skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work for a student information system company. These systems are all ancient, designed around a time when a dozen people would connect to the server using their green screen terminals or, in a spate of massive innovation, Oracle Forms.

As a result, all of the web access must be done through a single db server. Any app (including the portal) tends to directly access the db, causing all sorts of stored procedures to run. Nothing is cached. The server is only busy twice a year, fall and spring semester registration, so there is a limited desire to spend more than they absolutely have to on it.

Over all, IT in higher education in an interesting mix. There is a decent percentage of really good people there, who love the environment and are willing to give up the salary as a result. Unfortunately, there are also at least as many people who are earning what they are worth. The less prestigious the school, the higher the percentage of the latter.
Are you asking "why mobile", or "why native, as opposed to HTML5?"

The answer to the first question is obvious, IMHO. I always carry a mobile device, whereas I'm only at a computer 12-14 hours a day.

As to the second, opening a web-app using a mobile browser is cumbersome and thus a fairly large barrier to adoption. The key to this app's success - as with any personal analytics tool - is continuous use.
Just got it! Dead on Arrival, does not work at all. $337 junk. The only thing that woks on this is the piece of shit built in monitor speakers.
A lot of these kinds of 'Automatic Diary' apps use Twitter feeds as a key data source (especially now that Twitter accounts are integrated directly into iOS) - is anybody else worried that this valuable source of life records might dry up if Twitter starts shutting down API access?
Setting up a challenger to QuickBooks does sound dull.

Setting up a challenger to SAP on the other hand does not sound dull.

Wanna see a cool B2B company? Check out a tool called CyberArk.
"Now that so many things in our lives are timestamped and available online, collating it all together is a natural next step. It's interesting to see all the different ways that this is being done by different apps and services."

I completely agree. It seems like the timing is right for an app like this.
I've had the HTC Incredible for two years. Up until a few months ago I would have said it was a great phone with no problems. Then HTC pushed out a new release that broke it, such that it reboots itself randomly between 2:00AM and 6:00AM (some nights just once, other nights many times), and they still haven't pushed out a fix. And of course every time it boots you hear "Droooooooooiid".

I have to turn my phone off when I go to bed now, which is lame.
They haven't had a product that people lust after in a long time. In fact, with other tablets now viable competitors, I'd say their laptops are their most lust-inducing product out there.

I just don't know how they can regain that level of desirability without disrupting another vertical. Or if they make some truly radical hardware innovations, such that it is visible and will make it obvious that you are using an Apple product and not a Samsung. The touchscreen iPhone with gestures and a full browser was a device like that, but that gap has long since been closed by other manufacturers. Siri was, I think, an attempt to do that again, but it wasn't quite ready--something that almost makes me think that Jobs knew he had to pull something out of his hat immediately, even at the cost of shelving his famous perfectionism.
This article speaks to a point that most miss:

The business model can be as sexy, or sexier than the idea itself.

When we build something that is boring to some, I wonder if we forget the magic of what we do.

What is boring to us is magic to someone, stuck suffering with managing details. It's nice to see the maturation of developers who do for the world what's being asked of us: help everyone everywhere, with software.

About B2C or B2B:

1) It's a preference. A reality is, there is not as much B2C out there as we think. Too many consumer facing "successes" do not take money from "customers". Why? The users are the product that are sold to advertisers. They often ask businesses to pay, maybe by advertising, and it's a lot of work.

2) Consumers are quite fickle, irrational and emotional decision makers. They will often think about any decision over $5/month.

Small businesses, on the other hand, don't think about $50/month too much. They're fairly logical (a good fit for developer's tendencies), and very much understand and make decisions based on value -- saving them, or making them money. They'll also be more forgiving about understanding features-based marketing instead of benefit-based marketing if you can't dial in your copywriting. In short, there's more flexibility to learn and still do well enough to keep improving.

3) If you let a sliver of your talent tackle a B2B problem that customers will pay for, you get to keep the panacea much easier: Work on what you want every day without fear of paying the bills, or pursuing a swing for the fences idea without fear of failure or running out of money. Not everyone gets to live in the Valley. I'm sure I'd be open to other possibilities if I lived there, but I don't right now.

If you're out for the first success or two of your life, consider this: check any ego and immature thought habits to fit in. Exchange them with discipline, to learn what you need to about the fundamentals of building a business, it will serve you very well when going after the B2C ideas.

Almost everyone who tries to fit in, inevitably gets left behind. Do what others aren't willing to do to build a business that makes money, because it's worth way more, to customers, and VC's.

