skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mobile phones used to have 4-year development cycles, but due to consumer pressure and CEOs making ridiculous promises, the development cycle has been compacted into as little as 6 months. This is not enough time for accurate testing on all fronts (variables double out in the field).

Furthermore, over-the-air updates are not used due to hacking. Though there could be copious amounts of security, one fail would mean complete loss of mobile communication in large areas, if not nationwide.

Features cannot be cut since the products will not sell. Apple could afford it only because it was riding the success of the iPod - other, unpopular companies cannot do the same. While I agree that there needs to be a better balance of features and quality, there isn't too much leeway especially because handset manufacturers are doing especially bad in this economic downturn.

I agree transparency is a great thing - but it may also cause a PR nightmare. There needs to be great discretion in revealing problems especially in a field where consumers understand little. Discussing problems may only make consumers more disgruntle or panicked.

Operators (Networks) control everything. EVERYTHING. They choose which phones are allowed and which ones are not. Again, Apple had a lot of leverage due to their popularity, but ultimately lost out to AT&T control. It isn't as simple as "keeping operators out" - laws would need to be instated and Networks would have to yield control (they definitely won't go easily).
Lessons for startups: User behavior analytics
So Americans enjoy no better standing than Canadians, whose pensions funds such as CPP also invest heavily in the US stock market, and Salvadorans, who run their economy in US dollars?
I second The Dish
I understand the issue you are trying to get at, but I am still unclear as to the actual deliverable.

It seems like your idea is a mashup of a human-powered element (think Amazon's Mechanical Turk, ChaCha, or Mahalo Answers) and a computer generated part (think Google or Artificial Neural Networks/Machine Learning). With the computer generated part, you can assign weights or penalties to establish some "worth" (e.g in my Twitter example, you can assign more points to Robert Scoble's tweets than mine). You can also try to simulate context. (e.g If a person said they "bought fish" did they actually buy fish or did they misspell "Phish"?)

So here is my next question. Which specific problem are you trying to address? Being as clear as possible will help you move to the next step. No one on Hacker News is looking to steal ideas...I think we all have some "revolutionary" project we are currently working on. :)
Another iPhone App Sold: MindMaker Goes To MindMeister
ASP.NET isn't the worst technology to use for a startup. There's lots of useful prebuilt components for it (commercial usually, but the value is still there).

Microsoft is also offering some pretty good hosting platforms for startups, and usually you can pick up licenses for low cost. EC2 now is also offering Windows instances for easy cloud hosting.

That said, I've done ASP.NET professionally for about 5 years, and 2 years ago switched to Ruby / Rails / Merb and have found the transition to be a huge improvement. The open source world has a better atmosphere, and I believe better talent overall.

The worst thing about ASP.NET is the corporate culture, where unskilled VB coders adopt it, and use it to build really badly developed websites.

Also, ASP.NET pretty much requires Windows. Trying to develop it on Mono, or on a Mac (with Vmware) is an effort in futility. If you go ASP.NET, make sure you're comfortable with Windows. This was one issue that I had a major problem with. Command line scripting and build tools in Windows are generally aweful. This will limit any good developer's productivity.
I was a tech journalist and an analyst for many years and there is one point that is implied, but not mentioned explicitly:

* If you can talk knowledgably and interestingly about the the industry and a bit of technology, apart from your specific products do so - if asked. Journalists are always on the look out for knowledgable people who can tell them little bits of information about what is going on in their patch. It is fairly easy to build up a decent rapport with an journalist if you're a domain expert.

This one was not mentioned at all:

* Know the journalist. Not all journalists are created equal, so find out a bit about what he/she has written previously. Is (s)he a tech geek? interested in the business side? After user case-stories? Where are they in terms of experience - a new staff writer who would welcome a bit of hand-holding in the technology, or an old lag who knows the industry backwards?

Knowing this can make all the difference.

