skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It can't work without an investment of $10B or larger if you want to make even a small dent in the wireless industry, due to spectrum rights (in the USA). This type of money is not VC money but more private equity firms.

MVNOs don't work because the wireless carriers hold all the cards and they don't let you in on any profits. Most successful MVNOs are owned by the major carriers for a reason. If you think retail wireless data prices are high try looking at what wholesale wireless data costs are, you can't operate a successful business with those prices. AT&T won't even sell MVNOs data, it's voice&text only. Even if you become successful carriers can shut you down whenever they want. Having been down the startup MVNO road I have learned my lessons, unless the government forces competitive wholesale pricing the best you can do is build a customer base and than sell it all back to your carrier like what Boost & Virgin did. MVNO is possible with VC funding but the success rate will be even worse than the current social apps, and there is no big payday.

WiFi networks sound great but can't work because the range isn't there, even in highly populated areas you will run into interference which will bring data speeds due to every slow speeds. There is a reason Google WiFi didn't work even in Mountain View.

The cheapest method is probably "buying" exclusive rights (franchise rights) to be the local phone or cable company, like the large telcos do one at time and building a fiber network. In most cities ATT/Verizon/Comcast/etc... will just outbid you. Than you have to convince (buy/lobby) city council members and/or mayor. To do a decent sized city you are looking at tens of millions in bootstrap mode.

If anyone out there thinks they can get VC invest in the 7 figures or higher for a MVNO or local landline/cable company project. Feel free to get in touch with me I am always interested in an adventure.
I buy shoes and clothing from Zappos all the time, because of their very lenient return policies. If I'm not sure what size or style to get, I'll just buy a few different combinations, try them on in the privacy of my apartment, and then return the ones that I don't like or that don't fit. It's a great system, and Zappos seems to even encourage this behavior.
Timelapse showing one of the biggest aurora borealis phenomenon in recent years
Yeah. I think that is the challenge. A good way to get around the AJAX problem is to see if a site has an RSS feed and use that to extract content. I wish sites had a url for bots built in so you didnt have to do all this fancy stuff to extract the content.
AOL, Meet Riak
The best part of this article, for me, was the link to letscrate.com.
I haven't used the number porting feature, but I'm using everything else and have no complaints about it. I even got it to replace the features of my android (e.g. replace the default voicemail app with google voice's voicemail).
Scala - with Lift or Play
You raise two good points.

As for the cost, they are cheaper but I don't necessarily see that as being structural. What I mean is that that there is that as capabilities expand, so will what producers can do with that platform. The cost will go up with this. This will, in part, be mitigated by increasing market size.

Or possibly publishers will finally learn that if games are cheap people will buy more of them, a lesson that has been consistently proven true from Steam price cuts (where selling a game for $5 made more than the original IIRC).

The second good point you make, which I missed, is the multi-user aspect of games like Madden. This is mainly because I've never been this way inclined. I haven't been much of a console gamer at all really. I'm more of a PC gamer that likes turn-based strategy games.

But I have bought and played a plethora of "casual" games on my iPad (and now iPad 2).

I see tablets as being fundamentally personal devices, not really something you play a game on with multiple people (unless they each have their own).

Still I see a huge potential market for games like Madden where each person has their own tablet as a control.

What about where the Apple TV (a future iteration) plays one view and each player has their own control so it looks like a real football game?
What will Y Combinator look like in three years?
The Rude Awakening for iOS Devs
I guess Microsoft still doesn't know this, a big reason for Bing's growth in market share is a $100 million ad campaign. Much of that ad spend, ironically, is on Google.
I didn't used both but gave try to bespin when it appeared (it evolved to cloud9 as i know) and liked. it's an advantage to have a universal gui, to not ignore users of other platforms.

btw, i put some effort to build an online ide 4 years ago. i stopped maintaining it because my dream tool was evolved to firebug lite. anyway, my died ide can be seen at vimeo.com/azer for some web nostalgia
Here's a "family tree" that includes AT&T and the other telecoms. It's from 2008, so it'll have to be updated with the latest mergers:

http://www.neatorama.com/family-tree-of-telecommunication/
Degree mills are illegal in some countries and some U.S. states. In some states it's illegal to use a degree from a diploma mill to gain employment.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma_mills_in_the_United_Sta...
It simplifies a lot:

It seems to imply that Bell Atlantic et all merged to become Verizon around 2000.

