skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The interesting question is whether the business model would be deemed illegal outright (highly unlikely). Under US law, at least, it's all about disclosure. False/misleading claims and deceptive business practices are usually what get companies in trouble. Those are subjective, to be sure.
Talking to casual users, "my iphone/ipad is slow" was a reason they were motivated to purchase the newest model of iphone. When it comes to repeat purchases, I wouldn't find it difficult to imagine that responsible for double digit percentages of new iOS device sales.

Unfortunately for Apple, Steve Jobs is dead and the magic is gone. Now I hear those same users say they are "tired of the iPhone" and want something new. If Apple's competitors can deliver good Android experiences, they are going to get to keep those new users for a while.
What if it was so much cheaper and not subsidized, like how desktops are? It could have been a different type of market, and maybe better for electronics altogether. That's how desktops were, anyhow. And the internet. Phones are getting to be like cages, though.
I bought a Nexus 7 a little while back and my initial reaction was similar to yours. Now, I'd rather use my old iPad gen 1 than the brand new dual core Nexus 7, which -- among other things -- can seize up so badly when doing something as simple as typing a URL that it misses touch events altogether.
The longer I ride my bike in the city, I fear cars much less because I've learned to avoid putting myself (and them) in dangerous situations.

What I do fear is other cyclists (on cruisers) and pedestrians.

The only two accidents I've had in the last two years was from getting hit by two different people on giant heavy cruisers/hybrid bicycles. They never seem to have control of those bikes and can't keep a straight line.
Can't figure out how it works.
I suspect that when you're dealing with the brain there's little difference between physical and psychological: if the brain's hitting a wall physically it will unconsciously invent some explanation. I suspect that's what's happening with these startup founders who think they are working 18 hour days; anecdotally, when I've pushed myself to work 12-14 hour days, I haven't felt unproductive, I suspect my brain just shut down so that it couldn't register all the time I was wasting. If I look at my actual changelist history, I'd find that the first 3 changes of the day would take a total of about 3-4 hours and then the last one would take 7+.

There's been a lot of research done into "ego depletion" - basically, 100+ studies have found evidence that the ability to focus and make yourself get things done is an exhaustible resource, and then recent studies by Carol Dweck have indicated that your abilities to do so, in some sense, depend upon your mindset going in and whether you embrace the task to begin with. The logical place to answer this would be with an fMRI study, and the first such study was just published a week and a half ago. The abstract indicates they found something, but the article itself is paywalled:

http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/20/scan...
It's going to be impossible to quantify "better" anyways. It depends on what you're optimizing for. This research is incredibly valuable in helping us understand the results of TDD, particularly if we're optimizing purely for quality:)
You're totally right but you probably want to if you can. For a few reasons:

- The later you raise money the more data and knowledge you have to validate what you're doing.

- There's less risk involved. You know you can work well with your team. I personally want to pay back my investors 10x or more so raising money with an idea and either failing or selling to Facebook for $2M isn't appealing. You can be far more flexible.

- You can get better investors interested. The best investors look for people that don't need their money and have something to show. Traction, revenue or validation.

- You can raise money at a better valuation. Admittedly some companies need the money to build your company but the longer you hold out, the longer you're worth. If not you're probably doing something wrong. This means you also have more leverage and control of your company through bad times.

If you aren't succeeding and need to raise money at a low valuation the chances are things won't get better quickly and as you won't have control of your company. Your (Bad) investors will likely kick you out. These stories come up all the time.

Color had a founder with past wins but if he'd followed his equation, he would've been agile enough to scrap everything or try something completely different.

There's nothing wrong with raising an incubator/YC style boost when you start. As in raising 10 - 50k right at the start to help you survive if you need to. Whether it be from friends and family or an investor you know that you trust. Raising $2m with just an idea seems like a bad idea.
Nexus One has just completely dropped support. Android's saving grace is that there is a community of programmers willing to support devices that are otherwise locked/unsupported. A lot like *nix in the early days. It's all grassroots from here on.

If only there was a way to distill that information to the less informed consumers.
Any other startup related irc channels you can recommend?
The cleverness of Columbia's approach was that a certain percentage of people at the margin would keep (and pay full price for) CDs that they'd never have bothered to go out any buy on their own. Just like credit cards: Issuers hate people who pay the balance off every month and earn them zero interest -- but most consumers aren't quite that disciplined.
You're chasing this pointer maybe a few links farther than I intended. I'm just saying that it's annoying that message board threads are comfortable ignoring the dishonesty of sources like Techdirt and Torrentfreak, so long as those sources are whipping up rageviews from people who vocally support copyright infringement.
Multicore at the Command Line with GNU Parallel
No, the opposite.
Nice to see some data-driven policy making!
Interesting. I always expected the way to do this was with radio buttons.
Yes, A video game contributed to Unix Development
I think there is room for innovation in blogging platforms, and as a general rule, I would not make any feature that was not supported by a well-thought out API.

