skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Listening to Steve talk, he's very upfront that there is no blueprint for creating a successful business/startup. His advice is not meant to be taken as "here's a list of steps, do them, and you'll be successful." His advice is more like a set of guidelines you'll likely want to pay attention to (or at least knowingly disagree with).

With respect to asking potential customers what they want, he's said specifically that you should do that, but don't take their answer and create exactly that. In his view, there's an "art" to startups that involves taking feedback and turning it into something that's useful. For example, the iPod/iTunes ecosystem wasn't something mp3 player users' would've come up with, but they probably would say, "I want it to be easier to get music my music on my mp3 player" and that's something Apple definitely knew.

There's definitely ambiguity around what you should asking potential customers and I don't think he'd claim there's a right answer about what to ask or not to ask. But it seems pretty likely that talking to people is worthwhile activity.

That said, he also admits there are exceptions to every piece of advice. You could avoid talking to anyone and still be very successful. It's just something he's seen correlated with success.

I'm not sure this is where I remember most of this from, but I think this podcast [1] has most of what I'm paraphrasing.

[1] http://startupsuccesspodcast.com/2012/02/show-134-prof-steve...
I think the big problem is juries. A group of random individuals isn't going to wade through the technical details well.

However there's a right to a jury trial. So I propose the following.

Juries for patent trials should be paid dramatically more (in the neighbourhood of what lawyers get) and selected from a list of volunteers according to criteria that the two sides argue over.

The idea being that we want competent people to fight to get on juries rather than come up with an excuse not too.
I'm curious to understand why only Ivy Bridge CPUs are affected, especially if this is a software accounting/refcounting bug. Also, there was talk about this not being an 10.8.2 bug, but a result of an EFI firmware upgrade. Anyone have any insight?
I've been frustrated by this problem also. For enterprise sales you really need an experienced salesman with a large Rolodex of contacts in your niche.
I get the lean startup "talk to customers first" thing, and it seems perfect for so many startups. However, I can't help feeling there are some cases where you are selling execution not innovation

Talking to potential customers first is still an excellent thing to do. Find out, in their view, what the pain-points are in the current solutions. If you can't find any, you will have a difficult time marketing your product.

You have an advantage here: the customer is already familiar with what the products do (and, more importantly, what they don't do). And furthermore they already have a sales process for buying the product. Be sure you ask them about these things. Then you will know what to build.

Why are these things good for startups to do? Because that's what the big boys do. Suppose bigPharm inc has an idea for a nasal delivery device for medicine for treating osteoporosis found (primarily) in elderly ladies. Who wouldn't rather have a nasal delivery than a shot? Can't miss.

However, they won't spend a penny until they talk to the docs. Turns out, elderly patients don't mind shots. They get a million of them. Now, make a cheaper medicine--that's a different story.

Decision: product scrapped.

BTW- good to talk to the insurance companies too in this case.
First, this was not written by Steve Blank, but rather Bob Dorf.

In any case, I completely disagree with this notion that customers are some complex, mysterious enigmatic force that require a laboratory and several months of conversations to build a successful product for.

I think the best advice is to start by building something useful. People pay for utility. If you can make tasks significantly easier, or enable people to do things they couldn't previously do, they will pay you. The sad reality is that most startups suck because their products simply don't meet that criteria. They come up with an idea and just start building it, without actually using it themselves. A good sign you've got a winner is if you yourself find that you miss not being able to use it. If you don't, then don't expect anybody else to pay for it.

All that said, talking to people accomplishes nothing. People have no idea what they want. They are typically followers and do what they are told and use what is put in front of them. That's why the best products are typically not built by large corporate research departments, but rather single innovators solving a single problem with which they are intimately familiar.
This is a really terrible article. "iOS 6 is a disaster, but it's not just maps.. it's also maps and maps and maps". Seriously? The contents of this article constitutes a "disaster"?
It's not anyone's fault but yours if you reuse a password. But now the straw men will come out of the woodwork, declaring that password reuse is somehow a good thing.

All this shit started because someone who does not understand security thought it was horrible that a local program might store a password locally in plain text. There are a billion local programs that store passwords in a reversible way. Know why? Because sending a non-mac password is the same if it's hashed or not.

Blame whoever you want to blame, I don't care. But don't tell me Pandora is responsible for the total security of every moron on the internet, either.
Launching a startup in SF (reaction gifs)
It is always good to tell the truth; the carefully edited truth.
Apple: bounty program for fixing iOS6 map woes?
This has nothing to do with lawyers. If you talked every criminal lawyer in the country out of prosecuting murders, it wouldn't make murder legal. The system needs to be reformed through legislation, which has everything to do with politicians.
Citation reliability
I know you're being funny, but for everyone else here's their spiel on saving your passwords locally: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords

The default and most secure setting is to not save passwords.
Introduction: Using diff and patch
The commands diff and patch form a powerful combination. They are widely used to get differences between original files and updated files in such a way that other people who only have the original files can turn them into the updated files with just a single patch file that contains only the differences. This tutorial explains the basics of how to use these great commands.
The alternative is age-based bullying, so, mu.
Oh noes! you mean my hacker mom will be able to log onto my pandora account and listen to my Yes/Supertramp mix station!!??

