skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tighter iteration loops does seem like an area where startups could help. Maybe not just with 3D printing, but in other areas of coordinating the workflow as well.

I wonder too if there's some streamlining to be done in the supply chain. Look at how Amazon streamlined retail to a point that they serve not only as a catalog/payment service, but also a fulfillment house. Is there something like that to be done with supply chain? Manufacturing?

I know there's companies out there in those areas, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's not still big gains to be made somehow.
I intended `a` to mean `a` repeated zero or more times, meaning that `a` defines a language of infinite size as there are an infinite number of strings that match that grammar.
Couldn't you do those things in Windows 7 by docking applications or web shortcuts to your taskbar?
"We know there's room for the next Steve Jobs"

I'm not sure if hardware hackers want to be Steve Jobs... they want to be Woz!

"Woz soon followed with the machine that made the company, the Apple II. He single-handedly designed all its hardware and software—an extraordinary feat even for the time. And what's more, he did it all while working at his day job at Hewlett-Packard"

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
Cyanogen Mod Android ROM Stores Unlocking Screen Patterns
If you look at it as a form of advertising, it is a great idea. And I am sure there are a number of returning customers.
The main problem with it right now is that it feels like it's gone out of favor and everybody is abandoning the platform

I totally agree. I actually dabbled in making AIR apps a few years ago and found it just great. It's really the lack of access to the iOS platform that killed AIR for me.
Buy them directly from O'Reilly. Tim O'Reilly and crew were early and full-throated in their support for DRM-free content, and they deserve your support.

You can also watch one of their pages/blogs (it used to have an RSS feed, too, IIRC) for frequent sales, if you are looking for discounted prices.
I think it's fascinating how much money people are willing to pay for hardware compared to software. It's hard to convince people to pay anything for software, but these kickstarter projects are getting lots of people to pay hundreds of dollars for hardware.
Is it working for others?

10:10AM PST here, watching the liveblogs update, but the apple video says "available shortly"
Interesting. I'd thought it would be handy to have that sort of service for Kickstarter projects, but I can see it could be much broader than that.
Except it'll be the wrong one, sadly.
I'm not sure yet; this thought that something is seriously wrong occured to me very recently and I didn't have free time to pursue it yet. As for what would I do is first of all, to explore the problem more, which is what I plan to do soon.

Anyway, some initial thoughts I had:

- consuming is still broken on tablets, at least on Android ones. Most of the apps out there are written for smartphones, and do not make use of neither screen space, nor the multitouch capabilities [0]. There are few exceptions, including third third party clients for Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, and also official GMail and Calendar app. And maybe maps. Pretty much everything else is still made for phones.

- tablets could be used as an additional input devices; the big advantage of them over typical input hardware is an reconfigurable interface[1] and ability to handle more finger operations. In particular, I have some drawings of an helper interface for 3D software in my notebook. The idea is to use tablet as an additional interface for zooming, panning and rotating the scene in a similar manner people use "spaceballs" for. I plan to test this idea soon, so I'll post it to HN alongside with all lessons learned in the process.

- I think that some ideas from Bret Victor's "Magic Ink"[2] about context-sensual data graphics could be explored more on tablets. Also exploring data that is in graphical form strikes me as something tablets could be much better for than mouse and keyboard.

- tablets are nice to carry around (as opposed to laptops), so I see some hope that as the physical environment around us gets more and more computerized, a tablet device may become the most convenient way to interact with it when you need a bigger screen than a smartphone can provide.

That's pretty much it; for now it's just me and the feeling that "surely a hand-held, big, multi-touch enabled screen with Wi-Fi and lots of processing power must have some better uses than playing Angry Birds and browsing Reddit".

[0] - I know, phones have multitouch as well, but with small screens, there's not really much place to make those touches comfortably.

[1] - that, on the other hand has a drawback of hindering the ability to learn to use them intuitively if we start reconfiguring those interfaces too much, but I guess it's just a tradeoff.

[2] - http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
Arrington back to writing at TechCrunch
I see your point, but the phone example actually plays into the post-pc argument. And when it comes to spreadsheets, I'd argue that there are tons of people that don't do much with this. Sure, apple or whatever post-pc company might appear might not take over the corporate world, but it might still be a scary thought to microsoft that the post-pc devices, tailored to needs (iPad: simpler creation and consumption, iPhone: on the road calls and other stuff) could take a significant chunk of their revenue. Betting on just corporate, and not the creative sector at that, might be putting too many eggs in one basket.