As every single person on HN gets older, they will have more responsibilities because of the other things in their lives they want, and cost money every month. There's a chance now to address those very easily and get some great business development experience. That doesn't sound like much to some, but startups are a longer haul game than anyone ever admits.
Apple is propping up the NASDAQ and S&P500. Apple's iPhone revenue alone generates more than all of Microsoft's various business units combined. I'd say that's a pretty good way of losing its shine.
I am now afraid of browser plugins
I had been looking at Lenovos, but when i saw they charged 1k for 16gb of ram, when you could buy the same ram on newegg for 120, I stepped back quite a bit.
"After all, during his too-brief, once-in-a-century career, he radically disrupted at least seven industries: personal computing, desktop software, music, mobile phones, publishing, tablet computers, and Hollywood animation"

Completely OT, but I thought it was interesting to note that the time difference between the first mobile phone and the first commercially successful smartphone (1973-2007) and the time difference between the invention of the telegraph and telephone (1832-1876) were approximately the same. Apparently awesomeness takes 40 years to bloom.
Soap film forms textured display screen
Welcome to the world of technical writing.
"And no these aren't just features geeks would want"

Yes they are. By and large no one cares about removable battery, locked bootloader, non-aggressive process killing or SD card option. You know how we know this? Because the iphone doesn't have any of that. The things these phones have that the iphone doesn't that non-Geek consumers care about are LTE, the big beautiful screen and perhaps the price.

The reasons the One isn't selling like the Galaxy S3 are pretty clear:

(1) bigger screen

(2) better battery

(3) walk into a Verizon store and see which phone get's shoved into your face.
I built an iOS app for my school (Simon Fraser University) that allowed students to view/share their schedule with their friends. One of the most frequent questions I get is if the school has tried to shut me down and it is exactly for reasons like this that other students don't build more apps like this.

We have the same student system that UCF uses. It's horrible and slow. Tools like this make it a little bit more manageable.

I am surprised more schools dont have simple API's that allow students to build services on top of them.
I think the problem there trying to address could be looked at like the OpenGL/DirectX issue. Sure you can code directly and in that it's fine though you have alot of things to do and redo each game. Now what happens is you have layers upon that OpenGL/DirectX called games engines be them the quake engine or Values offering or the many others. They allow the game writers to focus on the games and obviscate alot of the boring details that distract from the tasks at hand.

So in that if they were to create a game engine that would generate the html5 etc to allow them to run on a web browser then and only then do I feel they would of achieved there objective. Beyond that I can not see any insight at all into how they are to address the problem defined in the article beyond they will do betetr html5 games. If they were to create a development enviroment that generated the html5 and to the extent that you don't need to know html5 and can focus on using this `game engine` then I feel they will be onto something that will make them stand out and also help get html5 inplace. Rememeber flash did a wonderful job of allowing people to make html games, albeit with use of a flash plugin. Now html5 offers all(apparently from what we are told) features that flash offered then maybe the approach to the problem is how this issue is solved.
william carlos williams couldn't have said it better
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Your b12 will be up because your body is cannibalising its tissues to stay alive. That's your liver, kidneys, etc. and it doesn't mean that you're healthier.

Given that you don't know that, and earlier on you didn't know what ketosis is, I'll take your dietary advice with a large grain of salt...
Your argument would be more useful if you listed what people are currently cribbing about and then debunked it.
"PeopleSoft's "SA" module that UCF is using for registration includes a waitlist feature that already does all of this"

It isn't always enabled. Many classes for some odd reason have the waitlist feature turned off.
> I think it is time we stopped thinking in browser versions and instead check for availability of features.

Great. How? Detecting features can be really difficult, it's why we need libraries like Modernizr. Some are outright impossible: try detecting touch support. I know you think you can but you can't without UA sniffing.

Even harder, try detecting mouse support.

I don't know what the history is behind document.implementation.hasFeature but I know that it doesn't work for anything but SVG today. Not sure if that's the way to go but we definitely need a better way that the try/catch and complicated loops we currently employ.
Sounds like a pitch for http://join.app.net!

But in seriousness:

1) If you are pulling these tweets, you should be saving them.

2) This source is already “drying up” in some sense in that you cannot access your own tweets older than 3,200 tweets ago. (That’s a number I blew by years ago. It sucks. It’s “my” data — and text, at that! — and Twitter won’t let me have it.)
Like paypal shutting down charities and refunding the donations after they take their percentage.
There's a lot in your post that implies that the distribution of education is irrelevant; that there's no need to rate the quality of an education system according to how many people are being educated, but just that whoever manages to get any education is being educated well.