Ok, admittedly, bad form on pandora's part but seems pretty low impact to me.
Let us ignore Maps, as we've all had a pleasant and merry chat about it and focus on the rest.

Siri/iMessage/iTunes Store Connection Issues are pretty easy to understand (although annoying), they use Apple's backend server infrastructure which is getting swamped by iOS6 downloads, iPhone 5 registrations, iCloud backup creation/restores etc. This doesn't give Apple a free pass, core services shouldn't be getting impacted in this manner, but saying iOS6 is a mess because they've had high load is a terrible thing. That's like saying "My mobile phone provider is a disaster because on New Years Eve it takes ages to send a text", which is annoying and they should prepare for but it's a thing and it's not a disaster.

I've been pleasantly surprised with how stable iOS6 has been, it's had no flaws and no rough edges aside from Maps. The march of cloud based services pushes on, and we'll often find services like iMessage will have issues.
What a lof of drama. Apple knows the maps they use now are inferior, that's obvious.

The point is: their contract with Google ended and they had to come up with something. I find it interesting how everybody is blaming Apple when the core issue is that Google retains a monopoly on cartography data. If you wanted to create anything with a map you would be on the mud too, since Google doesnt contribute to OSM.

What will probably happen is that Google will release their own map, with ads. Tge same situation of the YouTube app.
I would love to look at the docs and tutorials but I keep getting:

An error has occurred: {"code":"ENOTFOUND","errno":"ENOTFOUND","syscall":"getaddrinfo"}

Either way, this looks like an awesome product and I can't wait to learn more.
What are imaginary numbers?
Yieldbot Tech Talks - from MongoDB to key/value
The Amazing Colossal Science Fiction Ketchup
5 Reasons Your Community Isn't Growing
Construction toys are gendered. You just don't notice because it is the standard.
How to build your own dedicated Pandora radio
I don’t understand why Apple made such blatant mistake.

Originally the clock app wasn’t included on the iPad.

This version of clock is well made, simple to use as this kind of app should be. Not rocket science but alternatives version are clearly missing on the Appstore.
(I looked for one of them that could replicate the one I have on my Android 4 Galaxy S2).

(Re)introducing the Clock app is great, but borrowing the design of very well known clock is a even better.

It fit the trend of Apple reunding well known texture and design. If that trend is good or bad is another question fueled by love and hate feelings.

But Mondaine, the owner of that clock design, have licensing option already in place :
http://www.mondaine.com/private-label/

Apple could have just bought the licence of this design. End of story.

Apple could also have taken this opportunity to ask worldwide watchmaker to give their clockface designs for the official Apple Clock application.

I am sure every watchmaker in the world would have even paid fro that privilege. After all they are all spending millions in magazine adverts.

I don’t understand the position of Apple just after the Samsung lawsuit.

The result is to show Apple being arrogant once more and it put the company in a mismatch branding situation that could have been avoided.

Clearly somebody at Apple is not doing his / her job.

We’re talking about a Clock application here! Not Maps which is another fiasco much much more difficult to fix.

That kind of decision never been the role of Steve Jobs. Who else is missing at Apple ?
Typica damage control PR bullcrap that contains lots of words that say nothing.
Sounds like you are in the UK (Ordnance Survey) but I wrote a mashup to combine mapping layers and provide other utilities (slope analysis etc) for my own planing of off-road bike, hike and ski trips:

http://www.hillmap.com

It mostly covers the US and there are a lot of legal issues surrounding the different layers meaning it is difficult to run it as anything but a free site which may be why more people don't do this.
Equity, no matter how it is structured or offered to you, is a gamble.

Always get cash, and take equity if it's offered (so long as there aren't any strings attached).

Cash will pay your bills today

Lotto tickets may never pay you a dime, and can be a drain on you emotionally if you're constantly expecting one to pay off.
My wife works for a recruitment agency and lying in the resume (especially about work experience) happens sometimes. Why people do it? Because if you are not an expert on anything and want to break into sales or lower management, for example, your CV might compete with another 100-150 CV's. So you need to have some good-looking work experience in there, otherwise you are not considered for interview.

But it usually doesn't work, since she gives the interviewee very specific questions about his work experience, so the laying is quickly discovered.
I'm not sure why only Ivy Bridge.

