skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They don't, nor do they have to. In fact, they generally don't have any idea of what to expect from a simpler computer, other than "it's not frustrating".

For those of us that are computer literate, it's hard to imagine that even basic abstract concepts like email are completely foreign to the majority of the population. I would guess that over half of people don't know how to answer the question, "what do you use for a web browser?".

So you have a blank slate, a free pass to design anything you can imagine. If you can deliver it to these people, and if they don't find it intimidating, or hard to learn, or unpredictable, then they'll like it.
perhaps they mean in terms of UI design, not software design?

I saw in one of Ian Piumarta's talks that OSX has considerably more lines of code than vista. Kinda surprises me, kinda doesn't.
I'm not too thrilled about this having been posted to Reddit either, but fortunately so far not very many Redditors have bothered to post a comment.
Dev Team Jailbreaks 3G iPhone
The girl who is waiting until well into her thirties might find it impossible to get pregnant, or may have a child with Down Syndrome.
That's the thing with open source... you don't have experts to fix the deficiencies because usually big companies gobble them up with high salaries. Saying "it's your fault for not fixing it" only applies to experts in the field, and 99% of people here are not experts in the fields to which you refer.

This is why commercial software ends up with such great user experiences compared to open source software.
Well, "fiber" is just the API's name for a user thread. Calling it a "marketing term" seems unfair -- it is just a piece of technical jargon.
4chan is the internet's septic tank.
Startup Job Site Gets Backing From Y Combinator, Relaunches As Startuply
Well thanks for disagreeing "passionately", seems like you have evidence that I don't have. I can only hope for you that your conclusions match your reality and that you will therefore have a happy life with no bad surprises.
Using Facebook’s Thrift with Python and HBase
Congrats to the Startuply team on launch and TC!
The App Engine is just that - a tool to build apps, not startups. Not even programs. Just apps.

Look for a startup engine.
No, it isn't. You can just decide to use something else. There's zero buy-in unless the device is already the closest thing to what you want. When it isn't, the open source community supporting that device has a major problem.
Isn't a twist on a worthy, original idea also a worthy, original idea?
OpenMoko was founded by a Taiwanese company and initial development efforts were handled by four people.

| If something doesn't work right in OpenMoko, it's your fault for not fixing it.

Ah, of course. Well, since I am responsible for all of OpenMoko's various problems, I am going to make the executive decision that it is beyond my ability to fix it, and abandon the project altogether.

Your attitude may be correct, but it is not helpful.

There's no reason to expect that someone who is knowledgeable in human interface design, or graphic design, or workflow, should also be capable of patching a system themselves, let alone dealing with the process of submitting patches.

Whether you like it or not, criticism does drive development in user interface in open source projects. The programmers build something, users say, "this sucks" -- but the really helpful users say, "this sucks because ..." -- and then while a handful of people (like you) tell those users to get bent, other programmers go out and fix what the users are complaining about.
Oh, for sure, and to be fair, my response was not meant to be a rigorous logical statement, since it was in response to a jest about Sandman comics :-) However, I felt there was some truth to it so I defended it anyway.

I'm quite comfortable with the idea (original or not) that opposing concepts can both be true simultaneously. Your opposite generalisation does sound very interesting too. I'm going to write it down in my little idea notebook for further thought some day :-) Thanks!

(Thinking about it now, putting both these statements together appears like it could well need to a very interesting Borges-like story)
Well actually one of the reasons for the slowness in the video (disclaimer : dont own the phone, basing slowness on video) is because its processor is very slow. Its using a 400MHz ARM9 vs lets say 400MHz ARM11 on Nokia N95 or what is rumored to be 600MHz ARM11 in iPhone.

edit : That should mean that the N95 has at least twice as powerful processor as freerunner and the iphone maybe even 3x faster processor. IMO the processor chosen was just plain wrong given the goal of producing a smartphone. They should have chosen a faster SoC and forgone the GPS and accelerometers.
I don't see how that works. If the wire came out of the back it would be in the way of my wrist.

I don't see how it would have anything to do with the home keys.

Edit: Wait. Do you put the mouse in front of the keyboard? I put mine to the side. I think most people put it to the side.
Successful open source projects tend to be very iterative. First version kinda sucks, second version still sucks but there's been some important changes, third version sucks a little less; some number of iterations later, hopefully, the project starts to become competitive with commercial offerings.

Give it time. The scrolling and the keyboard will get fixed.

