skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mean, it's always useful to know what's happening under the hood, but it's not always realistic to expect that to happen. I don't think the average C programmer need to know assembly any more than the average Ruby programmer needs to know C.

I disagree. Given that C exposes you to some hardware details that are abstracted when developing in some higher level language such as Ruby, for instance having to deal with overflow on signed/unsigned types and register variables (I know that compilers will mostly ignore that, but it's still a language feature).

The average Ruby programmer, on it's turn, can perfectly live without knowing C programming. A more accurate analogy would be to a Ruby programmer to know about the language implementation being using (MRI, JRuby, Rubinius, etc.)
Google maps in the browser works great for me, even in areas remote like Englewood, TN. No app needed IMHO.

Remember: When Steve Jobs was first defending the 30% app store cut he said something to the effect that it wouldn't matter in the long run because everybody was using web apps anyway.
it's not like 500 million people are using a high-quality device like Galaxy S3.

Sure, they don't have the latest greatest shiny, but so what? Its still market penetration, and unlike people just chasing shiny toys, they're looking for tools. And that's what they now have, a powerful tool that almost entirely everything the s3 does.

It doesn't have the most powerful graphics, and that userbase might mean targeting a lower API level. Thats about it.

I really don't see where you're going with that statement.
That's the Javascript Maps API, first, and it only applies if you don't have an enterprise agreement anyways. You don't think Apple had a contract for mapping data independent of Google's pricing of their web API?

(for developers, AFAIK there has been no cost for using Map Kit in iOS or a MapView in Android)
Of course Vinod Khosla has an agenda. However, I know some very smart and helpful investors who don't do convertible notes and/or won't touch YC companies because they think they're overpriced (I'm not one of them).

There is no one-size-fits-all for this. Some companies need certain investors to help them, some are better off getting cheap capital. A smart entrepreneur would decide what his/her company needs and optimize accordingly.
I think someone who claims expertise in 'software' should understand the process until it stops being software, which is architecture. Honestly I think the 'average' Ruby programmer ('average' reflecting their understanding of ruby) who really claims to understand software should know C and ASM.

I really don't have an issue with someone being a dev in Ruby who doesn't understand pointers or how if/else statements can be constructed from jmp primatives. But if you're on the road to expertise I don't think you can remain ignorant of these.
Something like that. Look carefully at the roots of the word "passion." It involves suffering and sacrifice.
It can be applied recursively, but with diminishing returns and an increasingly alien (to a software developer) set of rules as you go down. If learning one thing made you 10% better at the thing above it, you would also become 1% better at the thing above that.
There is no guarantee that what's being put in phones today is going to be necessary or compatible with what ends up "winning" mobile payments. Notably last month a group of major retailers (walmart/target/711/sears/best buy...) announced they are going to push what sounds like a non-chip solution.
The last time I saw this posted I installed it on 2 computers. One was running Mac OS 10.8.1, the other BackTrack 5r2. I have it installed on both and the command xiki-status returns "running" but I have not got it properly implemented in any text editor. I have tried in emacs and vim on both. If anyone gets it to work, especially in vim on Mac (which is very limited), please let me know as the instructions are not helpful, there is no helpful discussion on website and and the only option is to file a bug report. My problems aren't a bug, they are lack of info available.
In London and probably many other places around the World Google has only fairly recently started offering public transport directions (if they offer them at all) so I'm not sure the loss is that great. There are plenty of apps available that offer this.

The people for whom this is a big issue are a fairly small proportion of the global population. Basically those in the US who live in major cities and are users of the transit system. In San Diego and New York this is a big issue and those are centres of the HN readership and probably also the tech media which might be important but the practical impact of this limitation may be limited.
Plenty of products are successfully using HTML5 for applications where it makes sense and are succeeding with it. Blanket generalizations are usually wrong.
There's a course adressing this, full stack knowledge but from bottom to top. Building a system from 'Nand to Tetris' as they pitch it. They probably left ceramics as an exercise for the reader.

http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/
If you're not set on being in the same location, check out my entry in the co-founder spreadsheet and see if we could match.
You could always install OS X as a Virtualbox instance.... ;-)
Already applied.
This would be fantastic as a sort of "dev/ops live wiki/shell" for small IT departments. I already spend time writing shell scripts and wiki pages so that my coworkers can perform some of my job functions while I'm gone, this takes it to a whole new level where the shell script is the documentation is the dashboard is the README. It's glorious.
This iteration is for the masses, it's not for you.

It's for my mother (who is taking one-on-one classes in an Apple store), it's for my partner who is just starting to get work done on her phone (she's had an iPhone 4 since they came out) and its for everybody that's just trying to understand mobile.

