skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"To put it another way: If you think you can identify winning ideas/teams with even 50% accuracy, then drop what you're doing and raise a fund, because you're going to be the most successful investor of all time."

Oddly, I think I can but I probably won't be as good as guys like Jeff Dean of Google as a big whale of an example. The principals that Jeff Dean provide aren't rocket science. They are grounded in science, theory, and a bit of art.

If I were in a hiring mood and an unknown guy like Jeff Dean walked up to me and started talking about computing. It would probably take only less than 5 minutes for me to want to hire him. If I brought him to chat next to Anders Heisenberg of Microsoft, I'm sure Anders would want to hire him just as fast if not faster than me.

Now if I brought Anders and Jeff to a typical corporate world (obviously hiding their resume & history), I can see a small disaster occurring. They would probably insult them both and suggest they start at the lower end of the corporate ladder. They probably won't even hire Anders due to his lack of degree. (I still don't understand the corporate mindset as well).

A very good technologist is extremely noticeable (unless they are also a very good actor) once they start talking about technology and how they think about how stuff works together. It's like a giant spotlight shining on you. It's hard to not be blinded.

I don't see a difference a big difference in the investing world vs the technology world. A very good investment should have the same effect but for some reason - people ignore the light.
Unless I'm mistaken, we had monitor mode working on the G1 (and similar) devices a wee while ago now.
On flagship phones that is a two handed operation.
Interesting point.

I fully agree with the OP here, the back looks bad. I don't get it. The all-glass back on the 4S was really nice. Had a certain allure and design sense to it.

Apple this time around:

Tim Cook: "Hey Jony, let's make the back uglier by anodizing the steel and let's see how many we can sell before we release the 5S next year."

Jony Ive: "Alright Tim, I bet we'll sell more than the 4S with an uglier case, you're on"
Um, Google doesn't have a DoJ mess with eBooks, Apple does.

The Google Books lawsuit is primarily a dispute with authors and publishers about fair use. The DoJ's involvement in that is tangential (and AFAIK was limited to commenting on and investigating the proposed and now rejected settlement).
I'm also thinking in terms of familiarity. For me, I get frustrated whenever I use an iPhone because there's no back button. I also get frustrated whenever I need to change any sort of setting on my wife's iPhone.
A big thank you to all of you who are thinking about this issue and posting your ideas. There is no one right way to fix the patent troll problem, but hopefully Congress will figure out that this is a serious problem for tech companies and will do something.

There is a long history here. These terrible software patents have been around a good while now, and they have been a curse on Internet companies for over a decade. The "America Invents Act" which passed about a year ago was the culmination of a lengthy process which started with the proposed Patent Reform Act of 2005. It went nowhere, nor did the later iterations in 2007, 2009 etc. These earlier bills definitely targeted patent trolls, but did not pass because of significant opposition by a coalition of interests that did not (and do not) want to accept the changes necessary to hammer the patent trolls. Take a look at the organizations against and for at the wikepedia entry for the Patent Reform Act of 2009 and you will see what I mean.

Now, those opponents are still powerful; therefore to pass any legislation a bill will need to be acceptable to most of them. That means any bill that passes will not be ideal. My goal is to try to get a bill that at least levels the playing field and puts plaintiffs in a position where they have economic risk. The status quo is simply untenable and it is getting worse.

Many of the comments here correctly point out flaws in the SHIELD Act. We will try hard to convince the sponsors to correct these flaws to ensure the bill has teeth. However we must not lose sight of the real issue, namely whether the bill can get out of committee and receive a majority of the House and 60 Senators. It will be hard, and it will take a lot of public support. Please write Congressmen DeFazio and Chaffetz, as well as your own Members of Congress and give them your point view. They will pay attention. If they do not hear from thousands of people, nothing will change.
You won't be able to designate that as your "default" Maps app though, right? So if there's an address in another app, you can't just tap on it to go straight to the Google Maps app.
How about ending software patents in USA?

I have never heard from serious european company which argue that it need software patents to protect its IP.
> There was a much more eclectic selection of content available back then.