...One thing I thought was especially strange about the keyboard was the arrow keys (from the "More OpenMoko Train Wrecking" video, showing off the Qtopia interface). If you can interact directly with the screen, then I can't think of any reason to have arrow keys on the keyboard.
Just put the offer on ycombinator's - or another reputable entity's - web site for everyone to see. However the "call me" part is half joking; while I have ideas to tackle some of those problems, especially the economic foundations of them, they are not amenable to funding by ycombinator or similar entities. The smaller problems being purely practical such as not being - or wanting to be - in that funny country of yours over there, the larger ones being that it's a contradiction in terms to use an old economic model (invenstments, corporate structures, sell-outs) to create a new economic model. Look at the file-sharing example quoted: A P2P network technology, even one that created economic benefits for its participants, such as musicians and listeners, would never get VC funding since there's no central entity to siphon the profits off.
Truer words were never spoken.

I agree with the sites policy: ban child porn...and just about nothing else. Maybe I'm being closed-minded about child pornography, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. At any rate, vaksel, you're totally right. May I add that freedom is not about being able to say what others want you to say, but being able to say what they don't want you to say. (except for "fire!" in a crowded theater and the like")
What do you mean by "scientific"? It seems like you mean "propositional".

"Ice cream is nice" is not nonsensical. It falls into a category of utterances that actually say something about the speaker rather than the thing indicated. "Nice" is shorthand for "deemed by the speaker to be of high value". It can definitely be true or false. However, due to the clever formulation, if I disagree with you, and say "Ice cream is not nice," I'm not really disagreeing with you, but rather stating something about myself.

That's not to say that there's no such thing as nonsense statements. But, to the extent that you're really doing philosophy and not just making word salad, philosophy has no place for nonsense.
Answer: Not much.
I don't see how. I presume mice only register changes in position, and not changes in orientation. That's all you can measure with a ball so I presume that's all that is measured with optical mice. So if you were for instance to hold the top of the mouse in place and rotate the rest of the mouse around that point, you would definitely register a change in position with the optical sensor, and I don't know how you would do this in software. So the mouse won't ever behave exactly like it would if the sensor were at the front.
See, even the idea that original ideas are not original is not original. If only Borges was around to help guide us, we'd probably found that Nietzsche got this idea, in slightly different form, from an 18th century academician, who in turn was able to lift it from the writings of a Russian monk, who in turn found it in a little-known greek play.

From André Maurois' preface to Borges' Labyrinths (about Borges):

His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: 'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.' Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): 'We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.' But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): 'God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'
I think it's okay to be disgusted by what spoken of somewhere, and aware of the harm it can potentially cause, yet guard fiercely the ability to say it.

I don't think freedom of speech should be axiomatic, though. Firstly, I take a realist stance -- it isn't treated that way by the world, there are some things you could say that would make your life much worse. Second, it seems that freedom of speech is a good heuristic due to how awful the alternative is: forcibly inflicting silence on people. But there are many degrees between speech and glorified, internationally accessible scum, and that's often what ends up on the internet -- I'm not sure it deserves much more glorification.
Looks great. One thing: on the main site, when I search for "boston" and then "cambridge", I get completely different results, which is a little odd.
you can't call a philosophy wrong

Sure you can. Philosophers do it all the time.
Ask YC: Startup option grants ranges in SV?
Hi All,
I was wondering if anyone knew the current option grants ranges in SV?
Talk on org mode for emacs - outliner, gtd system
"... I'm flagging all of the stories that turn out to be locked behind a paid subscription wall. ..."

I don't think this is locked I just clicked on the link and can still get access to the full article. Is NYT locking by location? What is your 1020 and timezone, au GMT+10.
Django-graphs: beautiful, extensible, and fast graph rendering library
Yeah. Most people I know who were using it heavily last summer (including myself) only log on when they receive a personal message now - and they don't even know about the Beacon flop/privacy disaster. Facebook apps are for the most part spam.

I don't think they're going bankrupt yet, for sure - but they're a looong way down from that $15b valuation some months ago.
Why No Outrage?
You're using the word "philosophy" in it's everyday sense. My life philosophy might be to take risks, live it to the fullest, and enjoy ice cream, because ice cream is nice. Those are extra-scientific statements.

Philosophy, the discipline taught in academic departments, is something else entirely. It's a bit ironic that you contrasted philosophy to "better-defined and more rigorous logic", because the formal study logic is a sub-discipline of philosophy. At least at my college, if you're a math major and want to learn about logic, you take a course listed in the Philosophy department.

