skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The people making the decisions probably spent a long time wanting to realise their ideas too. If an idea isn't good enough to convince you to work on it day & night, it will be a hard to convince someone else to do so.

The authors advice is right: "If you want to get your game made, make it yourself". If your idea is good & you can show it in action you have a much better chance of getting noticed than if you just post a wish-list on a forum.

[Edit: Is it just me timing out? Google cache: http://goo.gl/ez5e4]
280 Must Read Books for Entrepreneurs
According to http://www.phonearena.com/news/iPhone-4-sales-hit-a-million-... AT&T sold 1.7 million units on the first weekend.

I wonder if Steve Jobs being dead actually is a reason for increased sales. It could be like a singer dying and people buy more of his records.

On the other hand it might be just that many people held back buying the iphone 4 and waited for the next one.
On launch weekend, the iPhone 4 sold 1.7M units in five countries. The iPhone 4S sold > 4.0M units in seven countries (the additions being Canada and Australia). The iPhone 4 launch countries had a combined population of ~644 million. The iPhone 4S launch countries had a combined population of ~700 million -- only an 8.7% increase. So the additional launch countries alone wouldn't explain the vastly increased number of sales (~135% increase).

At least from personal experience, most Apple Retail Stores didn't seem to exhaust their supply on Friday the 14th. So having more units on hand (and the usual second round of deliveries on Saturday), plus the pre-order records contributed to breaking this record. Simply having the product available was probably the biggest factor, though pre-orders (confirmation tomorrow) do indicate that demand may have increased over the iPhone 4, although some of that that could be seasonal demand.

I'm not sure on carrier counts (iPhone 4 not known, iPhone 4S launched on 22 carriers). In the US, the iPhone 4 only launched on one carrier, whereas the 4S launched on three. That's also going to be a significant contributing factor in increasing its effective availability to buyers.
Apple announces 4 million iPhone 4S sales in just 3 days
walldorf's link puts iPhone 4 sales over the same period as 1.7 million; that's 2.3x as much.
How is the system in an unstoppable slide towards feudalism? Is this the same feudalism I studied in European History, with the land-holders and vassals and all? If not, why are you using that word?
Memory Trick Could Speed Up the Web
True for any number of companies, including Marshall/Orange/Sount City/HiWatt in the UK, pretty much ALL of which got into business after being recruited to build louder amps for The Who.
That's not what he wrote. He's talking about hand-soldering (vs PCBs) and using certain components or technologies that work really well when marketing but have no effect or even a detrimental effect on sound. For example, people want Class A amps, not Class AB ones, even though the designation is purely a technical one and is not correlated with sound quality.

The difference between a tube amp and a solid state one, by the way, is one that you can objectively measure through spectrograms.
This was exactly the kind of disclaimer on the thinkgeek 'submit t-shirt idea' page, at least 6 months or so ago. I would link to the page that had it but it seems it's now behind a user login page.
And yet, curiously, George Soros and #Occupy are both leftists
By taking a beat up car worth $200, and buying some parts for $400, and fixing it up and selling it for $1500, you just created $900 for yourself. This is growing the pie. The is not a set amount of wealth in the world.

Think about the creation of entirely new industries. Think of how much would be spent on cell phones today were it
not for the innovation caused by RIM, Motorola and then Apple. Or cloud computing were it not for Amazon, Dropbox ect. These companies create wealth, by creating value for consumers. Banking is a little more complicated, but they provide capital to allow the aforementioned companies to grow and innovate.
Google publishes web safety advice
> But it's just a matter of time before it's functional again.

And then another very short matter of time before it is non-functional again, since the then-current generation of developers will want to "build something new".
The launch "delay" probably had something to do with this as well. Anticipation was already high. Plus perhaps it allowed them to launch in more countries simultaneously.
Product delays are not always because of manufacturing issues. Sometimes it can be a business decision.
A number of sizable and well-respected law firms will take your case on contingency if they believe that it is a good enough case and you can win. Upside is that you can get good lawyers able to help you, and if you lose, you won't be out the lawyer's fees. Downside is that if you win, you will pay a substantial percentage (30-50%) in fees, largely due to the increased risk that the firm takes on.

Also, whoever said to sue for IP infringement may be worth listening to. 12.5M for a patent judgment is low.
I have serious doubts about the lean startup methodology but this sounds more like confirmation bias than anything else. Also, what evidence do you have that the quality of startups has declined? Maybe what's happening is that lean startup is being used by weekend projects that would have produce equally bland products without lean startup.
Find a lawyer that will take it on contingency.