Apple's network and ecosystem is now mature. Any change has to be so thoroughly considered. Anything at all risky (say NFC) gets binned until its proven because they can't upset what they have.

Unfortunately this isn't about technology, it's about strategy.
While it's important to initially form an idea around a problem to be solved, the focus really should be on building a product to solve a problem in such a way that it would be painful for your customer to stop using your product.

That's how you create enough demand to properly charge for your product versus offering it for free and it being considered just a really cool idea.

That being said, there's quite a few "startups" launching every week that are really just neat projects or ideas, but aren't proper startups/products/businesses. That doesn't make them bad, just not in the same category as something that charges money. They're essentially trying to solve a problem they created themselves...said another way, they're a solution in search of a problem.
If you want to know what GCC is outputting, you need to learn a hell of a lot more than just x86 assembly. You're going to have to do quite a bit of study of compiler theory. Run objdump on some non-trivial C program and the direct flow of logic will not likely directly resemble the C you wrote.
This Fall, A Billion PC Users Will Wake Up To A New Desktop: Windows 8
Buying an iPhone 5? Don’t go with AT&T
tmpfs is useful for embedded systems where the primary filesystem is mounted read-only. Generally /tmp and /var may be tmpfs backed in that situation. Not sure why a desktop system would want this though.
> Wait, what? You're writing a rant about other entrepreneurs not solving problems when your startup is "google alerts for video games and movies" with no apparent business model?

I see a clear business model. If you have thousands of people that want to know about upcoming movies and games you have a valuable asset for film and game studios.
Gee.. I wonder why? Hugo Chavez will steal the election through fraud and thuggery again, and all the tweets his people see will be cheerful and happy. All the tweets we see will be pro Hugo.

The White House will say nothing about this, as usual.
LMAO. Vinod must be going senile if he forgot the KPCB hype around Bloom Energy.

Not to mention Segway, which was going to supplant the car like cars supplanted horse and buggies.

And those are just the two examples that spring to mind. I'm sure I could come up with a slew if I went back to Y2K (anybody remember the whole kereitsu hype?)
Linkbait title. What are we doing wrong?
I think you should know at least one level of abstraction, in each direction, beyond what you presently know. So if you're writing a C driver, you should know what the assembly will look like and also what the application developer will be writing with the help of your driver. This probably has more to do with communication and understanding of the people problems involved than with performance though.
Most undersold new thing is finally revamping iTunes.

Hopefully it's actually faster now too.
"What problem are you solving" is dogma. At the earliest stage, a startup is an experiment to see if people want something.

There are tons of examples of companies that started as toys, and ultimately became businesses. In hindsight you can always come up a description of the problem they were solving at the time, even if nobody knew the problem existed. You could do this for Twitter today: they solved the problem of (exercise to the reader).
Good tips. I've found that http://pngquant.org generates smaller pngs than optipng, but the former is lossy (reduced color palette). I can't tell the difference though.
The counter-argument is that black swan is not a regular gaussian style outlier from a known distribution. Its better thought of a datapoint from an <Uncertain> process, being mixed into your run of the mill vanilla <stochasitic> one. Thats the issue -- I appreciate your comment making it more clear. So, if we take the black swans and put them into a group, its not clear what we have. Though it seems a stretch that they would be representative of the vanilla process per-se.
I have a problem with Google web fonts. Sometimes connectivity to Google is problematic. For example in China after searching the wrong keyword all connections to Google are blocked for 1.5 minutes. This leads to sites with Google web fonts not hosted locally to hang in loading as it waits for a response from Google. This has led me to hosting web fonts locally.

Was wondering if anyone has a better solution. Or if anyone from Google is reading this, could they place web fonts on a different domain/IP and pray that global censors don't list it?

Kinda nice to be able use cached versions of the fonts.

I only use China as an example. I have had problems with Google web fonts in other country and on bad connections.

edit: watching the video it sounds like by hosting locally I am not taking advantage of the different versions served to different operating systems.
Apple Accuses Polish Grocer A.pl of Copyright Infringement
All the map comparisons so far are between Apple and Android. Anybody has experience using Nokia maps and how that fares against Google or Apple map product?
The startup gods have proclaimed that you must solve a problem and now everyone seems to be taking it as an absolute truth. The startup gods are wrong.

Listen, solving a problem is what we need more of in this world. It's hard, its rewarding, and the idea of it is sexy though the problem itself may not be. That said, solving some problem is not the only way to succeed or be relevant. Some things can be cool and sexy and total non-needs and still be a huge hit. Some things that are just fun and entertainment are not just successful but important in our lives! Yes, important! Like Zynga. I fucking hate them but they make freaking games and they're doing damn well (their downward spiral is irrelevant and unrelated to my point). How about the cheeseburger network (you know, Lolcats, I can has cheeseburger and all that?). Useless, entertaining, non-problem-solving ideas that are big hits.

