.

Perhaps today is when I start using those last 5 minutes to take at least one note a day.
idk there's nothing more irritating as a creator to be told "oh that's nice". I'd rather everyone tells me it's utter shit than tells me niceties.
I took a course in high school that used that grading model before (minus the gaming terms ofc). It was an online, at-your-own-pace class in one of those subjects I find interesting but would absolutely hate to learn about in a traditional classroom environment. The grading scheme was indeed awesome and motivating. Completing the next exam/assignment ALWAYS meant your grade went UP, so let's do it now and see what grade I have then! IIRC I finished the course far before the end of the term, which was an additional reward as it allowed me lots of goof-off time in the computer labs.

Of course, it can be a bit awkward to explain the F on your first interim report card, but if this kind of grading became standard that wouldn't be a problem. :)
While I agree with the sentiment, I think sites like Read the Fucking HIG serve a good purpose: they keep UI designers from getting lazy. Nobody wants to come up with a design that ends up on a site like that.
Not all people who create can critique, especially their own creations.
Whether you know it or not, exactly that sort of reasoning is what is used to manipulate the CPI numbers.
Technically the AppStore guidelines say that Apps must follow the HIG, and that not doing so is grounds for rejection. In practice however, I think you're right since I've not heard of someone actually being rejected because of that.
I meant the 2600 i7 chips. What is AMDs answer to that?
Not as a result of trading.

You can argue that getting equity pricing right helps companies with their access to capital, but once you have the pricing right at 100ms I don't understand what value HFT firms are adding by pouring money and talent into getting the pricing right at 10ns.

It seems like such an obvious win for society to mitigate the winner-take-all incentive of being first to market on a pricing disparity.
Whenever you see a stock price it is always the price where the stock last changed hands. If the stock is lightly traded then the last trade may have been for as few as 100 shares. So what is the price if you want to buy or sell 200,000 shares of that stock? I am sure it is not the last quoted price. They are setting-up a market where slower and bigger trades can take place
I used to keep a journal and found it very therapeutic writing my innermost thoughts and then as I got older I'd laugh at the things that stressed me out when I was younger. Then my mum found it one day and started reading it and that put an end to it... I've tried doing it online but it's just not the same as writing it in a beautifully bound journal and flicking through the pages.
A Life-or-Death Question to Start Your Day
Are you serious? Windows 7 was in beta and RC publically for a very long time. Thats just lazy in my opinion.
Hospitals Can Work Better
FWIW, I think parents/friends give blind support and encouragment. HN/peers/tech community should give complete honesty. If that means saying "That idea is terrible" so be it.
I know how you feel. I built http://www.pingbrigade.com/ which is similar. Mine runs of VPS's though.
Am I the only one who thinks this is pointless? I don't trade billions of dollars of equities, but I am a long-term investor.

One of my big rules as a long-term investor is that I can't sweat the 1/8ths and 1/4ths (borrowed from Philip Fisher).
The time I spend worrying about these high frequency traders getting a few extra cents out of me is time wasted finding great companies that are selling at a discount.

Sure... Its annoying, but if you really are a long-term investor a few tenths of a percent won't kill you.
> vastly smarter and more knowledgeable about science than anyone here on HN

Perhaps, but that's probably why the GP talked about his reputation "in medical circles". He's not any more knowledgeable about science than his major critics:

http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/weil.html

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/06/science_is_irrelev...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4431

http://scientopia.org/blogs/whitecoatunderground/2009/10/18/...
In defense of RTFM
does this apply to SMS too? if the phone gets an incoming text, will it disconnect the internet?
It's a good book to use as reference. Such as should I do x or y. Easy to read, and with well explained examples.

Great book to sit along with Web Analytics 2.0.
He may be right. But he's not adding any value for anyone the way he points it out. I think the biggest problem I have with it is that he's insulting and attacking the people who made these apps. There is no reason for that.
How to Use JavaScript Shared Web Workers in HTML5
The sorry state of the CSS3 specifications
There's a truism in many fields, "You have to learn the rules before you can break them." It means that rules are not the end-all-be-all, but they exist for a reason, and breaking them is generally bad unless you have a very good reason.

When you're just copying an iOS interface to the Mac, to use an example from that site, that isn't intelligently deciding that you can do one better than the HIG. That's just pointlessly making the app less intuitive.
37signals is at their worst when they adopt this sanctimonious attitude. Say what you want about their juvenile tone, the criticisms on RTFHIG are mostly valid.