My basis for saying that there is room for innovation is that I have worked on a number of big websites, and I have never been able to use out-of-the-box blogging for any of them, the features had to be too integrated and specialized.

One way to think about the market is to keep in mind that what people mean by "blogging" may be slowly evolving.

If I were implementing a blogging platform, I would use Drupal because that's what I'm most familar with. I think extending Wordpress is also an idea you should consider. However, it be best to ignore the underlying platform, and just think about and write the API. After you have defined that, pick a platform or framework and implement it.
Is there an official (by Google) upgrade to Android 4.1 for the Nexus One?
Why do some people use .org instead of .com ?
>I'm sure with a bit of engineering effort, the memory footprint of iOS could be drastically reduced.

Drastically ?

The core of iOS is fundamentally the same as OSX and there are shared components. If Apple could figure out how to dramatically reduce memory usage they would have done it by now.
While the iPad1 is noticeably slower, I have found it running out of RAM around the same time as the iPad3 during app development. Oddly enough, the iPad2 really is the best iPad right now in terms of overall package performance. Of course the retina screen looks great, but the iPad3 hardware is just barely enough to support it. I'm expecting the iPad4 to really be the retina device to have.
I dunno why people downvote what they "dont like to hear". Sounds pretty much accurate to me (some guy is going to tell me my opinion doesnt matter if its not baked by graphs tho).

In SF, there are quite a few bicycle lanes. That's cool. Half of them are ruined by parking. That's not cool. Half of my bike-riding coworkers have been "doored" so far.

Heck, it's still a lot better than no bike lane, but it's hard to get right since the space is already taken by car lanes and parking lanes.

In Paris, even thus, as per previous posts, scooters ride on it, some lanes are actually part of the sidewalk and are forbidden to pedestrians.
In Germany I've seen that too (albeit theyre not as well designated IMO). Advantage: no one car park on it. No car can even cross them. Feels a lot safer.

Unfortunately in Paris that's not the norm, its only a few places where they were able to do that.
Wanxiang Group Corp is about to takeover U.S. battery maker A123 Systems

That kinda sucks. A123 used to be the highest quality lithium batteries. I wonder if that will change after Chinese takeover. And why on earth is that even happening?

China's state-owned oil company CNOOC Ltd is trying to buy Canada's Nexen

and nexen tires have a pretty good reputation too for value/quality
The IBM research is interesting, though it seems as anecdotal as the OP, it also has the 50% reduction in faults, perhaps if there's a few more cases like this a metastudy could yield some conclusive evidence.
Didn't notice this by now, but i can say that i'm pretty happy with it (for now). As i said in my initial comment, Android has problems, but if you think back to the first iOS versions, there were a lot of problems. Many people dont remember that, but before iOS 4 there were a lot of pretty nasty bugs.

The other thing is, if android improves more over time, it's doesn't hurt so much when they drop support for device X after 2 years when you only paid 200-250 Euro/Dollar. If you run a 2 year cycle of devise-replacing for a price like that, i'm perfectly fine with it.
I for one, have found the parallel make command ("make -j4" for a quad-core), extremely effective. It cut the rebuild time for a large project I was working on from ~10 seconds down to 3 seconds. (I have a cheap 6-core, the AMD Phenom II X6 1035T which cost me $100.)
What apps "require" ICS? Isn't Gingerbread good enough? :)

The point is that lack updates hurts consumers. This is no less true when Apple does it than when Android OEMs and carriers do.
Too bad they don't give a damn about privacy either.
Looks great.

Two things,

#1: If you modify the attribute checked of the input, the state doesn't change.

#2: I don't see a programmatic way of changing the state from your source without re-initializing all the elements?
I think I have signed up there before, but I guess I need something more interactive and personal.
This article is rampant with dishonest usage of statistics and anecdotes:

“Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.”

Ok, but how about the severity of the injuries? This is like saying that most car collisions in the US happen in parking lots. Also, there are lots more injuries per instance, or absolute numbers?

"The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled."

Of course, but bicyclists travel many more miles. That's the point of riding a bicycle. It would be more fair to compare against people who ride buses.

“Nobody wears helmets, and bicycling is regarded as a completely normal, safe activity. You never hear that ‘helmet saved my life’ thing.”

Of course not. If you don't wear a helmet and you have a fatal accident in which a helmet could have saved your life, you're dead. The dead don't speak.

EDIT: who downvoted my comment and why? I'm just stating obvious flaws in the article. Answer instead of downvoting, please.
The Responsive Design Myth
I have an iPad 1 myself, and I am looking to replace it.

