skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to losing 20% or so users at each stage of the funnel, the bigger picture is that most startups closely follow Zipf's Law, e.g.:

* Hacker News has (hypothetically) 300,000 unique monthly users.

* Of those, 30,000 have an account.

* Of those, 3,000 submit at least one comment or story over the course of the month.

* Of those, about 300 are regular contributors (at least 5 comments and/or story submissions per week).

I don't know what the real stats for HN are, but I doubt that is very far off.
I say this with absolutely no judgement regarding the value of the iPad Mini, but I'm struck by the similarity between this criticism and the criticism leveled against the original iPad ("it's just a giant iPod Touch!").
Lay them off last friday and save your shareholders a man-year of salary?
I think you are not Apple's target user.

I, personally, would buy the Kindle Fire. Most people, however, will buy the iPad Mini. Bigger price and all.

Curiously enough, I think the iPad 2 has just become the most compelling tablet in the market in terms of price/specs/performance. I'm wondering if iPad 2 will eat into sells of the new iPads? And would Apple care?

Anyway, interesting times.
I see what you did with that title.
I guess it opens the market to more people (by being less expensive,) but absolutely underwhelming. A desktop computer that's thinner (who cares how thin the desktop is?) and a smaller iPad. It's getting confusing know just what to buy anymore, each variant of iOS device has a myriad options, it's getting more like the old Dell customize your PC selection, memory, network type, display size. I guess Apple are trying to recreate the whole PC ecosystem, just around tablets instead. Good for their bottom line, which is, after all, Apple's goal here.
On the iOS platform, you want to be very careful about timing when you ask for the push notification permission. which you'll need it for scheme 2.

One newbie mistake on iOS is to ask for notification permissions right after install. This is very similar to your point about signing up: You have to build some trust with the user first, then ask to notify them.
You citing a number of examples of marriage evolving and being redefined only serves to clarify how the process is continuing today and how people of all backgrounds have an interest in those issues.

Your demeaning tone and labels doesn't serve your supposedly tolerant position. I agree that everyone should be treated with respect and decency. But I also believe that there is a standard for morality that should be honored in order to promote the greatest mutual happiness.

Advocating a standard of public morality in marriage is the same as in drug control, pornography, hate speech, or any other area. We might have different opinions on what standard will bring the most happiness. We don't have to agree, but mutual respect smooths the democratic processes around reconciling those differences.

We are a bit off topic here, so I'll stop derailing the conversation.
The app situation they highlighted vs Nexus 7 was pretty damning for Google although I have a feeling Apple cherry picked apps that make the N7 look especially bad.

On the plus side for the N7, they screwed up on price though - for the ecosystem and build quality advantage may be a $50 premium would have been attractive esp for lesser screen resolution and older CPU/GPU. The N7 also feels like it should be more single hand friendly than the iPad mini.
@rimantas What apps do you use on iOS that don't exist on Android?
(Genuinely curious.)
This is very dangerous thinking. It shows a mentality that views "Will it catch criminals?" as the watermark for whether to give the state more power. That should not be the only consideration. State power tends to expand itself, and needs to be watched constantly. At some point, it is better to let guilty men go free than to open the Pandora's Box of giving the state enough power to catch them.

Freedom isn't free.
It's gonna sell like hotcakes. Also, they probably just iced the iPod Touch.
To follow up: hardware requires many more moving parts than software, both literally and figuratively.

- supply chain & associated quality management

- manufacturing (this is an entire discipline, btw)

- shipping

- board design

- packaging of device

- QA is intense

- hardware engineering culture != software culture.

- continuous deployment can't exist

Those are from the top of my head. Anyone from software who is jumping into hardware needs to stop and think: it's different, and that needs to be reckoned with. It's not impossible, of course. :-)
My guess is they didn't do retina because it would introduce yet another resolution they would need to support and also it would add expense to an already not cheap build.
Are you serious? A well designed ecosystem is much more important than trying to increase the number of gigahertz/megaflops every release. Just because a corvette is more powerful and way cheaper than a Ferrari/Porsche it does not mean that you will have a better experience than buying one of the latter.
Which was a ripoff of the classic mid-1990s SimFarm.
Yeah or maybe some way to stretch pixels closer or further apart being that you move your face further away from larger screens. Seems a little silly to have so many devices that do the exact same thing but just have different sized screens.
Apple iPad Mini Announced - Release date is Nov 2nd at $329
Nuodb - a "NewSQL database". SQL on the outside, NoSQL on the inside
That makes no sense. The first iPhone had an excellent overall UX for its time with a pathetic 128MB of RAM. The subjective experience of performance matters more than numbers on a spreadsheet, and for that we'll have to wait for hands-on reports.