In terms of showing copy, I never did. But if you have someone who you think is a bit wobbly on some aspects of the story it does no harm to say: "If you want me to have a quick look through once your done and check the detail, it's not a problem".

Regarding the advice: "journalists are generally not out to trick you or trip you up." Well actually some of us are, a bit. Particularly when presented with a glossy, to-good-to-be-true presentation, the natural inclination is to look for problems. We don't (well I didn't) like writing puff pieces. So we'll use our smarts to say "well what about this?".

Try to be straight forward when answering these kind of questions: Someone saying: "yes, you're right that is a potential problem, we are looking at it and in the meantime there's a workaround that - while not elegant - does the trick" ALWAYS works better than blushing, getting aggressive or whatever.

Finally - don't try power hand-shakes. During the '80s bloody U.S. execs always turned hand-shakes into an arm wrestling match. Occassionally, I just used to say: "ouch" it always put them off their stride wonderfully.
I've been looking for a version of this with English subtitles for a while now. Do you have any suggestions?
Wait, how do we know that Venkman isn't a legitimate scientist, again? Because he's insufficiently skeptical about ghosts? But in the universe of Ghostbusters ghosts physically exist!

If anything, the part of Ghostbusters that strains my credulity is that in their universe there seem to be scientists who don't believe in ghosts. You'd think that the accumulated evidence would be pretty overwhelming by the 1980s!
I love netflix, I also have been really happy with their netflix streaming service... If netflix keeps leading the way I doubt the movie industry will end up as screwed as the music industry.
'Rogue' Googlephone App Raises Questions About Android's Open Policy
I wouldn't say WebForms was meant to make it easier for Windows Forms developers to build web apps.

I think it was intended to make it easy for Visual Basic developers (which is a huge market btw) to develop web apps.
I'm a libertarian. I'm with you.

I'm just saying it's what most conservatives believe in.
I seriously wanted to name my first startup "Setec Astronomy", but the business people I worked with complained that it had nothing to do with data security (we were working on airgap software for secure file storage).
I agree with the comment above. Start small, maybe your neighborhood mall. You could probably try and get the mall management on board since you will be promoting the businesses that lease from them.

Also get those businesses to promote your service in their stores by establishing a relationship with each of them and in return, give them incentive for using your service.
Nationalize the banks?
When you abstract away the web as .Net does you also miss out on the subtleties - e.g. "Postback" - the .Net function that stores server state in an encoded string which it embeds in a form on the web page and restores state. It makes the web seem friendly to ex-Windows programmers but ignores the HTTP RFCs and ends up as big non-REST-ful mess. .Net is full of features that make it easy for Windows programmers to avoid learning how to use the web properly.
Report to Obama Calls for Startups to Have Less Red Tape
Probably because there is no reason for it to exist if you can use Photoshop... I'm surprised there are that many posts about FW actually, I don't know anyone who uses it and I tend not to install it even.
Trips on commercial airlines takes hours longer, mostly due to security precautions.
Russell Brand is an English actor, comedian, and television and radio personality. He is known for his striking fashion style which he considers "S&M; Willy Wonka". In October of 2008, Brand resigned from his BBC Radio 2 program following a controversial prank call to actor Andrew Sachs that resulted in his suspension.
--Mahalo.com
Well, to be fair, I wouldn't hear about it, because I do not make >20million a year :)

I wonder how advertising works for the super-super-duper rich?
I lasted 15 seconds before raging and closing... Because I had 16 tabs open at the time and it took a while to find...
well, I think this makes sense for interviews; Of course, you should have the person come in and interact before finalizing it, but I think that for most technical positions, you will get a better candidate if you judge them based on how they answer questions, not on how well they interview (which is largely a test of 'charisma under pressure') I personally try to do this because I find it easier to overcome my own biases and make a rational decision this way.

Discrimination based on writing style (and correctness) will continue, and personally, I think that's fine. I think it's rational to weight a good writer over someone who can barely communicate in text.