What are we going to do next? Pillory literary, film and food critics because their insights are inconvenient to the sensitive feelings of creators in those realms? Come on.

Creating things for other people has a long, rich history of criticism. Some valid, some bullshit, but all essential to the advancement of whatever creative field is under scrutiny. The shovelware artists who RTFHIG pick on might find a genuine direction for improving their work. Meanwhile, we're all talking about what genuinely makes a good interface.

That these guys are provocative makes their insights more valuable, since they get more attention. If you don't have or can't grow a thick skin, you don't belong in a creative field. It's as simple as that.
What's new here is the direct observation of a spectral feature--the well-known 511 keV line--which corresponds to annihilation of the positrons produced by the TGF with electrons. Gamma-rays and electrons had been observed before, but it wasn't known that positrons were produced as well.

Compton didn't observe it because its energy resolution was too coarse, and RHESSI (another satellite which has detected many TGFs) doesn't have enough collecting area to do spectroscopy.

There are current ground and airborne experiments looking for high energy emission from lightning.

(I'm a gamma-ray astrophysicist who works with these satellites on other sources.)
Complete honesty can be simple, direct, and if not exactly nice to hear, certainly not mean-spirited in tone.

That's quite different from the style of "oh my god what a bunch of fucking idiots these guys are, ha ha ha". It's a cheap, easy way to get some laughs (see: Ted Dziuba) but I'm not really a fan.
Yep, it's a common misconception. Stimulants will have the same effect on people with and without ADHD.
Aren't micro instances $15/month? (Plus EBS backing, unless you want to lose your DB on reboot.)

Regardless, it's added complexity that you can avoid with MySQL early in your application's lifecycle. Even if it's not much more expensive, you have more hardware to administer. Compare that to a Rails+MySQL stack, which you can run on a single box. (There are added benefits of replicas, sure, but they aren't easier to set up, per se, then just installing your stack on one machine when you're getting going.)
Suster on how to approach, pitch and powerpoint a VC
Great youtube video from Mark Suster of GRP partners
Quite so. AT&T restricts your ability to tether, because there are still unlimited data plans and they don't want people to fully take advantage of those plans.
Rent prices rose 12% in 2010
> Java learned a ton from previous language's mistakes

No. It only "learned" from C++'s mistakes, if even that, and threw out the baby with the bathwater (threw out templates but tamer generics as well, threw out non-nullable references, threw out context management — RAII or other)

> The fact that it's ubiquitous, not perfect, has traditionally been slow/judicious to adopt new features (good), and hasn't had a release in the better part of a decade (bad) , amplify the perception of it's flaws.

No, the fact that it's full of flaws that have been criticized from the start does that.

> bounds checking..

Java didn't fix bounds checking, they only fixed the memory unsafety of it, because Java is a GC'd language and therefore memory safe by default.
Played by humans, scored by nature, online game helps unravel secrets of RNA
“Where the heck were you when the page was blank?” - Paul Butterworth

Always such a bogus argument. This is what people say when they don't like your opinion but have no argument to counter, so they resort to a rhetorical that implies you have no authority on the issue. But the fact is you do not need to be a creator to criticize a creation legitimately. Sometimes specializing in just observation/criticism and not creation allows you more time to think things over from the standpoint of analysis, whereas creation demands that a large portion of your mental energy goes to the creation process.

I can't speak to the blog in question but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of a blog just for the sake of criticism. How it goes about that criticism and any unnecessary hostility is another issue.
I agree, but there's a big difference between honest, polite feedback and negativity, meanness, or just good old-fashioned flaming.

HN is pretty good in this respect. Reddit is still decent, though it can definitely lean towards mean. YouTube / app store reviews... forget any chance of respect.
'Read the Fucking HIG' (and 'Perversion Tracker', two years ago - http://www.perversiontracker.com) is interesting not so much for the content of the criticism, but because it's a reaction to the massive influx of new developers into a development community with its own distinct subculture.

Mac developers for the longest time engaged in 'artisanal software production' (for lack of a better term) with high production values - and while a few did well, many of them were just scraping by, doing it largely out of love for the platform. Then iOS came out, everybody learned Objective-C, money began to flow freely, and like homeowners in a town that's suddenly become touristy, they found themselves economically better off but a little ill-at-ease with the new character of their neighborhood.

Because of this, I'm more inclined to give this guy a bit of slack. The criticism isn't personal - it's just one person's way of mourning a world that no longer exists.
That's slippery slope logic. If the pricing is right at 1s, why pour money and talent into getting it right at 100ms?