Also, talk to 'grellas' here, he's one of the nicest legal eagles I've ever seen.
The key to being a good employee is showing that you can do what you are asked to do. If the company needs quick and dirty mock ups, do that. You can always show them what polished mock ups, too. If they don't value the polished versions, you can learn to take pride in your ability to do quick and dirty, because that too is a skill.

Learn to focus on what business problem your job solves.
Anecdata: I've supported Ubuntu desktops for non-technical users, and they do indeed seem to have an amazing ability to accidentally re-arrange panel items, even with "Lock items" ticked. I'm entirely in favour of making it more difficult -- although I probably wouldn't have figured out holding down "alt" by myself, but I would hopefully have found it with some googling.
Still a lot of money, of course.
It would also be interesting to look at the growth of iPhone 4 sales. I know that they were growing like crazy in the quarters after the launch. But it's hard to compare. Sales numbers right after the launch are certainly always an outlier so it might be more reasonable to wait for the following quarterly results.
Get a NYC lawyer that agrees to take the case at his own risk.

Pitch them with your story, if they find it solid (you can prove you claim) then you have a case and they should be interested.

Good luck
Usually in open source, real user feedback is better than guessing.

Certainly. But that doesn't mean it is a good idea to push unfinished stuff as default. Though maybe that is the only way to get people who aren't technology enthusiasts to try the new thing and provide feedback.
I'm not turning away because Desktop Cube doesn't work, I'm turning away because it completely messed up my system by simply trying to turn it on, through the GUI.

I wasn't messing with my X configuration or any other insanities. I clicked a button in the settings, and had to Google around just to get back to a working computer.

What other landmines are waiting for me? What if I install KDevelop or some other KDE-based program? Will that cause everything to break too? I don't know, but I never before had to be afraid to just try things. Now I have to worry if whatever I'm doing is "Canonical-approved," and I'm not okay with that.

(I really doubt KDE is going to cause a problem, it was just an example.)

For the record, I played with Gnome 3 a little more, and I'm willing to give it a longer chance. Avant Window Navigator is a must, though.

Overall, it just seems like Gnome 3 and Unity have all of my least favorite parts of OS X jammed into it for no good reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter.s...

Microsoft's Kinect currently holds the record for Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device. It sold 8 million in the first 60 days at a rate of about 134,000/day

[Edit: source http://community.guinnessworldrecords.com/_Kinect-Confirmed-...]
Extending Python with C - Using OpenCV on the web
Congratulations to Tobi and all the Shopify crew!
The Perks of Working at Google, Facebook, Twitter and More
You are probably correct that there has been some dilution. My co-founder already had very deep pockets before we started the company, and I believe that he remained the primary investor throughout (though I am aware of 1 small round participated in by a venture firm). He would have made it a priority to dilute me out of existence.

They have refused to provide any information with regard to this at all.
Be Realistic with Content Marketing Goals
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I see the GW scanners all over the place now, but know no one with a GW compatible phone. The tough part about launching a phone-based NFC payment system in the US is the damn 2-year contract lock-in. We probably won't see noticeable device saturation till late 2012 or early 2013.
It was an interesting read, but can you please post how you got your alpha users?
C-h:

'C-h S' to get help on that obscure bash built-in or elisp function,

'C-h v' to get help on an elisp variable (most modes offer a lot of customisation via setting particular variables),

'C-h m' to show the current mode's keybindings,

'C-h k' to find the name of the function bound to a particular key sequence,

'C-h t' for a tutorial on all the basic (and not so basic) editing & buffer/window management commands,

and 'C-h ?' to get a list of other help commands.
TARP! Yes TARP has been repaid! Why are people complaining, when the money has been repaid? Who are these people who are clearly ignorant of the facts?!!?

That would be you.

We loaned citibank $25bn with TARP. They paid that back. You seem to think that thats the end of the story. Thanks for telling us what we should read.

Turns out we also guaranteed losses on $300bn of assets, added an additional $20bn, and a further credit line of $45bn.

From were I'm standing, that should mean we own citibank. If my company was in that situation, you think investors would offer me a loan? You think that's gonna be the deal you get next time your company is in trouble?

We should own it, dismantle it, break it up. Do that for every big bank down the line.

But forget the $350bn. You think that if your business needs $25bn or it goes under tomorrow, that one of these rich people will just loan you $25bn and let you pay it back when you can? LOL. In my world, $25bn bought citibank outright, and we overpaid. Instead we got 36%. Joke.

Two sets of rules. One for them. One for us.
To all developers trying to implement a text-editor inside the browser: Do not fuck with the regular text input/textarea elements..

This editor probably has an event handler when the user types quotes on the system - most likely is is trying to insert two quotes and place the cursor in the middle. The problem is, most non-US keyboard layouts use the sequence of "quote + spacebar" to insert a quote.