If you are a business that operates mostly on voice communication, well, you are going to be a more homogeneous organization. Most people feel about accents the way I feel about poor writing skills.
".Net is full of features that make it easy for Windows programmers to avoid learning how to use the web properly." Upvoted for quote.
I don't have a pension and I don't invest all that much money in the US stock market. I am perfectly happy to invest in other countries and changes to US corporate law would have little impact on my finances.
Mozilla gives a $100K grant towards an open video format for the web
"First, he picks small venues where he can do rapid, low-risk experiments with new material. In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between 40 and 50 appearances at a small venue called the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey"
Just going by public traffic numbers - traffic to cricket.com seems negligible when up against cricbuzz.com cricinfo.com etc.

You know what's also quite telling, for example here http://blog.harjtaggar.com/?p=43

You don't even mention the product or your users. It's as if they are an afterthought. Seems to all be about the networking shmoozing etc

And then in the acquisition there's spin to suggest that auctomatic is somehow relevant to affiliate marketing or something... it's simply bizarre.

(Don't mean this as an attack, it just seemed to me a completely surreal situation).
Oh my god this is funny, the article gets all the pictures wrong!
Actually, I'm not so overwhelmed by it. Taught me we can pack more on a page.
I think the point is "Be yourself. Don't try and use phrases that other people in the area or industry use simply because they use them."
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/
How are you going to make money ?
Looks like it raises questions about eMobiStudio's competency to me.
The OP's argument is that it will increase productivity. If it pays itself off and makes the company a net gain will you still be upset?
If MS did not gain an advantage from using H1B's in the US it would not go though the trouble of getting H1B's. The level of corruption in India is a significant problem and MS would much rather do business in the US but they don't want to pay market rates for US workers. So they try and have their cake and eat it two by transporting workers to the US system.
Fantastic read, my favorite part: "This led me to believe that real science was occurring, because it didn't seem like anyone was having fun."
This is the worst list ever.
Personal Rapid Transit - Without The Car
It's older than that.
I much prefer "Triumph of the Nerds."

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/

The real Gates, Jobs, etc. are far more compelling, interesting, and charismatic than actors trying to portray them.
The key to Yelp was their content acquisition strategy. Yelp is of course the classic chicken and the egg type website, so they needed clever ways to get things rolling.

They incentivized them with things like private dinners, free dinners, and inside information that only the top Yelpers could see for a time.

Another trick was the founders of Yelp used their site extensively - if you want to get into the content game, be prepared to write some content - if just to demonstrate what your site should look like.

Putting aside Yelp's strategies, here's my number one launch idea for you - do a small launch before you do a big launch.

We've been working on www.trailbehind.com since April, and our first launch was May 1. By the time we have a big launch this summer, in time for the hiking season, we are hoping to avoid the flameout problems of big launches.

Remember, a Techcrunch hit comes and goes, but a Google search is forever.
You already had the best (Primer)
After that, in no particular order:

Sneakers. Brilliant film.

Hackers - I think it's old enough now to be allowed but it was really laughable at the time - in the kind of way swordfish will be almost respected 20 years from now.

Wargames is the Hackers of the early 80s.

Pirates of Silicon Valley is also worth a watch.

Three Days of the Condor is a fantastic film if you're even slightly old school.

The nines is one of those films you'll either get and love or won't - I loved it.

Battle Royale is an amazing film that happens to have some hacking in it.

2001 is the ultimate hacker film, even though there's not much that you could associate hacking with it. The way it's put together, the dedication to realism, the way the special effects were implemented a year before man went to the moon defines it as a hacker film for me, although YMMV.
This one is kind of cool: http://www.engr.washington.edu/facresearch/highlights/ee_con...
John Carmack on Patents
Parens let you have multiple expressions in one line, which indentation alone could not really express (except perhaps in a Haskell-like with currying, . and $ operators, etc).