So I agree that the post-pc device can never take over certain functions, but it can replace enough to make microsoft worry.
The thing with Metro is that nobody yet knows how well it will fare with it's target audience, the so called "average user".
If you really want to you can set yourself up as an employee, pay taxes as such, and be eligible for unemployment benefits.
The unions for doctors and lawyers aren't really the same thing as "normal" unions. They're more advocacy based.

The unions for teachers exist because teachers are (wrongly IMHO) considered by their employer to be in the parents poster's category. If teachers weren't considered a commodity I think they would have less need for unions.

And professional athletes unions are usually restrained to sports where the employers are a cartel (or even a single entity). The cartel phenomenon is similar in the case of actors.
I don't care, this is friggin' hilarious. I can't believe we're dealing with adults.
I don't think the author of the post is arguing that GroupOn isn't a good product, it's just not a sustainable business. The company they build fills a need for its customers, but it doesn't make money for GroupOn by fulfilling that need.
> Barriers to entry are a good thing for incumbents and for the market leader.

There was a time long long ago where it was also considered a good thing for startups, so that young funded companies would not be competing with bootstrapped/small-angel deals.
Interestingly, Mark Pincus, who was Nguyen's co-founder in two of the 'pump-and-dump' schemes listed in the article (Freeloader and Support.com)[1], seems to be on an eerily similar path with Zynga.[2]

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pincus

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/10/05/zynga-kee...
Sounds like an opportunity for someone to make it to the cover of HN...
How to Setup a Secure Private IRC Channel
I'm talking about a new trend. The hardware companies we've funded haven't had time to grow into Dropboxes. But as I wrote, hardware companies are overrepresented among the most promising startups from the summer batch, as far as we can tell this early.

True, hardware involves lots of schleps. But that means good ideas of this type are often lying around in plain sight, while all the other would-be founders are fixated on making the latest mobile social commerce app. (http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)
Innovation 2.0 (its not about process, its about people)
How does one write regular expressions for profit? Do you mean using regex's to filter datasets or do you actually sell regex's?
nouveau drops to Unity2d on Ubuntu 12.04 when using a modest pci-e GT520 card, so I shall try a 12.10 live cd and see what cooks. Thanks for the quote/still, I was aware of that one. There might need to be another outburst if we reach a situation where a future distribution can't work properly on hardware with nvidia graphics...
Thanks for clearing things up. What I am trying to say is, they had no other choice to send the message across that stop ripping off apple products. The patent they sued samsung over can be considered silly but what choice they had? I bet if this verdict was not given, next galaxy series would've been like iPhone 5. It was not about money, it was more about market position because what samsung was basically doing was placing ripped off versions of apple products in market. And i don't think this is a generic patent.

and this is what I call abuse of system. Just look at the patents mentioned in the link. Something that paul or its company was not even remotely associated.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/27/microsoft-co-founder-paul...
Not working for me. "Available shortly"
>they just 'steal' it from goodwill communities like Hackernews and Reddit

Reddit sells ads and subscriptions. And I don't see how you can "steal" from aggregators who just link to content other people have created.
Worth a mention is that you can customize how Readline handles these sorts of shortcuts in your ~/.inputrc file. For example, I use forward and backward by word far more often than by character, so I do this:

$if Bash
# various other stuff left out
# easier back and forth by word
"\C-b": backward-word
"\eb": backward-char
"\C-f": forward-word
"\ef": forward-char
$endif

For more examples and syntax, see http://docs.freebsd.org/info/readline/readline.info.Sample_I... and http://docs.freebsd.org/info/readline/readline.info.Readline....
same here
*der... Safari only?
Apple iOS app review process really is as bad as you've heard
This is one of the reasons why I don't use FB apps. The privacy and security controls are far too loose and broad. It's never clear exactly how your data will be used.

One of my clients has a FB app so work with this stuff daily. It's so easy to build a full profile of of an active user's life, their interests, their friends, their work and education history. Their geotagged photos and check-ins tell you exactly where they like to go. Pure gold for marketers / spammers.

The information is just too accessible and valuable for people to not abuse it.
Do you meet the requirements? They're streaming to a small audience.

> Live streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on Mac OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.

And to everyone else, they lie and say it's "available shortly".
> LTFS offers an abstraction layer so that software can treat a tape drive like a hard drive. That makes programming easier, but it will not have any effect on performance.

Ugh. You're more right than you know. This is a misconception that I sometimes have to deal with at my work. Tape systems are not harddrive systems and can't be treated as such even if you use LTFS or an HSM. The problem is that even though you can delete things by removing them from the (disk based) inode table, you can't actually remove them from tape or overwrite them without a special effort, which means that you can't simply reclaim tape space.