Really? On Geocities and the web in the 90s?

Just because you stopped looking for new content and 'web rings' fell out of style, doesn't mean it all went away and the only thing on the Internet is now Facebook. There are nearly 200M active websites on the Internet, with 55M of those alone being Wordpress sites (which I'd suggest is in competition with Tumblr, et. al to inherit the 'geocities' throne). In 2000, there weren't even 50M individual websites.

I think you might be viewing history through some rose-colored glasses, open source or otherwise.

I do agree that SF.net (and /.) played a central role in Open Source, and was fantastic at the time. It's a well worn turd now, compared to it's younger, more nimble competition.

It does have the benefit that it only (afaik) hosts OSS though - as was mentioned the other day, there are thousands of projects where the code is available on github, but there's no license allowing any form of derivative or other use.
For USB3 support on Micro USB, you need an extra connector off to the side for the extra pins, so it's not a plug and play, reuse all your cables panacea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Connector_USB_3_IMGP6033_w...
>The 24-pin, while dated, worked and was just fine

Kinda like VGA ports on notebooks.

>This connector seems very fragile and flimsy and I see it disconnecting all over the place
>The 4S has an A5X, I bet the performance benchmarks are negligible between the two

Read the article.
I find it interesting that everyone is talking about the screen size instead of the screen technology. The CNET review[1] and I'm sure others often show them side by side with the iPhone 5 brighter!, when of course it's like the before/after pictures on TV and could very well just be the slider setting.

I'm also waiting to hear better estimates for battery life -- why is talktime the best standard when no one I know talks for 8 hours on a bill, let alone a charge? I love the data/cpu usage shackles Apple has put on apps, but iOS 6 better let me turn off LTE with less than 6 taps!!

[1] http://www.cnet.com/iphone-5/
This is all good advice, but a couple notes:

1) Don't lie to your co-workers or boss. You shouldn't talk about your business all the time, but don't be afraid to let them know what you're doing. This is really a context dependant situation, but personally, when I was starting my company while I was still working a 9-5, I didn't hide that fact which made it much easier to leave the company amicably when the time came to do so.

2) Make sure you have a lawyer you can run things by, but you don't necessarily need the accountant right off the bat. It depends on how quickly you'll be generating revenue and how, but you can do without an accountant for a while.

The contractors point is a very good one, and I can't stress it enough. If you can get away with bringing everyone on board as contractors, you can save yourself a ton of hassle and costs in HR, taxes, etc.
Most microUSB cables have an engraved USB logo on the top of the cable. Once you realize that it quickly becomes a habit to ensure that your thumb is on the logo when plugging it in and you get it right every time, even in the dark. Throw out any cables that don't do this.
Off on a slight tangent here, but http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/tom-tom-g... is interesting. Made me replace my GPS.
I use CasperJS - it's a wrapper with syntactic sugar around PhantomJS. Posting to social networks is almost trivial (couple of lines). Just run it with your cookies file, and it'll login automatically.
Including depression, from memory?
The maps change is such a big deal I can't help but think there's also some big money involved. Also gone is the youtube app. Since google makes money from ads, and the iphone apps don't have a lot of ads, was apple paying google? Did google ask for eighty bajillion dollars when it came time to renew the contract?
Re: Apple pissing off some developers:

I have been bashing Apple for all of this on my blog (I have some regular readers) and I have carefully explained the "Apple problem" to 15+ people in non-Internet space.

It is OK with me if most people don't get the problems that Apple's new butt asshole behavior is causing. Personally, I will spread the message as I am able, and move on. (As I have previously mentioned here, I wrote the simple Chess program distributed with the early Apple II and I had fairly good luck with an app I wrote for the Mac in 1984 - but that is history for me now.)
It's cos that would be like comparing apples with oranges...
yeah 45% thinner than the previous one! OMG!!! 45!!! that is a big number.
Perhaps that's the "would-be" part. The portion of people who solved it dropped off fairly heavily for the last level.
> Again, can't make this call until I play with the device.