For example, I don't see how (map (fn [x] (+ x 2)) (concat (take 5 my-series) etc...)) could be broken down with indentation alone without taking quite a few extra lines.
Multi-staging environment for Rails using Capistrano and mod_rails
"conservative" is about far more than just taxes. If you want to compare government spending and fiscal responsibility then Democrats are by far the more "conservative" party. The modern use of the term has far more to do with preserving the status quo from 100 years ago than it does about any specific ideology.

EX: The ban on abortion, the free market pre great depression, "small government", banning stem cell research, anti environmentalism, which really started around the great depression. I expect the "conservative" movement in 100 years will look back at the good old days of the hippie movement with longing.
Why bad taste rules in business endeavors
Eh, why not? It's not like we don't have room for one more.
I just saw this recently, and the one problem I had with it is the actor playing Buckaroo (Peter Weller) is maybe the worst actor in the movie.

Having John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd in secondary roles was amazing; they really go all out to push the intentional corniness over the top. (Lithgow's intentionally bad fake Italian accent is wonderful; Lloyd, as usual, really does seem like someone not of Earth; and I still don't understand why Jeff Goldblum spends most of the movie dressed like a cowboy from a 1940s serial.)

Having so much great acting around him made watching Peter Weller kind of painful to watch.
I've spent some time digging through the .NET internals (through books and code) and have/had a good familiarity with IIS and the HTTP pipeline Microsoft has set up.

ASP.NET is an oddball. It's roots, as many have pointed out, were to make web programming look like windows programming. That's the crappy part.

The good part is that there is a heckuva lot of power under the hood if you take the time to learn the mechanics of things. I can move from a drag-n-drop GUI programming of the web into all kinds of other things depending on my whims. I can go XAML, or Silverlight. I can go straight functional with F# or some of the other functional languages for .NET.

And it all runs inside the same IDE with IntelliSense and debugging and machine-level inspection if I want it. And all the applications, no matter what their language, can easily interoperate with each other. And if I stick to ASP.NET 1.1, I can run on *nix boxes all day long.

The list goes on.

Please don't misunderstand me. I don't have the religion, so I'm not trying to pump it up more than it is. It has real problems as an architecture because the winform idea doesn't fit into web programming. Having said that, however, a good programmer can crank out ASP.NET applications as fast as anybody else in any other platform. For exploratory web application programming it's on par with any other platform. The new team stuff looks pretty cool.

I find that most people who dis ASP.NET failed at learning it or are just blowing off steam. To say the same thing a different way, by the time you've wasted years figuring out where all the alligators are, you don't see what the big deal is any more.

Biggest plus? I can almost go to Seven-Eleven and pick up good ASP.NET programmers. The market has a lot of them (cheap). Biggest minus? Just because a bunch of stuff is hidden doesn't mean it goes away! Great ASP.NET programmers can crank out Javascript, CGI, and StoredProc code with the best of them. By "helping", Microsoft makes it a real pain to get under the hood and take total control (but it's very possible to do once you get the hang of it)

BTW, your example? You drag a label onto the form, double-click on it and type one line of code in. I'd argue that it only takes one line of code (and about 5 seconds) to accomplish. The rest is framework fluff.
"E is the highway, not the vehicle, we do not need traction." Well I would assume a highway is definitely built for vehicles, hence needs the traction to justify the investment.
Look around - somewhere in there is a grey lozenge/button with 'Get the NOW Widget' I have it in my OS X Dashboard now, god help me.
My side-project, ClipClipSave (clipclipsave.com), let's small businesses create printable coupons.

Maybe we can team up in some way–incentivize participation by offering some sort of discount.
Please spare me the RTFM comments; I am sick and not feeling well enough tonight to dig into some huge research project. I simply would like to know how a company like Youtube functions. Do they have to pay for the right to use their video software or is the software currently available for anyone?
How committees suck the life out of software...
My wife and I just traded in our cable subscription ($65/month) for Netflix ($12/month) + XBox 360 for tv streaming ($299) and let's face it, XBox 360 duties as well. Streaming from a USB hard drive (already owned). Plus Christmas gifts basically covered the XBox.