Bell Atlantic merged with NYNEX in 1997.

In 1999 Vodafone merged with Airtouch to become Vodafone Airtouch in the US.

Vodafone-Airtouch in that same year went after PrimeCo and merged with it.

Verizon Communications is actually the result of the Bell Atlantic and GTE merger of 2000 (signed 1998).

GTE was not a Bell. Neither was Contel which was acquired by GTE in 1991 (so they should both be on the same level).

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture signed in 1999 and begun real operations 2000 between then Bell Mobile. and Vodafone-Airtouch-Primeco.

Finally in 2005, Verizon Wireless bought MCI.

-----

Looking back on things, the chart really only shows named succession. It doesn't attempt at all to do what you're expect---place companies on a family tree.
HTML5 Boilerplate - A rock-solid default template for HTML5
Entrepreneurship is all about the pursuit of a vision - one that manifests as you lead the way.

Ultimately, a full time commitment is required. You have a job right now. So the immediate challenge is to transition - from the job - to full time on this.

Capital can be your bridge to a full time commitment. In this case, you would use it to replace income previously received from that job. To fund your efforts, while you build something.

This capital must come from somewhere. It could be from your savings account. A friend or family member. It could come from bank in the form of a loan. Perhaps an investor. Or a combination all of above.

Truly, this challenge is your first test of business. Your performance will be a measure of entrepreneurial ability.

Goodluck.
Here in France, we have many African people from our former colonies studying here, and many staying too, so I guess we are used to it.
Speaking about skin color, there are more "brown" people than "black" people, because Magreb is more represented than sub-saharian countries.
Hi PonyGumbo

> Contract

I completely agree. DO have a document outlining cost, payment, timeline, and what you charge per-hour for support / over-time work.

Don't overthink it and write out a detailed contract before you even have customer #1.

> Website

I've never put up a website for my work / business, and never had a client ask. What purpose would the site have? I don't think it would be cost/time-effective in terms of lead generation, so it would just be a listing of the skills I have and examples of other work.

I'd rather spend the 1/10/100 hours I'll spend on the site meeting with potential customers and learning about their problems.

Maybe it's the different audiences. I'm working with small business owners on marketing campaigns. You or the submitter my be working with a different audiences who places a lot of value on a website. Me? I think I'd spend 50 hours 'optimizing' it and never get a lead, so I nixed the site and just talked to customers instead.
>So I'm an old fat ugly-looking guy. According to you, I should be looking for other folks like me who made it? This will somehow be inspirational?

Is this question really rhetorical?

I would say look at all of the discussions here and elsewhere about older Entrepreneurs being under represented and the myriad reasons why. I think that if the only successful role models were under 25, many others would find that quite discouraging.... whether they would let that dissuade them is another question.
I am worried about the future of Eclipse.
The ultimate superpower of IT-consultants is the power to make people forget to ask the question "why?".
Letters to our Abuse Desk
PriceKnock: Got Some Lean In Our Cup (Lean Challenge)
Sprint Embraces Google Voice
That would certainly be helpful. Gilt.com does a thing where they tell you what size the model is wearing and then give you the models measurements. One step further that I would like to see is actual measurements of the clothing. For example I tend to need shirts that are fairly long in the torso. Sometimes tall sizes work, sometimes the standard sizes are fine. Since no length measurement is usually provided the only way for me to know is to try it on. Your never going to eliminate all returns, but I think there could be a big improvement by providing some measurements beyond what is typically available (waist, chest, neck, etc.).
Which I believe is a large portion of the Wii market, correct? I wonder how Nintendo are reacting to this.
HTML5 Boilerplate 1.0 Released
The pricing you were quoted depends on what requirements you gave and whom you contacted. It can vary greatly.
http://www.google.com/chrome
Twitter, telegram and e-mail: Famous first lines
NASA wants revolutionary radiation shielding technology
I know this is heresy around here, but have you looked at F#? It's functional, has type inferencing, even in the dev environment, straight forward parallel versions of functions (pmap vs map), async IO, amazing dev tools, a REPL inside of Visual Studio, access to all of the .NET libraries. And, chances are, it's going to be around for a while.