Now, sometimes philosophy does rest on premises which are either extra-scientific or which should be scientifically testable but are not proven rigorously by a philosopher. For example, I could make an argument about whether or not free will is compatible with determinism. In doing so I might make some assumptions about "free will" and the nature of mind which probably should be sanity-checked by a neuroscientist sometime down the road. But those are just problems with my assumptions: whether or not my argument is good Philosophy depends on how well I make the argument, in other words whether it is valid, in the technical sense of the term. Hagel and other Continental Philosophers get a bad rap for being light on rigor, and we can have a whole separate debate about that, but to say that philosophy consists of quasi-true statements that can't be logically evaluated is just insane.

(I'd be particularly interested in which of Hegel's arguments you thought were "nonsensical" or "along the lines of ice cream is nice"! Although I admit I only have any familiarity with Philosophy of Right, anything I know about his other works is secondhand)
4chan more closely approximates the male mind than anything else.
I am sexist, racist, and callous, and if you claim not to be I don't believe you.
Ubuntu on the Asus Eee 701 | My Philly Network
at the cost of being even more expensive than what it is now, not to mention everything else that goes into making said n95 and iPhone smaller and sexier. uhhhh...no thanks :)
Win95 Lead Architect is a Mac Convert, Launches first iPhone app
Agreed. There are very active communities of philosophers that work on non-fraud 19th century thinkers; Leiter's blog is probably the center of philosophy on the web, and he's a Nietzsche expert. Anyway, it seems like criticism of "logic-chopping" always evaluates to "why do these philosophers' papers make me think so hard instead of just spouting the politicized nonsense that I expect from 'intellectuals'?"
When Apple implemented Exchange support for the iPhone, you will have noticed that they introduced at the same time another way of getting push email to the iPhone - they explicitly created an escape route if people want to leave Windows. Apple will ot fall into the trap of depending on Microsoft again in a hurry.

As for the various office productivity packages - sure, they've been around for quite some time now without really making much of an impact, but things starting to change. Firstly, Microsoft dropped the ball on the Mac platform by dropping VBA support for the Mac. If you want to use VBA on the Mac now, the best option is OpenOffice, not MS Office.

Secondly, those packages have been steadily improving - for me, it's only really been in the last year or so that OOO has got to the point that it could be considered a serious competitor to MS. You have surely noticed the massive discounts that MS has had to give for Office to keep it installed in large organisations recently - there have been plenty of examples in the press.
Interesting, but too bad that you can't even browse the items without signing up. Hopefully that is only because it is still beta (I didn't sign up).
Pwnage jailbreak tool for iPhone OS 2.0 released
That is why I said they should have dropped GPS and accelerometers.
I agree, go with slicehost.
I wonder for how long the demand for simple browsers will exist. Today we still have old people and such who are afraid of computers. But they might go away and all the young ones that come after them might not have their problems.

Also, I wonder about the browsers that come with game consoles like the Wii, are they any good? They might be easier to use than full-fledged computers?
As for my personal projects, see the answer to rms below.

As for anyone else's projects, even though they promise to put you in front of the right people eventually, you have to have some small-time prototype to show before they put you through to the bigwigs. Whether you use the $15,000 offered to create that prototype or already have one doesn't matter I guess, however what does matter is that for improvements in ERP/CRM/WebOS/somebigtech there aren't any small prototypes that could represent the idea's viability better than a PowerPoint presentation already does.

So how about judging the idea just by its presentation itself? The other problem is that PG/RTM/TB aren't exactly industry veterans themselves. Any Dilbert in the country has a better clue of how things work in, say, the corporate world than a painter and a university prof. They wouldn't recognize a better CRM solution if they sat on it, and neither, I am assuming, have friends in the right places that they could consult on the matter.
So seems like inventors would be better off beating down the door to the real guys.
How can you not have the time? Make the time... They give you some money, so it is not like you'd go completely bankrupt.

Time = Money...
I sincerely look forward to your futuristic improved economic system, capitalism is lacking in many important areas.
I don't want a nag screen on my MP3 player.
Ask YC: Online Payment Solutions
Hi Guys, I am in the planning/feasibility stages of a startup;
One of my stumbling blocks is managing online payments.

Specifically, i am creating a community where users exchange goods, and the money accrues to their account on our site. They can add money to their online account via credit card, and later, they can transfer their money to out of our site to their bank account.

So, in essence, they will have a 'virtual account' on our site, and they can add to this account and withdraw money to their real bank accounts.