Being able to access a tapes with the standard API used for HDDs is convenient but you can't lose awareness of the underlying system or you'll screw things up mightily.
What are you replacing them with?
Ridiculous, it only plays in Safari.
Need to watch on Safari for it to work. I know, it's dumb
It's quite curious how hardware design lost its cachet.

When I was in Computer Engineering at Waterloo (class of '98), many of my classmates were vying for coop jobs in FPGA, ASIC or board-level design. I happened to be one of the lucky ones and it set me on a path to a career in ASIC verification.

Today when I look around at my industry, it's downright shocking how little young blood there is around. The youngest ASIC guy I've met in the last 6 or 7 years had a Master's and three years experience - and we all regarded him as the newbie.

Only in the last few months have we seen the occasional new-grad's resume cross our threshold. I'd not yet call it a trend, but I hope it becomes one. We have horrible languages, horrible libraries, horrible tools - a huge, shaky mess of infrastructure built on technologies stretched far beyond what they were originally built for - and it's so deeply entrenched that few of my colleagues seem to recognize it. We really need a new generation of fresh perspectives to shake us all up.

Let's hope it is indeed a new renaissance that Mr. Graham heralds.
MongoDB Classes Start Today
Why on earth would barriers to entry be a good thing? As far as I can tell they are just a proxy method of limiting the true competition capitalism is supposed to offer.
Barriers to entry are good for those who can overcome them. That could mean either big companies or startups depending on what type of barrier it is.
Inventory costs are a problem, but a bigger problem is production costs.

To create a PCB you need artwork. This includes the electronic files; the drill plots, the photoplots, the etch resist masks and the silkscreens. You then need the production tools for the PCB. You'll need a stencil for the screen-printing of the solder; a pick and place machine program (and you hope your PCB software can provide something that the P&P machine can read); if there's any through hole component you might want a cropping plate made.

A team goes through the prototyping process, using hand built small batch stuff. But then they need to convert this into production ready stuff. So the above costs happen when you hope -but are not sure- that you're ready to build a full scale batch. You get ten PCBs made for test, and discover a missing trace. That means you need either another set of stuff or to modify every board as it's produced.

Without very careful internal quality procedures and excellent engineering standards it'd be very easy for a company to burn through $10k before producing any saleable product.
> Live streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on Mac OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later.

It's working only on Safari. On every other browser it says "available shortly".
He/she is probably referring to paid work that involves regular expressions.
The wording is confusing, actually it works on Safari even while it is still saying "available shortly" on Chrome.
ah. I'm at work on Win XP.. though I did just install Quicktime 7 and have latest firefox.

I guess it's a no go.
Sphero: from Concept Robot to Polycarbonate II – The Software
woops, nevermind... I had to switch to Safari and it works!
Apple announces new version of iBooks
I've been using Rubular for years and it's really a great tool for trying to quickly figure out where you went wrong in a complicated regex.
Joyent, you so cray. Thanks for reminding us that "Never" and "Lifetime", "100% Uptime Guarantee" and "Fanatical Service" are all bullshit indicators. You've got a good cloud, you don't need to make promises that you can't keep.
> These organizations are just a shame to Journalism itself. As a journalist, your duty is to report the news as it is, not what you think of the news. No one gives a fuck to what you think of the news. We all have our own opinions, right? Especially infront of a huge audience, there is a moral obligation to be honest, unbiased. You will never find such ethics with TechCrunch or Gizmodo.

As a former print journalist, I will just say that what is "just the news" and what is "honest, unbiased" has a coincidentally strong correlation with the reader's personal biases.

Case in point, you seem to have selection bias:

> For example, recently on Gizmodo, you will find pro-Apple articles suggesting comparisons between every single device on this planet concluding Apple is superior in all aspects, but, never any of its disadvantages. iOS was hacked recently (Security hole). When was the last time you read that on TechCrunch or Gizmodo? You didn't, because they didn't write it. Why didn' they write it?

Doing a quick Google search of "Gizmodo" and "Apple", I find quite a few negative-Apple stories. Of the top of my head, I remember that Gizmodo was the publication that leaked the iPhone4 prototype and pushed the Antennagate story hard...not exactly stories that a pro-Apple publication would pursue.
"Stop and Frisk" has been the defacto policy in low-income areas for as long as I can remember. On Chicago's South Side (where I grew up) many young black males walking or driving could expect to be stopped and searched one or more times per week, in some areas.

For those who have never lived what I'm talking about you might doubt it exists, but it's real and it's in your backyard.

I'm glad that activists are taking up the cause. It's long overdue.
Mixpanel - Join our product engineering team
Hey HN,

We're looking for people who are interested in helping Mixpanel build product from front to back.