What's the win to society to "mitigate" an "incentive"? Is the problem volatility? Other forces create huge volatility. Should we penalize anything that creates volatility? Maybe we should end all program trading?

Meanwhile, you're effectively vouching for a comment that models the markets as a closed system of people dividing up a single pot of money. Isn't it plain that such a model is wrongheaded?
New generation of unmanned spy planes being tested
This has been posted to HN at least 3 times before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191235

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833965
If the Hudson debacle was an isolated case, I'd agree with you. But Oracle have been alienating a lot of people in the open source community, and this incident isn't going to reassure anyone of Oracle's intentions.

And whilst the OpenJDK is open source, Oracle have made it pretty clear that they are not above using trademarks and patents to enforce their control over the JVM.
Or one of those slave collars from practically countless other pieces of SF. Not exactly a new idea ;)
One reason I can imagine that you wouldn't feel rich: because it feels unstable. If you're afraid you're going to lose it all at any moment, you just feel momentarily lucky.
Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome
Job Openings in U.S. Decrease for Third Time in Four Months
Okay, here are the basics. Sorry for the delayed response; I'm used to reddit with its handy orangered envelope....

For the past dozen years, I've taught in a very traditional way. I'd give a lecture on a programming concept, then assign several small programming assignments of increasing difficulty to practice the new concept. Once most of the class is fine with the new thing, move on. Rinse, repeat.

This year from day one I had all 130 assignments up on a class web page, each worth anywhere from 5 points to 400 points (most in the 30-100 range, though). I spent a couple of days teaching them a "hello world" Java program and how to compile with javac on the command-line. Then I said, "By the end of the first grading cycle (13 class days, each 90 minutes) you need 250 points to earn an "S rank" (100%) on your report card. It's 190 points for an A (90%), 120 points for a B, and 60 points for a C. Below 60 points is failing. Do any assignments you want in any order to earn the points, although doing them all in order is probably smartest. Go."

Students turn in the completed assignments into a digital dropbox, and I grade them daily, giving each assignment between 0 points and its max. If a kid makes less than about 95% of the possible points on any given assignment, I conference with him to explain what he's missing, and he'll redo it and turn it in for full credit.

I added in some LearnPythonTheHardWay-style assignments as the first couple of assignments of each new topic, so they can type in and mess with some already-working code that demonstrates the new thing.

I only give class-wide lectures when there are several students all stuck in the same place. Otherwise I just help the kids one-on-one or refer them to my slide decks or Google.

Points are cumulative, so for the current grading period, students need to have a TOTAL of 3300 points for an S-rank, 2600 points for an A, 1800 for a B and 1200 points to pass.

Some students have 4000+ points already and are on pace to complete two years' worth of curriculum in their first year (and sit for the Advanced Placement test a year early). Others will be fortunate to understand if statements, loops and functions by May.

Everybody's in a different place and it's fairly chaos in here all day, but every student is learning something and I love it.
Who's to say you're on the wrong side of that 1/8th? HFTs have downside risk too.
Adventures in Startup Networking: 5 Tips
Oh, I thought I should also mention that the class started at 0% and you could only reach the top grade if you got 100% on all quizzes and assignments, so it wasn't quite the hippie "everyone's a winner" deal some people might be thinking. Your current displayed grade was simply whatever you would get if you didn't do any more work until the end of the term. Also, there were many exams instead of just one big one at the end. I did do quite well in the course, so I wasn't just motivated to rush through the material, just motivated not to laze around instead of doing work.

Calculating the grades in that way just seems to make the interim grades seem more meaningful. When you have 35%, that means you have mastered 35% of the course material. Traditionally, if you have 73% at some point in the term... what does that mean in concrete terms? It doesn't mean you've mastered 73% of the course material, not even "so far", because chances are good that you've only received dinky assignments, labs, quizzes, etc., for a large portion of the material you're supposed to have learned so far. You won't be truly tested for mastery on chapter 1 until the midterm or sometimes even the final.
I think what rubs me the wrong way about this site is not the criticism. Criticism is ok. It's lack of proposed solutions.

One thing I really enjoy is when designers take a look at some established interface and try and design a better one and put it out there for comments and ideas. That is constructive criticism in my book.

example:http://www.flickr.com/photos/zachklein/4831151379/
Antenna configuration has more to do with the bands supported than the technology used. It does require a different chipset to support CDMA.