Stated right after you appear to have made the call. Ballsy.

> The 4S has an A5X, I bet the performance benchmarks are negligible between the two.

I'll take that bet. "The iPhone 5's A6 processor appears to be roughly twice as fast as any chip in an existing iOS product, if results posted by Geekbench prove to be accurate." http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57513867-37/iphone-5-bench...
Hopefully other airlines will follow suit. Airlines find any reason they can to upsell passengers, so it is refreshing to see one that will be rolling out a service for free. This fact alone makes we want to support their business.
I'm pretty surprised the lightning connector isn't thunderbolt. Didn't the original iPod come with a firewire cable?
> it supports USB3, which is faster than lightning

According to the article, and it's probably true, the limitation is on phone's end, not the port.

>every phone with micro usb works on every device, dock

Lighting is cleary better for docks, it's two side, slide-in design with lock. I hate using micro-usb every time when I charge my kindle.
I'm trying to determine the difference between vague and worthless. I assume a lot of vague patents are worthless. But where is the line?
They're arranged in order of last used; swipe left to bring up another screen's worth. Swiping right brings up music controls. It's pretty straightforward, and in my opinion incredibly useful.
I was thinking that it could be covered by the commerce clause. But no, that prevents California as a state passing laws forbidding companies from doing business with Texas.

I don't think there are any federal laws demanding equal treatment of different polities by private (rather than state) actors.
Entrepreneurs using Kickstarter are pitching an idea and often getting money before they've executed more than a video and description.

The typical entrepreneurs of Hacker News are consistently told that an idea has little value and that actual execution is so much more. You must almost always build out at least a basic product before you have a hope of money trickling in or gaining investment.

I think any crankiness might be related to that.
Interestingly, lightning was the previous name of Hyper Transport (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTransport), which was used in Powermac G5 machines.
Anyone with a MagSafe 2 connector knows how inferior it is compared to the previous connector. I'm just hoping the lightning connector doesn't follow suit.
The iPhone 4 and 4s are pretty nice phones and hard to top. The only reason I might upgrade is to gift my 4 to a parent.
Sometimes it's worth skipping the new software entirely. I think my old iPhone 3G could have been the last phone running iOS3 when I finally upgraded to the 4S. I refused to "upgrade" an iPhone 3G to iOS4 and burden the phone with an OS that the hardware couldn't handle.

As far as the article goes, I wonder why Engadget didn't list the new maps as a con. Certainly sounds like one, even in their own words.
Inferior how? I've got one, and I've yet to have trouble with it. It comes out a little easier than the MagSafe 1, but that's a good thing with twin toddlers running about.
Base Building Blocks – Twitter Bootstrap for Drupal
I'd certainly agree that Mobile Safari is superior to the stock Gingerbread browser (and even the stock ICS browser, to a lesser extent). That being said, are you asserting that Mobile Safari is "hands down" better than other members of the current generation of mobile browsers (Chrome for Android, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile, etc.)? To me, that seems like a much, much harder case to make.
Show HN: Randall, a micro-shortner for personal use
Honey, We Blew Up Twitter for iPad
You can turn off photo sync in settings.
Yeah. Lots of things. I'm a complicated person full of contradictions, foibles, and flaws. For every door I open, another one closes. There's no way to do everything I want. So I follow the path that I think will lead to greatest long-term happiness, even if, in the short-term, I have to make sacrifices.
Ruby vs. Python - A n00b's perspective - PART 2
The entire iOS UI is an app picker. If you want an app picker in Android, click the menu button.

If you want more than that, buy an Android.
That's the workaround that's not really a patch that I was talking about. EMET is a very cumbersome system to work with in my experience, and not something a consumer would put up with.
Developing with 4/4S everyday I just can't help but notice the difference in performance between them. Now, 5 is 2+ times as fast as 4S it seems, so I would argue that for 4 owners it's a pretty good upgrade. For 4S, well, maybe it's not that exciting
> The problem is almost everyone I talk to in the startup scene thinks that an anonymous function/block == a closure.