I can say though that the EFI firmware didn't cause the bug, but in fact the 10.8.2 software upgrade did.
Everything has an effect on others. The question is whether those effects are the result of voluntary actions. As far as I can tell, nobody is being forced to invest on Wall Street. Everyone is free to keep their money in gold or under their mattress.

Now, if everyone chose to do those things, that would have a huge negative effect on society, massively greater than anything Wall Street has ever inflicted. But that doesn't imply we should regulate how much people are allowed to buy gold or stuff their mattresses.
One of the big oil companies snatched up long-term leases for potential oil-shale land in Michigan. They made deals with hundreds of parties, locking up the land in exchange for a payment due a year later. Of course the payments were never made. It was all done through a shell that was dissolved when the oil company decided against the idea.
Before they rocked the OSM world, they rocked the Drupal world :)

It is great to see they continue to innovate at a very high pace! :)
So the question is, how do we make sure lawyers don't want to? (without going to jail).

Don’t get caught. ;-)

But seriously, there only seems to be one answer that is likely to work in practice: change the risk/reward structure so that patent trolling isn’t profitable any more.

One obvious approach would be making fewer things subject to patent protection in the first place. You could explicitly exclude whole categories like software or business method parents, assuming you could define them clearly enough. You could raise the general bar for granting/defending patents in terms of originality and non-obviousness. You could leave the standards the same in principle but apply more robust checking for prior art and/or a more thorough consultation to determine obviousness before awarding a patent. Each of these has costs in different places: principally, the legislature, the courts, and the patent office, respectively.

Another approach would be to look at the types and magnitudes of consequences that result if you lose a patent case, either by being found to infringe someone else’s patent or by claiming that someone infringes your patent and failing to win the case. For example, what if the remedies available to someone who owned a patent but who was not actively working to exploit that patent in some reasonable way themselves were made dramatically less than the remedies available to someone who was using the patent system “properly” to secure exclusive rights while they worked hard to exploit a real invention? What if there were a meaningful cost to bringing a patent case and losing not just because the court invalidated your original patent but also because the court actively determined that the original patent had been [some legal specification of “obviously abusing the system”], a kind of patent case analogy for dismissing with prejudice?
Thanks for a good summary, can I put it as tl;dr on top of my post? ;)
Unfortunately, the flies in the face of the principles of trial law. The goal,in a trial, is that the jury is a blank slate, which exists only to judge what the counsels say. The only facts they can consider are those they hear in the trial from witnesses, and exhibits introduced. To have a jury of experts completely defeats this point; a lot of people argue the recent Apple v. Samsung ruling was invalid precisely because the foreman was an 'expert'.

There is already legislation coming into effect in the US which will give parties 9 months to contest any patent, through the patent office. This should help solve the problem of lay juries deciding the validity of recent patents.

http://ipspotlight.com/2011/09/19/changes-to-u-s-patent-law-...
This article is definitely overblown but I will say this is the first time in recent memory where I can remember there being this much frustration with a mainstream Apple product. Many friends have either avoided upgrading to iOS6 or have been relatively unhappy with the upgrade. This is a problem of expectations more than anything but expectations are high because every Apple product launch in the last few years (that I can remember) has been smooth as silk.
Odd how 3G could handle it, until a day or two ago.
Looking at the terms & conditions, any algorithms that the users create become the intellectual property of Quantblocks. Is this just a tool to help users or is it a tool for the company to source the best algorithms?
I meant a physical wall clock, not an app. I suppose I could mount and iPad on my wall and run the app, but I don't want to spend several hundred dollars on a clock that will sue me.
The Drug That Never Lets Go
Didn't see any contact info in your profile.

Just wanted to say, keep it up. It gets a lot better if you keep plugging away at it. Was in your spot 7 years ago, finished college at 34 and life is amazing now. Good luck.
This is such a silly comment. They will shovel truckloads of cash and labor at it, that's how it will get fixed.
There are a bunch of settings where you can define the level of tracking. The state tracking is very low overhead though because it's on demand. So if you run your asp server through code perspective and then deploy it, you can at any time connect to it with the viewer and check out the current state information for all the classes.
Black iPhone 5 Anodized Aluminum Susceptible to Scratching?
I love this post as the line for the new iPhone at the SF Apple Store is wrapped up Stockton, down Ellis, all the way to Powell
nothing really changed with .1, they added some placebo fixes, like xml import/export (except that its a new xml format that only represents trivial edits and thus is useless).
Want smaller estimates? Get your team to lean to the left
Why? Wouldn't you like seeing ads for, eg, Python events? New Relic? Heroku?

That's what I mean by ads.
I don't mean to disparage other Ruby application servers, but this is why I use Passenger. It's not that I believe other Ruby application servers aren't good, or that their authors don't understand Unix as well as the guys at Phusion, but there's a real dedication to stability and predictability inside Phusion that I don't see elsewhere.