In the end, your super-smart editor will not allow me (or anyone that does not use a regular US keyboard layout) to type quotes into the damn text-editor.

Enough ranting: it looks like I will have to stay with screen and emacs to have a "collaborative code-editor with syntax highlighting"
Cloud Infrastructure Integration Model: Bridging
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I stated explicitly that the bankers had bribed the politicians.

It seems to me that it was mutual, sort of a ouroboros snake swallowing its tail. Just as we could say that bankers offered promises to politicians in order to secure favorable regulations, so did the politicians offer favorable regulation in order to secure their own re-election. As far as I can see, they're two sides of the same coin.

That being the case, it doesn't make sense to demand that the politicians wield great power in order to exercise greater control over the bankers. We know that the politicians are corrupt, so why would we give them more power?
Regarding the new alt-tab behavior: check out alt-tilde. I love the combination of the two!

It has a few bugs (e.g. try opening two terminals, then alt-tabbing... it doesn't switch applications), but it's definitely a step in the right direction IMO.
I don't think that calling somebody a 'middleman' implies that they add no value. The vast majority of middlemen add value: repackaging for local markets, translating, navigating bureaucracies, advertising, shipping, placing the product in stores and generally connecting producer with consumer.
It's about what Motorola sells in a quarter: http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/31/the-end-of-easy-growth-in-s...

And assuming they're evenly split between 16GB and 32GB (it's not, there's also 64GB models in the mix), it's over a billion dollars in revenue before carrier subsidies.
Or a certain obscure piece of algebra discovered by one G. Boole.

(Edit: During his time, Boole's results were practically unknown except to other logicians, and certainly nobody expected to find any practical use for them. It wasn't until the 1930s when Claude Shannon realized that the algebra that now carries Boole's name could be used to analyze digital electric cirquits.)
Smart or not, the horrible truth is that every version of GNOME and KDE seems to be more unusable than the one before.

I remember seeing KDE for the very first time when it was in beta and saying, "Wow!"

For a while I'd have a horrible feeling of disappointment when GNOME and KDE would come out with new versions because each would seem to be to buggier and less usable than the last. Sometime around 2005 or so I gave up. It became less of a PITA to configure a Windows machine to make a decent workstation than it to use Linux. I still use Linux on the server, but almost never as a desktop.

I used Linux first in 1993, and back then it was leaps and bounds ahead of Windows in every way. It wasn't until 2000 that Windows brought brought out a stable operating system based on a good foundation that was actually competitive with Linux. Windows has grown a lot since then, and Linux has either been standing still (or almost, on the server) and going backwards (on the desktop). It's a tragedy.
After having spent a couple years doing embedded OS development in C, Objective C is beautiful. The verbosity makes it much easier to read than typical C code and the memory management is brilliant compared to doing it yourself. It walks the line between static and dynamic types quite well, with most things being static except when dynamic makes things a lot easier. I think Objective C is brilliant considering what they were able to add to C while maintaining great speed and full compatibility with C.
Thanks you very much for the insight. That is something I've struggled with because it seems like from a user useability perspective having those types of 2nd level sub-index pages would be necessary in order to find and navigate through all my content. I have 6,000 some odd various articles with new content published daily. Do you have some examples of online news / magazine sites that do a good job of placing real content on high level pages without sacrificing useability? Again, thanks for the comment.
Was there any type of vesting agreement in place?
It looks nice! It remindes me very much of an old project I had once - presentmood.com (now offline). I wrote about the history on my blog: http://davidtanzer.net/node/82

I hope you have more success with your project than I had back then. That is: I hope you are successful! All the best for the future - I still think that this idea has potential.
Physical constants and factorials
Why I have not updated my iPhone to iOS5
>Or, since they're also advancing a political message of 'fear', maybe it will be terrorism?

I think you're really reaching there. Things are bad, but lets not kid ourselves from pretending that things are that bad. If we mindfuck ourselves into believing that the government wants to label everyone that disagrees as a terrorist, are we really any better than those that believe Obama is a Kenyan born muslim whose sole purpose in life is to invoke Sharia law on the US?
I'm in the same boat. Back when I was a heavy AS3 developer, JS looked dumb and gimped. But once I drank the JS Kool-Aid, I saw the value in how JS does things. Not everything has to look and feel like Java. Now whenever I see frameworks that force classes onto JS, I have to roll my eyes.
Leonardo DiCaprio slated to play Alan Turing in biopic
Agreed. I've had to use factories in Obj-C plenty. I guess the argument that I would make is that they are much easier to implement in Obj-C and require less boilerplate (especially if you use blocks), not that the pattern doesn't exist in Obj-C.
> Nautilus still exists, it wasn't abandoned.