This is a big pet peeve of mine - I keep seeing people use 'closure' as a synonym for 'lambda'. It's a simple error, but it bugs the hell out of me.

Then again, it's a dead giveaway that the person has never programmed in a functional paradigm, which may be a good thing to know, depending on the context.
The loss of transit directions is just critical. One of the most important features of my iPhone that I rely on every single day and they're ripping it out. I won't be upgrading to iOS 6 until they fix this.
My understanding of the term 'patent troll' is that it only applies to companies that own but do not actually use their patents to bring things to market themselves. Thus, the companies you mention don't qualify. Not to say that what those companies do is all peaches and cream but it's not patent trolling.
I disagree. After using and enjoying my iPhone 4 for quite a while my next phone is going to be android, to see how the other half lives. $10 in the play store and a few hours making sure all my settings are synched should be sufficient (and the synching I would have had to do anyway to go from iPhone 4 -> iPhone 5).
[Disclaimer: I have decades of first-hand knowledge of Hilary's awesomeness, going back to when we were CS students together in college. So yeah, I'm defending my friend.]

I'd like to ask you to think twice before publicly questioning someone's credentials like this. Whatever your intentions, picking on someone's CV just because of a blog post you disagree with is not only rude, but it sends a message -- particularly to women in tech -- that if they speak publicly, if they offer up their opinion, they will be attacked not about the content of their point but about their competence to speak at all. I believe this kind of attack has real consequences on our field, and I would urge everyone to show everyone the respect they'd want for themselves.

Dave
I've got a chrome extension called 'Hacker News Collapse'. With one click (on the parent comment spawning the low-quality discussion) I can hide the whole thread and move on to more interesting discussions.
If you specifically don't like engadget's review. Here's gdgt's aggregated reviews list:

http://gdgt.com/apple/iphone/5/

They'll add more to the list as they become available.
Well, according to wikipedia [1] we could have run over 8 Apollo programs for that cost.

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost
I'm not entirely sure what your distinction is between hardware and 'product.' I would argue that 'product' as you argued for should be a meeting of hardware, software and UI/UX. Any one (or two) of these items on it's own pales in comparison to a healthy balance of all three.
I wouldn't mind so much if I at least know what trains were at a certain station in NYC.

Its completely unhelpful.
Perhaps I did misinterpret. However the given reason for rejecting the app suggests there's something else going on behind the scenes. "Your app doesn't have enough native iOS functionality" is obviously BS when the app's primary navigation is a tableView, uses the accelerometer and in general is filled with native iOS functionality.

Maybe the app's use of Google maps was frowned upon because of some tense relationship between the two companies. So instead of rejecting the app for "using Google maps because we don't feel comfortable with that" the reviewer tried to find a crash. When they couldn't they gave me the hilarious BS reasons. Hence a pretense to reject the app could make the reviewer's life easier.
With Chrome on iOS, Google might have some wiggle room. For instance, in the G+ app, if you try to open a link in a browser, you get the option to open in either Safari or Chrome. Maybe they can do something similar for Maps?

I know that doesn't really solve the issue for other apps, but I bet a good amount of address-clicking comes from the browser.
Has that been confirmed? I've certainly seen that widely speculated, but haven't actually seen any confirmation that they indeed intend to do so.
Maybe it works if your name isn't Amazon, Google, B&N, Kobo, Sony and so on? (probably not)
Here's a good write up http://thetechblock.com/the-unibody-iphone. It's for WiFi/GPS.
My lecturer for 'Software Testing' at uni used to bring up that first issue. He was a total ball-breaker with assignments and exams, but you knew it was for a good reason.
I think the nazis stole the bird iconography from the romans.
I've been using the new Maps for a few months since it appeared in the first beta builds. I live in Sydney, Australia and the search struggles to find places. It's not so bad if you put in the entire address, but a search for a store or location regularly returns nothing.

I've noticed that this has been improving lately. When it first came out a search for "Apple Store Chatswood" (2km from my work) would return stores in the USA. Now it returns the correct destination.