You can acheive the same results with other app servers, but you're going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a lot more confidence in Passenger's solution than I do my own.
China’s Huawei Going Mobile? (Andriod)
Jannie Luong, Public Relations Senior Manager at Huawei told intelNews in an e-mail statement: “Huawei will not be launching a proprietary operating system in the foreseeable future”, adding, “our innovation strategy is governed by our commitment to open collaborations that benefit customers and consumers. To this end, we will continue to work hand-in-hand with our industry partners to bring together hardware and software that best meet consumers’ needs”.

While Huawei is publicly denying the intention to build a proprietary mobile operating system, it is interesting to note that it is not denying it could be building a mobile operating system entirely. The key point in Huawei’s statement may just be the fact that it will not be proprietary.
The question quickly becomes: is it building an open mobile operating system? Or is Huawei developing one based on Android? Huawei replied to such questions by explaining, “we will not be launching our own OS. We’ll continue to work with all operation systems.” Android it is then?
It's not the same to release a new crappy product and replace a perfectly fine product with a crappy one for millions of happy customers.
Android NFC Hack Allows Free Ride on US Subways
Finding a healthy medium between iPhone 5 and SGS3
Well written. Agree to all lines but

> DropBox kicked Apple’s ass when it came to “cloud” management of files

How so?
By external factors, I think he means factors unrelated (or at least not very related) to the success of the company, like wild stock speculation.
Seconded. The concept of "leaking" information outside of your NDA pretty much defines that there's no "proper" way to do it.
Tales of Creation: Hacking The Paleo Diet with Lou Franco
I bet he is using some elements that are licensed under a commercial license such as the appcelerator analytics and/or the enterprise element.

http://www.appcelerator.com/plans-pricing

It could also be that an appcelerator salesman was a bit aggressive on that front but I bet this is not the case - 99% of the time, people are breaching licenses without even knowing it.
The first few customers are not necessarily a market signal - they are often acquired via personal relationships or they want to leverage you to do custom development for them via your prototype. Neither of which are scalable businesses.
Stop thinking about your gear and make music
My problem with the enterprise is that I see the problems my company has, but it's hard for me to gain any reasonable degree of certainty that existing solutions wouldn't solve our problems and aren't getting adopted by other companies.

The reason for this: many companies are bogged down in inertia, at least at many levels that aren't seen as directly driving growth. So when I see the horror that is our phone system (it's a horror) and I think "I bet we could run this shit through an iPad" and then see other solutions out there that are clearly better, where do I see how I would differentiate myself?

So it's only when you're in the enterprise, have a problem, get authorized to actually solve it (rare rare rare) and THEN actually experience available solutions falling short that you can start to figure out what you'd build and do differently.
Tags da HTML5 - Infográfico
you could get an app pulled from the appstore using the DMCA - however if all he did was using the appcelerator module which is licensed under a permissive license (apache v2) - they would have no ground.

He's using something else there (perhaps their cloud services who are probably free for free apps and costs money for paid apps).
Holy cow, the heroine/model image with impossibly skinny limbs undermines the entire project.
In the consumer space we go through this every time we do anything: we are the masters of our iPhones. So when I want an iPhone app and it doesn't exist, I'm already 100% sure that I wanted that app and that it doesn't exist. Make sense?
First Freely Available DNA Compiler 
This is a pretty powerful application which allows the user to drag and drop known genes and modify existing ones. The company is making its money by producing the DNA sequences that people order through the application.
I can assure you I wouldn't name that class.

But honestly, I'm kidding around. I'm not arguing the class is silly, or poorly named. I bet it's perfectly named. I'm not arguing the author did a bad thing here, I'm sure he or she did something awesome. All I'm saying is that the context that makes writing that class description necessary is totally hilarious.

Let's just agree on that. It doesn't mean Java sucks or Spring sucks. Big complicated projects sometimes lead to pretty wacky situations and we ought to be able to laugh at them. I'm certainly not suggesting other languages don't have the same culdesacs of lunacy.. they totally all do. Can you imagine the number of times someone's posted "Everything that's wrong with Perl in one line of code" ?

I really don't see any reason to take this stuff so seriously.
Revalidating is optional. A browser MAY not revalidate if it likes so, unless you use `must-revalidate`:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.9.3

> A cache MAY be configured to return stale responses without validation, but only if this does not conflict with any "MUST"-level requirements concerning cache validation (e.g., a "must-revalidate" cache-control directive).

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.9.4

> must-revalidate

> Because a cache MAY be configured to ignore a server's specified expiration time, and because a client request MAY include a max-stale directive (which has a similar effect), the protocol also includes a mechanism for the origin server to require revalidation of a cache entry on any subsequent use.