You're absolutely on the right track. As startups struggle to hire, new startups should be looking to off loading more and more of their work to more productive programming languages.
You don't have to launch a probe to do that. They just have to go "@nasa mind if we borrow some video from you guys?"

Very misleading title.
You raise good points.

In particular, it cannot be overstated how important a good return policy is. It's also bizarre how many companies get it wrong.

Example: I bought some stuff from Bed, Bath and Beyond a month or two ago. I realized I'd gotten the wrong thing. By this time I'd misplaced the receipt. I was expecting a hassle when I went back to the store. I walk up to the service counter and ask what the return policy is. The women behind the counter says they have a no hassle return policy.

She said she could give me store credit no problem or, if I preferred, she could look up the receipt on the system with my credit card. If she could find it, she'd give me a refund instead. She did in fact find it. I didn't have to produce any annoying pieces of paper nor justify why I was returning the item.

After that incident I went and spent another $150 in comfort knowing that if what I bought didn't work out I could return it.

So my advice for anyone dealing with physical goods: make it as easy as possible to return goods and customers will spend more. Make them love your store/website/whatever.
pg's personal time may face a law of diminishing returns, but the alumni network will scale up in a comparative way. At least, in the 3 year timeframe discussed here.
Designer Sarees,Designer Bridal Saree,Online Designer Sarees,
What Man Understands That He Is Dying Daily? (This Is Your Life)
Hi, I work for Mozilla. Firefox 4 will be released tomorrow, March 22 (Tuesday).

But you don't need to wait to download it - if you are running Firefox 4.0rc2, then you are running the exact bits that we plan to ship as 4.0 final. Download the RC from http://firefox.com/rc
Potential market for people willing to shell over $40 for a game?

Potential market for people willing to try on a whim that bird game the whole office has been talking about?

Serious gamers will probably always stick with the most advanced gameplay and technology. But there is a _huge_ market for people who have a few minutes to kill on trips, during commute, in front of the tv etc. As games are increasingly made with cognitive reward cycles in mind, one could argue, that the percentage of people who never play will shrink ever more.
> What about where the Apple TV (a future iteration) plays one view and each player has their own control so it looks like a real football game?

The other weekend I sat down and looking into a very similar question. My detailed "report" can be found here:

https://github.com/icefox/tablet_tv_games

Summary: There might be some killer idea out there, but it seemed you could always do better without the TV. Also that in person (like football) multiplayer or coop tablet games are an untapped market.
Hottest IT jobs for 2011: Project management, security, network admin
What is the deadline?
Nope. They don't. I am an iPhone user but bought a Nexus one to develop on and put a sim card from an old dumb phone into it after disabling the data option on the phone. AT&T immediately recognized the smartphone and automatically added the data plan to my bill. When I called them they said I cannot even use my iPhone sim with the Nexus one as they come under two different data plans even though its costs the same freaking amount of money.
Why not have the actual (and more useful) link:

http://discover.twitter.com/
When you put it that way, The Social Network seems a lot like Spider-Man with computers.
I buy shoes from zappos. And yes, I only buy brands that I know are going to fit me well. Initially, I bought my first pair of sneakers because there was 1 year money back guarantee with total reimbursement (including delivery from and to zappos).