It's still not a trustworthy source of directions and I regularly have to use Google Maps via the browser.

So while this is very frustrating, I can see it improving so am not too worried long term.

Mind you if Google Maps was an App in the Store I'd buy it asap.
The pervious MagSafe ran "flushily" out of the back of the macbook, the new one juts out and is easily dislodged. I'm I the only one that detests the new MagSafe?
Am I the only one who believes, after reading this article, that Gerard Bakardy is a creation of Teller's?
Sadly, gmail embraced, extended and extinguished mail.
K9 Mail is the unofficial community fork.
It's trivial to become rich? Good one. #RomneyEncore

Average stock broker salary, $55k per annum. http://www1.salary.com/stock-broker-Salary.html
You're right, that's to bring up the menu, but the Jelly Bean action is the power and volume down buttons, which on virtually any newer Android phone is far easier to press than the corresponding buttons on the iPhone.
Feature. gNow is a useless CPU/network waster.
Sure. And I used to have a phone with a hateful connector that had a glow in the dark arrow on one side of the plastic housing. Treo maybe?

It worked. I was happy that it was there, and I thought it was clever-ish at the time. But it was more clever than smart. Smart is designing a connector that is easy to plug in, aligns itself, and can be done in either polarity.

That's what Apple did -- the obviously right thing that no one else had bothered to do.

Also, consider that micro-USB sucks for auto-insertion (docks, etc). It wasn't designed for it. Apple has never been shy abut breaking with common practice if they see a benefit for the product, and a few ruffled feathers won't stop them.
Do Too Many Lawyers Spoil The Economy? [1994]
I've been disappointed with maps, but would be incredbily surprised if Google doesn't release a stand-alone iOS version of their maps app within days or weeks. Whether it will include turn-by-turn directions is an unanswered question in my mind, but it would at least solve public-transportation and street-view needs. I suppose you'd still be stuck using Apple's maps for any in-app mapping development unless you can work out a deal with another provider or roll your own OSM implementation.
"As anyone who has tried the iOS6 betas can confirm"... by violating their NDA and confirming issues with _beta_ software?

I'm guessing, myself, that the Apple Maps are going to be crappy compared to google for at least a year, or two. And it's probably going to be half a decade before we see even rough parity on their routing (particularly walking/transit).

But lets be critical about their released product and respect the Beta envelope until it's opened.
I'm not saying that your claim is wrong, I'm just saying that your claim is meaningless. What's inside the machine doesn't matter at all, the suitability of the machine for the tasks performed on it is what matters.
I am also reminded or Light Table.

With an ecosystem like kick starter somethings are going to work and some aren't.

Also don't forget projects in other areas like designing, furniture, games etc.
Imagine what Elon Musk could do with that kind of money.

Either terraforming mars or we might make it to Alpha Centauri by the next century.
this article is almost unreadably poorly written
Okay, I kind of assumed it was a joke, but I'm too young to know all the history. Thought maybe I missed something.... Thanks for the info!
My mother has an iPad1, an iPad 2, and an original Kindle Fire. She has no problems with any of them, but when I gave her a Samsung Focus Windows Phone last Christmas (I'd gotten it as a freebie) she tried to use it, and got frustrated with the UI to the point of wanting to throw it across the room. This was just doing something simple like editing a contact that was already on the phone.

I ended up buying her a refurbished iPhone 3GS and she loves it to bits.
The Choice Of Metaphor: Why Apple Will Have To Make A TV App
+1 right on, do what you feel is right.
"then I declare software dead, since it costs $0 to manufacture software"

Please send me the name and contact of the dev shop you are using.
Are you trying to push HN into the trash heap too? You comment is wholly inappropriate.
Key differentiation here is manufacture, not design.
Goes without saying that pure MDMA and "Ecstasy" as many people know it (from a dealer, friend) are two very different things.
I like how the Lightning jack has its contacts exposed, making it prone to shorts and other mishaps. The name is appropriate!

(with most other connectors, the powered side is recessed or the contacts are protected somehow)