I honestly say fuck solving problems. You know whats really important when it comes to starting a startup no matter if it solves a problem or not? It's this question:

Can I get people to give me money for this?

If the answer is yes then it's a good idea. Solving problems is awesome and if you think of something that solves a problem that you'll get money from that's even more awesome. But all this talk of solving problems seems more about people trying to make themselves feel superior or trick themselves into thinking they're changing the world rather than anything having to do with business.
Samsung Galaxy S III vs iPhone 5: Side by side comparison
To second this, perhaps a little more solidly:

Q) Who owns Reddit?
Q) Who owns the Gawker<->Jezebel<->"to infinity and beyond" series of sites

...

And so on. Then add the 6 major players, and the actual Corporations who have entire multi-million dollar departments of people doing this stuff, and handing it off to other major companies. You know, those old school "Mad Men" type establishments. Then the other tiers of viral media, advertising and so on. Then the "cool" players who get free stuff before the market to generate desire.

The OP needs some serious perspective. In the eyes of everyone looking at your site, you're not an entrepreneur, you've just told everyone you know 0% about how the market works.

>Painful. This shit flies with HN? Interesting.
How embarrassing, Apple still requires QuickTime
Among the things that this resembles, I would include Org-mode for Emacs. Org-mode's support for execution of embedded code blocks provides very similar functionality (ships as part of Emacs 24).
http://orgmode.org/manual/Working-With-Source-Code.html
Not me. I tried the trial just a week ago and it is an abysmal user experience, especially for developers.

Windows 8 will be the next Windows Vista 32-bit for Microsoft.
The implication was that you need to know assembly if you're going to be a C programmer. If you can "get by fine without," that's close to the definition of not specifically needing it. Knowing the next layer down is definitely useful, though.
Yes, but when do you declare the quality high enough for release?
PG, When you fund startups, what do you look for beside founders. If the technology is not patentable or it can be easily copied, would you still fund those startups?
I'd rather live in a bad city than a nice suburb.
To keep you safe we've restricted your freedom.
Forgive me if these questions are well known or answered elsewhere but I am genuinely interested

How did you invest in some YC companies at 25k levels - was this Pre-yc investment?

Did you come across these (and others I guess) via friends nd family, or are you well known as an angel? (for a given value of well known)

if as your edit says you have been disrupted, where next?
Or rather, if the secret seems to be finding talented teams and mentoring them (rather than great ideas), where will
a small investor get attention when YC has worldwide reach?

Edit: is it fair to say that mentoring and experience are all well and good but handing over enough cash that a small company just cannot go bust (ie the 150k each YC supposedly gets) actually more useful - telling people not to do something may help but paying for their survival while they learn the lesson is pretty good too.

I have sometimes thought it would be a good idea for governemnts to pay young people entrepreneur stipend - basically YC for anyone. It has to beat some of the ways I spent my twenties, certainly must beat welfare, and probably would make mcjobs just unbearable.

ps

thanks for doing fuckedcompany - it made not being a millionaire in 2002 seem normal again instead of the nagging worry I had not noticed the free money machine
outside.
As cool and interesting as it is, as a citizen, the information I am actually interested in is all the way down at the bottom. Even then, if what you're looking for isn't in the FAQ, you have to open a PDF just to see more links (what?). There isn't even a phone number listed for non-emergency calls.

Very nice page, but a poor website
As an end user who set a font, you are the <1%.

I am too, but let's face facts, it's not a normal thing to do.
I... appreciate that they're using modern technologies. That's awesome. I also really like that they're topically focusing what they want to present. That's also awesome.

But that was a painful experience to go through, and it felt like my browser was crying. To me, in terms of UX, this is pretty much one step short of the blink tag. It's glitz for the sake of glitz, to the detriment of utility.
I think everyone understands the reasoning behind preferring micro usb, but why can't engineers consider users when designing a new connector? I feel like Apple is probably the only company who would go that extra mile to make cables user friendly -- I just don't see other companies making an effort to make cables friendlier to users. It's probably why Apple chose to design a connector themselves instead of choosing a universal standard.
Need some feedback on my startup - click5dev3.com
It's an online platform that connects readers to bloggers and vice versa. My mission is to make it easier for readers to find quality content based on their interests while helping bloggers promote their blogs.
I bet with some smart education shopping, you can reduce that figure to 100k for the university. A lot can happen in 15 years.
It's almost impossible to scroll using the trackpad on my MBP.