My question is if anyone has any suggestions on how to handle this kind of payment system?
I have researched PayPal and a few similar services. The transfer fees seem expensive, and I estimate that these fees will quickly rise to cut the margins with the many small transfers expected (<US$15).
With all the ventriliquists that I have seen that's exactly the sort of thing their sock puppets do.
I fear what we may have just unleashed on our simple news site.
Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage
It doesn't matter. Cause if they dropped GPS and accelerometers but upgraded other components, the price would have been high but you'd be missing out on two pretty useful/important features. Don't drop it, and it's still expensive.
ok it is kind of a funny meme but nickb is really not pg.
"It's like that drive to improve the world just doesn't exist in some cultures. It's not the land, american indians had the resources to do it if they wanted. But they didn't. Almost no cultures did, except Europe."

Your thesis that non-European cultures had no drive to "improve the world" because they're not dominant today just does not make sense. Many Native American societies were quite advanced technologically. The fact that imperialistic Europeans defeated them with a combination of disease and a technological achievement borrowed from the Chinese (gun powder) in no we speaks of their ability to improve their own lives with technology.

Your question is valid, and I don't think there there's one answer. From my experience in the developing world it's usually some combination of civil strife and poor communication that impedes basic innovation. Constant political and economic instability makes it difficult for people in many of these societies to think about anything beyond the very basics.

My point is, that while valid, your question is unimportant. The fact is these issues exist, and Amy Smith is one person doing something about it. It quite easy to masturbate over complex, over-generalized questions with limited information, but much harder to get off your ass and make a real difference. Those who do should be applauded.
The problem with that attitude is that the only customers that would be interested in the freerunner are the ones that know enough to fix the problems. It takes little effort for anyone to go "omg the UI sucks compared to the iPhone's!", it takes a lot more to actually fix all the UI problems, nevermind all the other issues.

And honestly, let's think about the other open source projects out there right now, shall we? The FSF loves pointing out the community behind freerunner is also behind Linux..yeah, when has that ever been a flawless experience for anyone with an excellent UI to match? Never. Because to the users and the hackers and the developers, it doesn't matter that much. When you're comfortable installing the likes of arch or gentoo, the command line is your friend and it all makes sense and you know how to fix issues. If you've only spent your entire life using Windows and you don't know how to do much, it's unusable. I have tried SO many times to get some people to switch to newbie-friendly distros like Ubuntu because I was sick of maintaining their Windows machines, and it's still impossible for a lot of them. The people who care about the freerunner wouldn't care so much about the major gripes most users would have about the phone. That is why this will never stop being an extremely niche product.

My two cents: Despite the feeling that I probably do have the know-how to fix some problems if I got a freerunner, I wouldn't buy a freerunner because I want a phone that just works with everything that I want with a minimal amount of hassle. Yay open source..I use Linux, but my main desktop will be OS X for convenience because Linux will never be able to match that. Just like how I got an iPhone..not because the ads told me they were cool..but because the phone just works and has everything I want. And in the very rare occasion I don't, and someone else hasn't come to the rescue, I could just open Xcode and hack something together. The freerunner can't even come close to it even if I hacked together a phone by myself with everything I want in it. I'm paying the price for convenience? Sure. But how much more time would I be paying in if I had a freerunner I could hack, but where nothing worked the way I wanted and it had no hardware I was interested in? Too much, especially some stuff that's totally out of my control and/or ability.

Oh yeah, this is all assuming the developers will love you forever if you fix a problem for them. If they don't..well..I suppose you could fork.

I'm trying not to criticize the people who are doing this, really, I love them for it. But if certain entities can get off their unjustified high horse(s) and get out of their fantasy worlds (cough fsf regarding the iPhone 3g cough) that would be nice.
That's very interesting.
A friend also had a similar idea. My friend/cofounder would be working as freelance under my company and get a percentange of the revenues he generates (maybe 30%). If a certain goal is met, he would have the option to exchange it to a certain amount of share (exponentially increasing maybe even to 49%).
I earned twice as much as him when I was working and quit my job and didn't earn a salary for 3 months. These 3 months alone are worth more than he is investing. The sum we both invest should be sufficent to get the company running for at least 10 months without any revenues. If it turns out to be a viable idea, we both (or at least I) can invest some more money or seek for an external investor.
I don't think a 50/50 split would be fair, as I already proved that I could do my technical park, and he only joined afterwards and has not yet shown or done his part.

If everything fails, there is still the option of selling the software. At least my former company will be very interested in what I was doing.
I'll wait until the market is ripe for my startup for startups for startups idea.
IPhone 2.0 jailbreak released
At first I proposed a 90:10 offer with options to reach 35% but he didn't agree with that. The current plan (to take away his shares if he doesn't meet his goals) doens't differ much from this though.
It's a bit tough to find, but there's actually a nice map with all the startups on it. I wouldn't mind a 'browse by location' feature though.