Also, bear in mind that the mini doesn't have to push around 4X pixels like the Retina iPads, so it can get by with less RAM and processor.
With classy moves like this, I can't understand why we all hate on them so much...
Funnily enough that's why I love android.
I take it out of the box and log into my Google account and have everything sync onto it.

(Well I'd actually root it, than install a custom rom but still.)
I find it amusing that the title claims that the cost is 20% on every step but the article itself says that the value varies and is not unique for every business. What's the point of choosing 20% in an arbitrary way like this?

Following this line of thought we could rename the article to "Every Step Costs You 50% of Users" if we chose that case as the example.
$_ and !$ are additional ways to get the last argument of the previous command.

http://samrowe.com/wordpress/advancing-in-the-bash-shell/ is a good list of extra tips
What good is 8GB of storage good for on a media consumption device? Even the Kindle Fire HD starts at 16GB for $199 (with ads).
Thank you for the timely announcement. I'll put you down for "meh."
The path-dependency (or difficulty of pivot) is an interesting angle. Certainly worth considering. Most product needs iteration if not outright pivoting. Perhaps the mitigating factor is that if the product is tangible, the need is also. SW is so powerful, as a concept, that i wonder if SW some startups may suffer from "too many degrees of freedom". Thus the ~inevitvble pivot -- combined with the ability to re-purpose a core of valuable skill-- is almost a more inherent characteristic of SW startup vs HW one. When considered in context of problem solving and product/market fit, &tc.
> Or do the people being stopped never actually fight any charges being brought against them (understandable, given whom the PD targets)?

For those who aren't found to be in possession of drugs (the main excuse here), that's exactly the problem. For the rest:

> If that is the case, how can anything found in those frisks be admitted as evidence in court?

They're only legal if the police have reasonable suspicion[1] of illegal weapons. Not drugs. Not prostitution[2]. Just weapons.

Of course, given the neighborhoods they target, it's easy for them to fabricate an excuse after-the-fact. So most people don't bother to challenge it, because they know it's, at best, a case of one person's word against the other.

[1] It may be probable cause instead; I'm fuzzy on the details, but I know the general idea is correct.

[2] In New York, having many condoms in your possession is evidence enough to charge you with prostitution.
Even Mafia Wars on MySpace was a clone, I doubt they've ever had an original IP.
I double that.
Plus for me the weight of iPad Mini (308g) is a killer feature, mainly because I plan to use it for reading and playing games.
Conceptually, I love every bit of bad Zynga news. I like to be reassured that a company will, in the long term, fail when its products are cynically designed to manipulate. That a company will fail when their strategy assumes it's okay to blatantly, consistently, continuously lift design from other firms and products.

Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible. Because the guys who architected this repugnant exploitation machine already got paid. They made millions selling their stock before the market truly understood what a shit business they were running. Meanwhile, front-line employees sat with their plummeting stock locked up.

So any bad Zynga news is nothing more than notice that yet another group of hardworking folks is, somehow, getting fucked over, despite their leadership enjoying tremendous rewards.

Very frustrating to watch.
>It's getting confusing know just what to buy anymore

Easy: not Apple.
Surely Lithium decay would produce radiation at a very specific frequency that could be detected?

And wouldn't putting a sample of the water (post-experiment) through a mass-spectrometer immediately reveal the presence of Beryllium?
Quoting it as 20% kept the title concise while sacrificing very little correctness.
With respect to Lamina, that's just an example of a task on a separate thread being treated as an asynchronous result. It's entirely possible to use it to represent network communication or pretty much anything else.
arduinos, 3d printers?
MPEG-LA? No. But MPEG itself is working on a royalty-free profile of AVC called WebVC: <http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/geneva11-1/geneva_pres.... That may not have happened without VP8.
Nexus 7 is again way more expensive than $99 China made android tablets. Depends on build quality and brand. A too low price-point would cannibalize iPads.
This has always been every Apple detractor's assertion.
> Apple have shot themselves in the foot with this launch.