One month in, no regrets.

I don't think the video industry is "dead", but it sure is in for an upheaval.

Netflix's streaming library is "meh", but if you have Netflix streaming be sure to poke into the "Starz" library; they seem to have to keep it visually separate for legal reasons and it has a surprising amount of moderately good/recent stuff in it. If you see reviews from before the Starz edition, it's certainly gotten less meh since then.

I would characterize the Netflix streaming library as: If you have a specific video in mind and you want to know if it can be streamed, the answer is "no". If you want to stream a video and you wonder if there's something good worth streaming, the answer is "yes". That's actually progress, all things considered.

Now, if either Netflix or Microsoft (XBox 360) cut a deal with Hulu, I'm set. And I expect the odds of at least one of those occurring in six months to be better than 50/50.
GATTACA might be worth adding to the list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
I read the whole thing and I thought you were about to quit doing it too.
So let's say you have a CS background and want to pick up python today - is it worth it to read up on the 2.0 stuff or just go right for 3.0 seeing as 3.0 is "backwards incompatible"? Is there a mass exodus to 3.0 happening or are there going to be a lot of people (e.g. researchers in other disciplines whose life is only peripherally programming) who are going to stick with the 2.0 that they already know and love?

And is this (http://docs.python.org/3.0/) the best place to look for 3.0 learning material or is it better to do the Dive Into Python (for v2.0) thing then figure out the 3.0 differences?
If there were a TechCrunch that covered TechCrunch they would dump out a headline focusing on the closer- "Arrington announces he is going to shut down TechCrunch".
We're going to offer premium features for a monthly fee.
That's a possibility. =)
email me at nick [at] feedbackjar [dot] com
As a libertarian, I think you've misread conservatives.

Conservatives believe in induction: that things that work the same way over time have a tendency to continue working the same way. That humans are basically good people but flawed. Liberals believe in experimentation: that the human spirit is basically flawed but can be perfected through the right combination of experimentation.

Burke is usually claimed as the first conservative. He was mostly a shill for the ruling class in Great Britain, but, to the dismay of his adversaries, turned out to be right in a large number of his predictions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke)

Both terms have varied so much over the last 30 years as to almost be meaningless, however. JFK? He was for big tax cuts to spur the economy. Nixon? Froze prices. Politicians (and parties) that were "supposed" to be either conservative or liberal basically abandoned their principles whenever they thought they could get votes.

People emotionally attach to the party, and then bandy about "liberal" and "conservative" as labels to shut conversation down. It has little to do with the actual philosophies of conservatism or liberalism (either classic liberalism or modern liberalism)

(Sorry. Political junkie here. Couldn't resist providing the information)

And long live libertarianism!
The pronoun "one" has mostly fallen out of use ("One starts to feel...") and the usual substitute in modern English is "you". It doesn't literally mean that the writer is talking about the reader.
That code is really bad. Dunno about you, but to me this handcrafted entanglement looks like the crap that any professional programmer should be ashamed of:

if ( .. )
{
for ( .. )
{
label:
...
}
}
else
{
if ( .. )
{
..
}
else
goto label;
..
}

The actual code is even worse than this as there's a second goto that jumps from the top for into one of else blocks at the bottom from where the control can go back to for via another goto ... I sort of can see how this code came about, but there is absolutely no excuse for checking in something this f*cked up.

If they wanted to show off, they should've just used the coroutines :-)
They are not PhD students, more something like postdocs. The only one of them without PhD is a target of jokes because of this.
"# Have been founded and generating revenue by the first week of 2005, and therefore able to show four full calendar years of revenue"

Not many HN companies can actually apply for it.
My point is that there is no slippery slope. There is a very clear dividing line: forced labor and slavery. H1B's are on one side of that line, women trapped in caged compounds are on the other.