I think it's the inertial scrolling that causes problems... the slightest touch sends it down three or four pages.
I have a drug that could massively raise the honesty of the world's population.

http://lookapinky.com
Thank you for this! That's one thought I had but forgot to mention in another comment below. Dogma is the perfect word for it too. I also believe the people repeating that dogma are doing it either out of ignorance or some attempt to make themselves feel important and world changing. That's where your second point comes in - those same people will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain the problem which may not even exist. Your example of Twitter is perfect too! They now say its some novel communication platform. Well, I'm pretty sure it started as what basically amounted to Facebook status updates on a site called Twitter. Now people are rewriting history to make the legend true.
Easy: bite tongue, spit blood on wall, and read out numbers like a rorschach test.
Signed vs. unsigned data types isn't an artifact of assembly language. It's more so one of digital data representation. I think that knowledge is just as useful to a C programmer as a Ruby programmer. Fire up irb and type 0.1 + 0.2, for instance. You covered what I would have said about the register keyword, but you're right, it's essentially impossible to understand that language "feature" without having a basic understanding of the CPU.
I wonder if 10 years from now people will look back on when gaming used to be confined to a flat screen in front of your face and laugh.
Great photos, but scrolling with my magic mouse got me angry pretty quick when I couldn't read anything even near the edge of the top or bottom or each section without an over-scroll happening.
>>I really don't see where you're going with that statement.

I thought my statement was pretty simple. If there are two operating systems, and one is sold exclusively with a high-quality device, and the other is sold very cheaply with shitty phones, then when the latter's manufacturer says "we have 500 million devices running our OS" everyone is going to go "well, duh!"
He had me until "Clojure is popular because Paul Graham is an excellent writer." Did he just confuse Paul Graham for Rich Hickey? I don't get that point otherwise. pg is a lisp guy but I don't see the Clojure connection.

Anyway his overall point seems to be that Clojure isn't the only programming language, or the best one for every case. Well, ok. No one worth taking the time to talk to would ever make that assertion, so it seems like wasted bluster.
3 Steps For a Better Mobile App using User Story, Flowchart & Wireframes
Good idea. I've filled in my entry.
Some spam entries on there already though.
Looks pretty, but is not very usable.
Microsoft is betting on 3d gimmicks, Sony bought Gakai.
I think the fact that this post is about to fall off the front page after less than a day says a lot. Even though it was flagged I still think this post had quite a bit to say http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510356 that's still relevant after the announcement.
Kudos for breaking the mold and I love the design from a "this is new and fun" perspective, but I completely disagree from a functional perspective. It looks really neat (if a little over-testosteroned), but if I'm visiting the police's web page then I might want to do one of the following (there are plenty more, these are just an example):

- Find the non-emergency number for the police;
- Report a crime;
- Find my car that has been towed;
- Pay a fine, citation, traffic ticket, etc;
- Find the nearest police station (to get fingerprints, etc);
- Apply for a job;
- View a map or statistics about crime.

To do any of those, I have to start at the picture of cops, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page (past lots of press releases), click on "about" and then start navigating. Or notice the tiny box on the far right side of the screen, click "about" (why click "about" if I want to find my car? I dunno), then start navigating. Some of these links are also in a PDF [1] just in case I haven't gotten my "Acrobat Reader wants to update itself" message for the day.

I'd say this is at least 25% less functional than some other (probably much cheaper) very plain sites I've seen for similarly-sized cities. [2]

In other words: if you aren't in the business of user experience, think twice before presenting a novel user experience. The business of police should be policing, not looking cool online. There is a zero chance that a technophobe would be likely to solve their problems using this site, thus increasing the burden on (already depleted) staff at stations.

[1] http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/wp-content/themes/milwauk...

[2] E.g., http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/police/
I like to think about this criticism in the context of Twitter's recent API pullback and push towards advertising.

When a start-up raises at a valuation that is high, most assume current owners win and new owners lose. Yet I contend that everyone loses.

Setting a val that is too high means the profits needed to achieve a decent return are sky high. More importantly they are different from the early investors/founders.

How much of Twitter's recent strategy is being driven by their multi-million dollar investors (at multi-billion vals) wanting clarity on an exit plan? These guys put large quantums of money in and are pushing hard for dollars back. IMHO, they'll tank the company - all because they raised too much at too higher val.

At the end of the day it's best to have everyone in the company (post-deal) feeling like they got a good deal. Kinda like a partner/wife - you never want to feel like you're the one that's trading down in the relationship.

Same can happen at seed.

Disclosure: I invested in a YC company this round.
I wasn't suggesting it was to replace bicycles, just pointing out the absurdity of the parent's comparison to bicycle fatalities.
I don't think that big of a change happens in a decade.

What peripherals popular 10 years ago seem silly now?
Google had vector maps before Apple, actually. It was on Android in 2010.