Actually it was. Current day Nautilus has little to do with the original scope and functionality of the project as envisioned (and promoted) by Eazel. It's like saying Hurd still exists. Yeah, but hardly anybody uses it and it failed to fulfill what it promised for 25 years.

> IIRC E17 is used on various phones

Yeah, which all of 5 people use, and one of them is Rasterman.

> Reiser killed someone

Isn't an often repeated premise of OSS that a project can keep on despite being abandoned by its' leaders?

> Parrot is still under development

Still in perpetual flux.

> Perpetual flux and incohesiveness is too management speak for me.

It's also something felt everyday by common people and expert hard core users alike.

> Look inside a big company, pretty much the same thing going on.

Companies tend not to fuck too much with the flagship programs, revenue streams, and seldom just for the "fun of it".

How many times, for example, has the KDE multimedia infrastructure been replaced with something entirely different only for this to happen again?
If your name is on one of their patents I'm surprised that was overlooked during due diligence when the company was being acquired.

But it definitely seems like you have a strong case based on what you have described.
I was thinking the same thing. This site is a pretty good example of "wrong hands"—a bunch of RIM employees.
> I worry that it might not be sustainable.

The rise of Wikipedia with the concomitant decline of commercial, paper encyclopedias offers some insight into the future of education. In the future, there will be more education available and it will be very cheap.

What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created an entirely new lecture every year.
At the very least, a successful criminal prosecution would make you feel better. And it would likely advance your cause...I'm not sure if an extortion conviction would be admissible in a civil trial for something like this, but even if it weren't, the fact that someone was convicted of criminal extortion would make it far more likely you'd get a good attorney to work on contingency for the civil complaint. Even if you only recover $1m, 33% of that is a decent payday for a lot of lawyers.
The fact that some publisher has published a book provides abosolutely zero validation to me. I choose the books I read based on:

- the author: did I previously enjoy their works?

- awards: a Hugo/Nebula nomination is huge validation

- reviews: professional or bloggers or Amazon's.
Not just one place -- safe deposit box at the bank. Crooks play really really dirty.

I personally wouldn't go anywhere alone. Maybe I've run into the wrong people-- but the wrong people know that it only costs about $5k to have someone's legs broken.
Very cool. I talked to a few of brass-playing musician friends and this is the standard process for getting rid of dents in brass instruments.
I went through a similar situation myself a long time ago, albeit for much less money.

1. Put your story together, with paperwork and references.
2. Call some attorneys about taking the case on contingency. You have to "sell" them on the value of your case. Think of it like pitching an investor, because frankly that's what you're doing.
2a. Don't pay a retainer. I blew a lot of money with this route before focusing on a contingency arrangement.
2b. I got myself a free Westlaw trial account and searched for cases similar to mine, figuring I could find someone for whom my case wouldn't be risky for them. Also I looked for small firms so that I could talk directly to the decision maker about taking cases on contingency.

Result? 0 money invested, reasonable settlement, and closure. It took about a year. Yours will take longer likely.
Thanks for the information. Really.

The Alt key thing is a problem, though. I never would have found that on my own, even after finally finding out that you have to hold Alt to shut the machine down. I still don't know how to reboot without logging out first (which, I haven't tried, and I don't remember if LightDM has a reboot option either. So yeah, I was CTRL-ALT-F1-ing and rebooting from the command line.)

I mean, it looks very pretty, but how can I recommend this to friends and family when I can't even tell them to "try rebooting it" when there is a problem?

I get the feeling Gnome 3 is going to be awesome. I'm just not sure I'd want to unleash it on non-experts just yet.
I agree with you on vim (gedit would have been a better choice), but RVM had been a huge help when I first started with Rails (and Ruby development) in general. It took away the need for sudo gem installations, for one.
Well, it might. If you don't have the resources, could you in fact pursue the extortion charge, get the judgement, and then come back around and say "hey, now that you've been found guilty, let's talk about the real issue"?

They may be willing to negotiate at that point. Of course, not a lawyer here.
How to protect user freedom in an app store world
Ousterhout's proposed system is based on dynamic random access memory (DRAM). [..] In a data center, fetching bits from DRAM and sending them over the center's internal network should be 100 to 1,000 times faster than getting it from a disk.

So the "trick" is "caching data in memory" but with more memory and spread across multiple machines. This is already the bread and butter for many infrastructure developers and sysadmins.

It'll be more interesting to see what memristor technology brings. The first commercially available solutions are due in the next couple of years and we'll most likely have cost effective, non-volatile DRAM-speed memory by 2020.
> it's over a billion dollars in revenue before carrier subsidies.

And considering that Apple doesn't care about the subsidies (they get paid up front), it's a whole lot of revenue.