Would you agree with that assessment?
3d printed exoskeleton helps child lift arms for first time
Well rephrased, everyone using Chrome and almost everyone using Firefox, since 15 and 9 are eons ago for those two. Pretty sure that's a decent percentage (40+ accord to StatCounter?)
Funny, i had this same idea 4 years ago. Bought iCapsule.com. The idea of "generational" digital asset preservation is a big problem to solve. Museums across the world are struggling with this. My guess, is this startup hasn't figured out the problem of how to preserve assets for 25-50 years. That is a real problem. Solve that and I'll be a customer!
A new way to visualize the global arms trade
Good point. You don't mind something that automatically tracks you (gps, events, etc), it wouldn't creep you out?

and we were quite inspired by Nicholas Feltron's work also. I think they're amazing.
Stop UEFI
Apple has done some things that I don't think are wise since the death of Steve Jobs - the "new iPad" branding, the new Apple ads, the potential new form factors developer have to design for.

However, they also made some decisions that I thought were stupid when Steve Jobs was there, such as releasing the iPad (which I thought would fail for sure). I'm just waiting to see how everything shakes out before I pass judgment. I've been dead wrong about Apple before, and I don't really see any reason I'll be correct with my opinions now.
Why don't you enumerate the complaints do he can refute each? It will be like HN teamwork. :)
I decided not to read the article when I saw that Time was accusing the 22nd largest company in the world [1] of being in decline. Time lost its shine with the decline of print media.

http://www.forbes.com/global2000/#p_3_s_a0_All%20industries_...
Either you're not serious or you need to calm down.
Sunny-leones-without-clothes
http://frnzbook.org/pages/view/117506/dating-girl-in-south-africa
http://frnzbook.org/pages/view/19867/sexy-bikini-beach-shoot
http://frnzbook.org/pages/view/128206/dating-girl-in-ukraine
http://frnzbook.org/pages/view/124998/dating-girl-in-spain
So anything that starts with Insta is now owned by Instagram?
That's a lot of researchers, 3 Zimmerman's alone! Which 3 get their name on the Nobel Prize when it comes out?
Ask HN: Where's the "sign-up" button?
There is no longer a way to sign up for a HackerNews account. Is registration closed?
To me, a sexy business is one that helps people and makes money.

By this definition the majority of social startups are as unsexy as possible.
Except, like, in the root.
Are you asking about the API vs expressive elements?
Hi there, our app is actually ready for you to use right now. So there's no baiting and waiting. Just sign up and try us out, and we'd love to hear your feedback.

(We're waiting on App Store approval, and you know how it goes with Apple...)
> Android owns the tablet market.

I haven't seen anyone who owns an Android tablet. And I know 40-50 people with iPads. I don't know about it, but Android 4.1 might be very good on tablets and Nexus 7 might (hopefully) sell millions, and I'm happy about it because it makes Apple try harder on iPad, but "Android owns the tablet market" is far from the reality I'm living in.

I agree with the rest of your comment. I wanted to upvote it, but my mouse slipped (I'm used to trackpads) and accidentally downvoted you. sorry about that.
It glosses over it pretty quickly, but it sounds like he was charging a fee for frequency of checks for the classes. Part of the slide presentation shows that the school's policy surrounding their electronic services forbids commercial use or personal gain. Maybe that's part of the problem.

Edit: The conduct timeline makes this pretty cut and dried: http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/ In the written statement of hearing determination (July 24, 2pm) they say specifically that he's in violation of their code by making unauthorized commercial use of their service. They then go on to talk about server loads, but the primary violation is the commercialization of their service.
I absolutely love cloud flare and I think they have revolutionised the way I deploy things to the Internet. Yet the fact that I can not turn off their security completely means that I have plenty of users complain about being blocked.
Maybe it's just the 20 year patents?
Interesting case study that was able to buck the trend is Atlassian software. I have personally seen bottom up influence in 3 large publicly traded companies land Atlassian very nice (and well deserved I might add) license and support agreements.

They built a product that would usually be sold at the VITO level, gave it away for open source projects so it became defacto to developers and viola Jira is now replacing IBM products in many enterprise software development shops as we speak.
The best (worst) part of that letter is the last part of that "research paper" section:

"Be advised that the paper may not serve to justify your own actions, nor evaluate the actions of others"

They are basically asking him to be academically dishonest in the event that the logical conclusion from his cited sources either supports his actions or serve to make the IT department look bad.