There are CDMA/GSM phones available by implementing both technologies (and Qualcomm does provide hybrid chips). The Droid 2 Global is the best example right now. It supports CDMA 850/1900; GSM 850/900/1800/1900; UMTS 850, 1900, 2100.
Can you point us toward data that backs up your point that "the scalability story is more or less false"? Seems like FUD.

There are several well-documented, major production deployments of MongoDB already, that seem to contradict your assertion:

* Etsy
* CERN
* BoxedIce (600MM+ documents)
* BuzzFeed (400MM+ datapoints/month)

That's just a few from http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments
Verizon Wireless iPhone 4: Hands On
> "But he's not adding any value for anyone the way he points it out."

It's a curious community we have. Pointing out problems or reporting visceral reaction is considered not constructive. Yet speculative re-designs to illustrate what the critic might have done differently are also considered not constructive.

It seems to me that when nothing short of actually competing against a product is considered useful or valid, the real argument is that criticism shouldn't exist and isn't useful in and of itself.
Well, thats true. And humans are loss-hating creatures, so we tend to worry about that side of things.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't care either way.
Adagio has opened 2 B&M locations nearby, http://www.adagio.com/stores/

I think their retail model is actually really interesting, and their blog is very transparent about the realities of the business: http://www.tearetailer.com/
I'm sorry for going OT and I know this isn't reddit but it has to be said because everyone knows that...

> Japanese girls are superior!
I wouldn't accuse someone of adding no value when clearly the site would not exist if readers did not find it valuable enough to keep coming back. Or if the author didn't find it valuable to keep contributing.

Maybe you don't find it valuable for you. But clearly you found it interesting enough to stop and make a comment when so many other articles on "more valuable" subjects sit uncommented.
> Since C# 1.1 they've only added features that are mostly orthogonal to the existing ones

Yes. Like delegates (1.0), anonymous delegates (2.0) and lambdas (3.0). Or `for`, `foreach` and List.ForEach. Orthogonalith, schmortogonality.

> Secondly, the features they've added aren't half-baked.

Though I disagree with your statement (C#'s properties are crummy, its Nullables are half-assed if even that, the collections are a mess, the enumeration suck goats, arrays are covariant, implicit conversions are terrible ideas, extension methods are a half-assing of open classes, tuples are painfully awful, out parameters everywhere is a gigantic joke, and I'm not even actually looking for these things), I didn't state they were half-baked. Me thinks the lady protests too much.

> Sure there's room for improvement, but they behave as you expect them to

Which is irrelevant to the point and completely uninteresting.

> IMHO language designers should learn from its evolution, because it was a good one.

There was nothing good about it. Trying to make a small but crappy language into a good language by accretion is not "good evolution".

edit: let's make this clear: I understand the constraints of the C# team (at least some of them) and I understand they weren't (and aren't) out to create a good language, let alone a revolutionary one. Doesn't mean I have to agree with that.
December-January. Most of my interns have come from out of town (although moving to Austin for a summer is hardly a hardship). Failures definitely count as experience, although obviously you don't want to spin anything as a failure.
Entertainment has value.

Not all time needs to be spent on productive endeavors. And maybe he just might increase the quality of these apps by shaming them into compliance. The devs might even read the HIG!
Win customers and improve products with HTML prototypes
Why HTML prototypes can improve customer development and lead to better products. Includes a demo HTML prototype with some good pointers for improving workflow.
It's more than economically dubious, it's outright false. If everyone else is making less than you, then whenever you buy anything whose cost is mostly personal service, it'll be cheap in real terms (i.e. the amount of time you have to work to buy one hour of someone else's labour).

Conversely, if other people earn more money than you, you're going to have to work longer to pay for someone else's time.
The word paper is derived from "papyrus", Egyptian invention - along with ink. Chinese invented more practical process though, although modern way of manufacturing paper is different.

Compass, yes, although I don't keep one in my office (nor gunpowder for that matter).

None of the clothes I wear were invented in Asia.
Thanks for screwing up my tea. Can't I just drink it to enjoy it? Now, I have high expectations from my tea which I am sure will not be met. Thanks a lot.

PS: I drink probably 3 cups a day. I am still not a genius and I get sleepy by mid-day.
Access the many Java libraries available, it's the only Ruby interpretor with true threading (no GIL), integrates in the Java server ecosystem ( say with servlets via java-rack etc), upstream IT management approval (it's enterprise).