Browsing - complex pages (techcrunch is one particular abomination) have a tendency to crash Safari. Chrome was far too slow to bother with.
Old Twitter app was crashing several times when loading in-app browser.
Applications in general tend to quit a lot.

It worked wonderfully when it was out, but its barely usable now.
Your assumption #2 is false.

According to the article, a significant fraction of patent lawsuits were being deliberately filed by competitors to challenge the validity of patents that had just been issued. The reason to do this was so that you could choose a venue that was patent unfriendly and therefore gave you better odds of overturning the patent.

Consider the fact that these lawsuits were filed preemptively (they had to be filed before the patent was used to sue you, else you would not get to choose venue), and that they would be filed on the weakest possible patents. One would expect the patent holder to lose a very large portion of these.

I would suspect that a lot of the 80% of wins right after CAFC was due to these cases reaching the CAFC, and it asserting its power over lower courts.

The long-term slide since then is undoubtably due to people pushing the envelope as fast and hard as they can on how bad patents can be, and how broadly patent law can be filed in novel areas (ie ones that Congress never meant it to be applied in).

There were obvious issues in the pre-CAFC era, but I'd prefer those issues over the current status quo.
My thoughts too. It seems logical to suggest that TDD would reduce the number of bugs in the product that's being tested, at least somewhat. However, the true question may be if the time spent writing those tests (longer that the time spent writing code?) is worth it when looking at the number of problems it prevented.

I believe the practicality of TDD depends on too many factors to make statements about it in general. Is your project well defined (good for TDD) or a cool little idea that changes and morphs every day or two (bad for TDD). Is it large scale and complex (good for TDD) or quite simple (TDD may be a waste of time here). There are more factors of course too.
I'm curious how long Google will provide updates to the Nexus 7 after they stop selling it? What's a "reasonable" time?
Here's an idea:

The moment the device is no longer supported, unlock the bootloader. If you really felt philanthropic, release some docs on the hardware interfaces.

This way Linux / *BSD / Haiku / whatever could be ported and extend the usable life of the device. This would foster a thriving second hand market, massively reduce the security risks that users of the older devices are exposed to, help clear old stock, keep devices out of landfills and so on.

Apple has already said they don't support the device anymore, so they have nothing to lose by opening it up (if we accept that the reason Apple locks down their bootloaders etc is to ease the burden of support from people breaking their own devices, not an argument I entirely buy...).
Open Source Fear Mongering Is Ridiculous With Advent Of Open APIs
I think he was fully aware of the nature of his actions but incorrect in his expectations as to how he would be perceived. In the chats between Lamo and Manning it was apparent he thought he'd be seen as some sort of hero for his actions by the majority of the US population. Obviously this isn't the case.
but you have to turn them off for each app you can't just disable them as a whole.
Why Apple took the risk with Maps
I've encountered the same thing in another subscription business where there was system data showing the customer hadn't used it in a long time. My personal (not legal) opinion is that, assuming these account for an immaterial percentage of revenue, the safe approach is to go ahead and cancel them. The reason is that to do otherwise would make the company look really ugly if ever questioned by a state AG or the FTC or in a class action suit. It's tough to say "Yes, we had computer records clearly showing the customer hadn't logged in for 16 months but kept charging her each month anyway because she never said stop." Folks whose jobs entail protecting consumers (even against themselves) don't like hearing that.
> 2. Sorry, all I can do is laugh. Do you actually follow the US legal system?

Do you follow it deeper than the propaganda about frivolous lawsuits?

> 3. Again, whether a patent is bad or not has nothing to do with whether it's infringed in any particular case.

He's not talking about particular cases, he's talking about aggregate statistics. A system with a lot of weak patents, where people might independently come up with the same design because it's obvious, is going to have a lot more infringement than a system with only strong patents, where infringement is likely to come from only purposefully copying a design.
I don't blame Starbucks for that at all. I saw far too many people sat there with an empty coffee cup they probably purchased three hours beforehand- they're a coffee shop, not a co-working space.
I'm in for this batch, thanks for the reminder :)
"Not every business is 'sustainable' through repeat customers"

Sure, but at the scale the ringtone business grew (and burned through users), they eventually ran out of suckers to scam. A lot of them would fold shortly thereafter, or move on to a different market (usually a completely different country), or consolidate with another company overseas and tap the suckerbase there.

This model is basically a modern, bigger-scale version of the old snake oil sales model. Set up a shop in town, sell a bunch of bad merch, get run out of town, find a new town. Rinse and repeat.