The delivery is fast. The prices are ok. So far I have never returned my shoes. They all fit perfectly and customer service is great!
The build script is an awesome addition to an already great tool. Keep up the great work.
What about peer pressure? I'm not black, but I went to a public high school, fairly diverse, let's say 15%/20%/10%/55% black/asian/latino/white. My experience with black classmates was that in individual classes they were pretty typical in the mix of other students, reasonably friendly and participatory in class, etc. But then out in the hallways it was a whole different story. It just was not cool to be studious in any way. I saw black kids get made fun of by their peers just for carrying books. Kids who I was very friendly with in class would not even look at me in the commons, I'm presuming because associating with a white nerd would be social suicide.
If both of the "accreditation organizations" were in fact set up by the scammers behind Lorenz, I'm pretty sure that's clear-cut fraud. Someone just needs to subpoena the domain proxy service.
The project went 1.0 today. Highlights:

* A custom builder to customize your download

* An Ant Build Script that handles all the optimization to make YSlow and PageSpeed happy.

* Rich documentation: http://html5boilerplate.com/docs

* Lots of videos (2 new) on Getting Started and familiarizing with the Build Script

* Default webserver configurations optimized for perf for: Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, Google App Engine, IIS, NodeJS

* Many small tweaks (read the source comments and full changelog)

* A humans.txt

* All that and we even reduced the overall published size of the boilerplate.
The Great Migration, the Winter of 2011
Is the magic back or just more of the same? iPad 2: The Detailed Review
"allowing" means that .ubuntu may exist in addition to ubuntu.tld

.ubuntu is a TLD itself (or it could be thought of as having an empty tld)
May I ask why F# is considered heresy?
What's wrong with a little cross-promotion? Long-standing businesses do it too.
We need to elect politicians like Ron Paul

Ran Paul has a pretty safe seat in the house. It is not practical to expect Americans to elect him president. I believe the OP asked for practical advice.
How to feed 9 billion people: the future of food and farming
You'll have to restrict your servers to run Windows. That's something not everyone wants to do.
Microsoft is now second biggest video site in US
Create Modern Web Sites Using HTML5 and CSS3
> We still have Verizon and Sprint.

Not if you're on GSM. Not everyone wants to consider investing in SIM-less devices that only work in the US.
Yeah, I've diddled around with it and it's great. Would love to see it hooked up into more services though.
Them nokia 6500 Lake
Not everyone wants to use the .NET ecosystem for any number of reasons. When doing purely windows development, it is my first choice, but if I want to do cross platform or web development even with Mono out there the appeal just lacks to me.

I will agree though that F# is a beautiful language, and am hoping on getting everyone else at work on board so we can start using it more for our development.
please change the name.
ImpromptuDo is just hard to read or spell :(
Google's Y Combinator-like initiative in South Africa
Will they extend it?
Once it hits RC stage, version bumps are in the filename only.
Aren't most people Sunday gamers? That's a lot of consoles, if true.
Can someone show/tell me what I, an average person, can do?

Get personally involved with your representatives and senators. Write paper letters, call, and show up in person.
Be friendly and talk with other voters at the events you show up to. Educate them on this issue. Abandon party affiliation, work with both Democrats and Republicans.
The Google docs team stopped to use contentEditable and developed instead a new "editing surface and layout engine" in Javascript. http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-different-about...

I don't have an iPad(yet), but I tried a very basic page you can get at http://beebole.com/brol/contentEditable.html
Tap the blue screen and start to type. On an android phone it works ok.
What Gymnastics Taught Me About Acquiring and Mastering Skills
feel free to reuse the texts in any way you want. backlink would be nice, though not necessary.
Not "haz"?
Got mine in a full day early. Pumped.
Except that fit is often dependent on style. I have clothes in the same category but different styles from the same retailer where I need different sizes; heck, occasionally I've ended up having to compare different copies of the same garment in the same size, because copy variation made a worthwhile difference to fit. OK, maybe I'm a picky guy with my wardrobe ;-)