Demanding that a student arrive upon a predetermined conclusion is not how university is supposed to work; that shit ends in primary school (or I suppose debate classes?).
I've had some problems with my video card in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I'd recommend checking out http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/
It may not happen often, but all it takes is once for you to really appreciate it.
Condorcet is so '90s. The cool kids these days (including the German and Dutch Pirate Parties) are using transitively delegated voting systems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback.
I love the part in the slide deck where he digs up a quote from the university's VP of IT talking up PeopleSoft's reliability.

“According to Joel Hartman, Vice Provost for Information Technologies and Resources at UCF, Sun really delivers in all regards. The Sun infrastructure for Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications at UCF provides outstanding reliability, investment protection, and performance”

- Joel, the initiator of this conduct case, stating how powerful the myUCF server network is in a technical brief for universities published by Sun Microsystems."
I'm in the same boat. While I definitely appreciate Backbone for what it tries to be (and it excels at that, in my experience), I find myself somewhat unsure at times if I'm deviating too much from best practices. Not that I need someone to hold my hand, but a lot of times when using backbone for my non-trivial app, I got the feeling I was reinventing a wheel.

For example: view clean-up (the zombie problem), model relations, alternative transport layers (socket.io), and view nesting.

I did however often greatly appreciate the elegance and simplicity of Backbone's source code and design, as well as for introducing me to the fantastic Underscore library, which I now make much use of both client-side as well as in Node.

I think I'll wait until the first 1.x release to consider porting my app over, or perhaps not depending on how Backbone 1.0 turns out.

Excellent work by both teams.
I also wish it did that, as well as stripping meta data and exif rotations. Or perhaps this is all automatic?
I do wonder if the higgs is a funny creature in that it has a sort of quantum echo. By that I mean that it is in more than one place at once, this would also help explain why gravity is as weak as it is. If that is the case then you could think of the higgs as being like a bouncy ball with the decay of the various bounces all actualy happening at once (may explain those fluctuations). Though if you were to observe a bouncy ball and sample its movement slow enough then they would appear to be as one event. Just my theory of things and I hope more is proven given the higgs will help to one day make the theory of gravity a fully understood fact. My physics was formaly high-school level and the rest is from a passing interest of all things science so if I appear to be so wrong then maybe somebody could point out the details so that I may not make the same mistakes again.
Apparently the magnet is in the laptop, so your same size is still just one, even with two adapters
Along with every single other print publication, not just Time. Misguided statement there, buddy.
Zynga doesn't succeed on the quality of it's ripoffs. They succeed on their marketing, positioning, and copying.
Have you seen System 76's notebook? I don't use one, but it looks really nice.
https://www.system76.com/
Steve Jobs suggests that Apple didn't innovate while he wasn't there (http://www.macrumors.com/2011/09/19/steve-jobs-apple-almost-...).

The question is then does Apple, without Jobs, have the visionaries and the management team supporting those visionaries to pioneer very specific markets to continue earning billions in the future. I'd guess that over the next few years a Google Glass-style device is ready for the market and some sort of car-friendly voice-controlled heads-up-display computing device is capable of commanding billions, but outside of that it's going to be about apps and information... and although Apple has a huge presence today and lots of cash they've got a very hard positition to hold as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are fighting for the same consumers who are paying a premium for Apple products.

My dad got a 1st gen iPad and really liked it. He just got a Nexus 7 and ditched his iPad. He doesn't think it's amazing or anything, but he can fit it in his pocket, buy books from Amazon directly, it was only $200 and it's lighter and easier to read on. At some point Apple's differentiation shifts from being innovative devices to being "sexy" design and a great interface... sure that sells, but it doesn't sell at nearly the same level as truly innovative devices like the iPod, iPhone, or iPad can. Apple's doing well today, but maintaining this level of success if going to be extremely difficult.
They were waiting for the easiest case to win.
As in $XXX or $XXXX

I'm also so focused on subscription revenue that I forgot to clarify that. Get a few $XXXX/month businesses and you'll have six figure annual revenue before you know it.
I already bought one to test and was incredibly disappointed. Given the SSD, I would have thought it to be super quick, but it is sub-par to my dell d630..really.

Also if I price it out, it equals a T530 or W lenovo with specs. I would buy ssd and ram externally from newegg
Google PageSpeed Service
I posit that if Steve Jobs were still alive, the new mag-safe adapter design would not have been approved. It seems worse in every way.

Has there been any explanation from Apple on why they changed the design?
Urban Terror 4.2 is out
The biggest ding for me so far is lack of integration with Mint. That's probably done on the Mint side, but Simple has to know their customers strongly overlap and should be pushing hard for it.