Eventually, though, your model catches up to you. Either you're closing up shop in old markets and opening new ones that aren't as big or lucrative, or you're keeping a toehold in the old markets -- but the costs of doing so grow faster than your revenues. Or you flee Market A for Market B, only to have a competitor or two leap into Market B the next month.
In this digital age, friends can still be pseudonymous, though.
The problem this is trying to solve is an annoying one - so much so that I just wrote something similar a couple of weeks ago: https://github.com/suan/quick-debug

Letters seems like a better way to do it though.
Ask HN: What's the best way to meet other developers to collaborate with?
I'm in the unfortunate (and sometimes fortunate) position of being a developer with a business background. The unfortunate part is that while my background (former strategy consultant, banker, and product manager) has given me a pretty solid "businessy" network, now that I mostly design/build stuff, I don't have as many developers in my network as I would like. What are some good ways to meet more likeminded developers who'd be interested in collaborating with me or building a business?

I have things that I want to build, but they're ambitious enough projects that I'd be hard pressed to build them on my own, not to mention my skillset is more front-end and design heavy (Django/Javascript/html/css etc) and I want to work with someone who has a stronger fundamental backend and data architecture skillset.

I've tried going to some meetups, but frankly they've been flops. It's like half SEO experts and Wordpress guys. No disrespect to them, but I'm looking for more of a hacker than that. I figure the most talented people are probably taken or busy doing their own thing. I don't want to be one of those stereotypical guys cold-emailing developers with "an amazing idea... all you have to do is build it". And I don't like the idea of outsourcing stuff on odesk.

Any tips? Are there online communities I can join for this kind of thing?

Thanks in advance, everyone.
Yup. People are tired of the iPhone because a guy they didn't know died.
My favourite piracy definition is by Steve Jobs who said: "Privacy is knowing what you signed up for".

We can argue back on forth on what the implications of the names showing up are and aren't[1], but neither the referrers nor the referrals knew that this would happen. That's bad privacy on Uber's and Dropbox's part.

[1]: Not everyone manages to get people to sign up as fast as you did. The implication of this is that if I know who signs up and when, I can surmise their name based on this information, which violates the user's privacy. Again, privacy is very contingent on the implications of what a malefactor might be capable of.

Whether a mountain or a molehill, this is something that just doesn't serve any good purpose but comes with some negative consequences.
>Oddly enough, the iPad2 really is the best iPad right now in terms of overall package performance.

I agree. For me it's the fact that the iPad2 stays cool after any period of usage. iPad3 has a noticable heat spot on the back and it really bothers me, it shouldn't, but it does.
I started blocking all requests from people who sent me game requests. I've then decided I don't need apps at all and disabled them in their entirety.

If you want me to use an app on FB, I'm not part of your target market. I just got fed up with the "Lets play jewelquest" spam.
If you're going to do e-commerce different than everyone else you better be clear about it and you're not. Companies like JustFab are the reason people like my mother doesn't want to user her credit card online. You aren't just screwing the consumer, but the rest of the industry as well. And you're doing it to people who "can't afford to just disregard price".
How about the FitDesk? Exercise bike with a Desk! I used it to train for a 100 mile bike ride. Now I use a FitDesk everyday to work and play my favorite video games. Oh, at 47 years old I now ride metric centuries 5 - 6 times a year. Just read the reviews on amazon.com. #1 rated exercise bike (based on reviews)
Two months later, developers (mostly) positive about OS X's GateKeeper
Marginal Revolution University Launches Development Economics Course
> The only traffic that actually poses a regular challenge because of their erratic movements and tendency to step into the road without looking are American tourists on foot...

Was that really necessary? The racial stereotype detracts from your your argument, and frankly, one erratic pedestrian looks the same as another to a fast moving cyclist, much as one erratic cyclist looks the same as another to a driver.
That's a really thought-provoking post. Thanks for that. Regarding being a polyglot programmer I think that it's important to know how to approach a problem from different angles, as you say. Knowing imperative, functional and OO approaches is in itself a useful thing. But I don't think it's just that - it's also useful to know that you could do a particular task in another language where it's idioms or libraries or performance characteristics are more appropriate.

I don't use Lisp a lot these days, but I'm always grateful that I learned it, because it increased my toolkit of possible solutions. I think people that think "there's only one way to do it" sometimes produce bad solutions. But not always! I think pretty much everyone hates VBasic, but one of the people I work with created a great product in VB because that was what he knew. I wouldn't take the language-bigot approach of calling him a 'blub programmer'. Just because he used a poor language, it doesn't mean he's an idiot.

tl;dr - knowing more languages increases your toolset which is good, but it doesn't in itself make you a superior programmer
The statistics show that introducing and enforcing helmet laws reduces the number of people cycling by about half. That's bad for the health and fitness of your whole society.