Yesterday we launched Engage, a way for our customers to send intelligent targeted notifications via email or push notifications automatically. It also lets them prove that it worked with data they already send Mixpanel. Check it out: http://mixpanel.com/engage

This is an example of something you'd work on here and the product iterations are done fast: 3-4 weeks. You'll have an incredible design team behind you and you'll work with at least one other person to ship our product as fast as possible.

If you're interested, don't apply through our normal channels, just email me directly: suhail@mixpanel.com

A little bit about Mixpanel:

Mixpanel has raised $12M in capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Max Levchin, Marc Benioff, etc. We're 16 engineers, designers, sales/support, and marketing people. We analyze 6.2B data points every month, have 580+ paying customers, and analyze a combined set of 27M+ of our customers' customers. Last but not least, Mixpanel is actually cash flow positive.

We're in the heart of SF and you'd work out of our beautiful office. You can find out more here: https://mixpanel.com/jobs/

- Suhail (Founder)
Unsorted is fine, we're just counting I/Os, and it takes O(1) I/Os to read or write a buffer regardless of the layout.
I've got no problems with people exiting like that, but it makes me wonder where all the pressure to sell up and move on comes from.

The pressure often comes from the VCs who put a lot of money down in an initial investment, and need at least some of their bets to pay off within a short time-frame. Are there any long-term VC funds which accept stock and then wait for dividends?
Windows 8 gives you three days from the time it installs an update and until it forces a reboot, 3 days. If you don't like that then you have many options, to say "I don't feel in control of it at all" is pretty ridiculous when you have all these options http://i.minus.com/i4uIsZYCj4oek.jpg
"Had been" is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect, further into the past than "was".
Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display introduced
Margin is an issue when you are making just another router.

Cost of inventory is an issue, but there are several ways around it, including dropshipping and createing on demand. You can hire an MBA to optimize in this area (this is the area where they are supposed to do well).

Basically if you could honestly imagine your product doing well on kickstarter, you don't need to worry about margins.

If you can imagine your customers being willing to wait 3 weeks on the product you don't have to worry too much about inventory.

I very much doubt that YC will back a new factory to produce hardware for others.

I very much believe that YC will back a company that produces an alarm clock that makes you want to start the day, or a device to insert into your toilet that will analyze your urin and tell you if the measurements are out of whack.
I'm not sure 8% is really indicative of any trend, also I think the sample size is way too small to draw any kind of conclusions. And no examples of what this 8% are up to, at least in broad terms?

If you look at the bigger picture, rather than the little world of YC you'll see lots of hw in medical, aviation, military, communications etc etc.

Saying that the number of companies that would be attracted to YC for money has risen from X to 8% doesn't really speak of any trend.

There are some examples from kickstarter that spring to mind, like for example, Brydge (bluetooth keyboard/speakers for iPad) and the game controller world has its fair share of hw innovation (like Connect for example) but real hw innovation is out of reach of startups, you need chip fab plants and cross disciplinary skills that are expensive and
locked up in the big company r&d departments. The real companies doing hw are not going to YC for money, they go to their boss.
Big Hacks in Little Paradise - The Story of the First Naples Startup Battle
I doubt it's fraud-level, but it is cashing in on the hype-machine in the silicon valley. If there wasn't a market for this, then we wouldn't be reading this article.

VCs do due diligence - success for them isn't just funding a real business, but more along the lines of cashing out at the right moment.
Ask HN: What are the best examples of SaaS websites?
I am wondering which SaaS companies you have seen that have the best websites in terms of sales funnel, looks, and conversion.
Sadly, I don't think TC is going anywhere. There's two types of new journalism that have come out of the technology boom and the Internet, and only one of them is worth while. Guess which type TC is...

The first type is the good type: the LA Times is a perfect example. Sorry to bring this up, but it is a great example: the Boy Scouts perversion files were released last week: thousands of documents about pedophiles in the Boy Scouts. The LA Times took that data, sorted it, and made it available in a map interface, with searchable text fields and all the documents available behind it. That's the future of journalism: reporting plus data analysis and presentation.

TC, on the other hand, is the bad type of new journalism. This is the type where the only thing that matters is timing, not accuracy. In the online world, most news outlets fall into this category. They don't care about facts or the people they're reporting on, all they care about is having the story first, even if only by a few seconds.

Engadget has a guy that is the World record holder for world's fastest blogger. They're really proud of this. I think it's actually a horrible shame and missing the point.

Anyway, people read the second type of journalism a lot more than the first. And that really sucks.

The easiest way to spot a real journalist is if he's on the phone. Real reporters spend all day on the phone talking to people, not on the web reading blogs and emails. I doubt TC ever picks up the phone to call anyone, except to return calls of the "WTF did you write" variety.