Shoes, speaking personally, would be a total non-starter online. I seem to have narrower heels than many; I'll routinely find myself searching styles to find the ones that fit me properly there rather than slipping, even if they're right elsewhere. I'm sure some others will be a little wide acrosss the toes and need just the right level of bulging across the front, or a different arch height that makes positioning of the insole's mound under the bridge or the tongue important for their comfort.

tl;dr: I can't always just buy a certain size and know that will be right. If your business model is dependent on that being possible, it won't work for me and I doubt I'm unique.
It would go a long way towards making life easier if we got desalination technology available and cheaper. I seem to remember an article I read saying that the farms in western africa were affecting the amount of water in the animal preserves.
Because it means you're (probably) going to be running Windows on your servers, which isn't cheap.
You're not far off the mark. I recently read that some $28 billion worth of merchandise is returned every year due to poor fit. Though I have no idea what percentage of the total expenditure that is, judging by the effect it has on the major driving forces of fashion (namely, none), it must be pretty small. About 4-5 years ago, a company in California did conduct some research into the sizing of women's clothing, and some of that has led to changes trickling into what's being offered on the shelf. But the research was conducted only on women, and the company doing the research even admitted that their population sample was insufficient. From what I can tell, all of the basic sloper patterns that ready to wear garments are built from get their standard sizing from... nowhere. Or a mysterious table of measurements dating back to the 1940s. Take your pick.

Compound this with the total lack of quality control in garment manufacture and you begin to see why shopping is such an ordeal. The same brand and fit (model?) of pants from Dockers, Levis or the Gap will fit you differently, depending on the color of the fabric. Typically, the darker the color of the garment, the more snug the fit. Sounds ridiculous, right? Lighter fabrics tend to relax out more. It's all about the fabric content. Raise your hand if you've ever washed something and had it either get smaller or bigger, or become completely misshapen. Quality control is done on the first hundred or so garments that come out of the factory. After that, it's a free-for-all.

People don't know what suits them because there is a very real learning curve to the whole process of getting yourself dressed. This is why most women shop and dress in groups. Institutional knowledge is hugely valuable. So is a cloth tape measure.

I watch What Not To Wear. They make it look easy. Then they make it look hard (the "victim" almost always cries). Because drama sells. But behind the scenes is an entire staff of people who follow fashion trends, understand a great deal about ready to wear garments and know where to go and what it costs. That's a full time job. Nobody has that kind of time, and it's a barrier to entry.

Not caring about what kind of statement our clothes make is a learned behavior. The fashion industry does not care about the happiness of the customer. If you don't believe me, find a girl who won't slap you for it and ask her about her bra. So if they don't care, why should we?
I think where this could shine is dialing up to 11 the recommendation system. I'd happily pay $5 or $10 for a human "fashion advisor" to actually put together a style for me, based on a photo of myself, plus some description of the occasion that I'm going to be attending.

I tend to grow my hair longer now than I used to, just so I can go to my hairdresser and say "You're the professional, you choose." Otherwise its way too easy to get stuck in a rut, and to be honest, the styles that GQ and Esquire show you usually require:

a) a bunch of money

b) a bunch of confidence that you look awesome and not a douche

c) a slender figure

Most guys aren't any of these things, so they'll buy a slightly too baggy T-shirt and a pair of jeans and call it a day. There could be much more.
I've been wanting (to build) this for a while. I have lots of different clothes, but usually stick to the same set of outfits.

Whenever I try something new, I have trouble knowing if it "goes well together" without some sort of outside confirmation. I've learned some basic tenets of what things "go with" other things, but I still don't branch out of that because of this problem.

Populating your library would take some effort, but it would be worth it.

Now couple this with another app/function that inventories your kitchen and lets you know what you can make for dinner and you've got a full blown bachelorator app.
This maybe true, but only in certain markets. I don't see many parents being convinced to part with the $ for an iPad for presents when a DS or PSP type item is around.

Though the games are indeed more expensive the up-front cost is a major player in decision making for leisure time purchasing.