Everybody is going to buy this.[1]

[1]iPod mini
What baffles me is the ease by which someone can walk while using and iPad mini with a bicycle between their legs at 0:38.
I put this together yesterday, with help from the ten winning teams. It's kind of like the occasional HN post that looks at hosting decisions made by YC companies. Maybe I'm just a gems geek, but I find this sort of thing fascinating.
yea.... they have some sort of OS detection on web, it is validating the visits.. only apple users were able to see it... you can got to ustream there was a live coverage too.
Samsung already showed several generations of foldable screens.
It has a bigger screen but is thinner and lighter. You're only looking at one dimension. Also, he held it up with one hand. I'd be very interested to get one in my own hand to see how it feels. If they managed to get a bigger screen, with a sufficiently sized bezel, and still have it fit comfortably in most people's hands... then isn't that a much better design?
Apple stock is down on the news. Although I'm personally underwhelmed by this announcement, I'll bet analysts are more worried about the lower priced iPad cutting into margins than they are Apple's ability to ship them.
If you find the Nexus 7 pixely than you should know that the iPad mini has a lower ppi.

I agree about the apps though. But if you haven't already than get SwiftKey.
Because Amazon markets the Kindle Fire HD as a loss leader. They sell them at a loss and make it up on content you purchase for it.
It is odd with the iPad maxi and the iPhone both having retina displays that Apple didn't go with that out of the box for the mini. But maybe hamstringing the resolution is one of the ways Apple hopes they can nudge buyers over to the full size.
I would've preferred a larger bezel. The new one looks a little off to me, and I'm guessing there will be lots of accidental touches on the edge. (Oh: software correction. Still, that'll misfire occasionally, and create a subconscious stress on the user for the simple act of picking the thing up and switching hands/grip.)
wait a week.

the 16GB Nexus 7 will drop to $200, with the 32GB release.
This is what apple haters say about every Apple product. They said the iPhone would be a total flop and never sell the 10 million units Steve Jobs said they hoped to sell-- because it didn't have a hardware keyboard.

They said it about the iPod too- claiming that having less capacity than the creative nomad and no built in radio made it "lame" (CmdrTaco famously said this.)

They said it about the iMac as well, calling it a toy computer that looked like candy. Funny how in 2 years all the other manufacturers were making their computers colorful, and the bondi-blue design aesthetic was adopted by a wide variety of products around the world.

Now I'm sure somewhere there are people who were not even 10 years old when the iMac was being put down are saying the iPad mini is lame. For the same reasons.

Then when the product strikes a nerve with the public, and sells 100 million units, they decide that the people buying it must be stupid and persuaded by slick marketing, because obviously its "lame" or "doesn't have the specs" of the competition (though they never detail how it lacks specs and usually they're completely wrong and ignoring the terrible usability of the competition.)

It's the standard issue mythology of the apple hater:

Apple products are inferior (even when they aren't.)
Apple products are more expensive (even though they aren't.)
Apple buyers are stupid and easily persuaded by slick marketing (even though it should be obvious that people buy Apple products because they work better for them.)

Consequently, EVERY Apple product introduction is "underwhelming".
It's only a tiny but smaller. Should have called it the Slightly-smaller iPad instead.
People buy a brand , not a product.It's like buying a Vuitton bag , it's not better than the other ones , it's just cool to have one , because now people feels they are defined by what they own. Then people try to justify this behavior by repeating apple talking points , so they dont sound like sheeps.
Steve Jobs must be rolling in his grave ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFAjfUT8wZI
Well, it was out of warranty. It's unfortunate that 1-year warranties have become the norm, but that seems to be the key difference between your anecdote and the parent's. They'll do a fair bit to help you while a device is in-warranty, but as soon as it's out, you're basically on your own.

If you use a Kindle heavily, and it's starting to behave at all flakily as you get towards the end of the warranty period, it's worth calling up Customer Service and pushing them hard for a replacement before it runs out.

(I have a friend who writes the warranty-expiration dates in Sharpie on the back of his electronics when he buys them. I thought this was a fairly decent, if dorky, little lifehack. I don't bother but that's just because I buy most of my stuff used.)
To make a PCB you design artwork, usually from the circuit diagram. This artwork is transferred onto clear sheets. You overlay the clear sheet onto a board - a sheet of fibreglass, a sheet of copper, and a layer of UV sensitive etch-resist. You expose it to UV, you fix it, you wash off the etch-resist that isn't fixed (thus exposing copper) and then etch the exposed copper off, leaving the traces.

This process involves a couple of one-off costs (design of the PCB; transfer of that design to photo artwork). It also involves some setup costs that you get every time you need more product - setting jigs to the right size to hold the stuff. The artwork costs a couple hundred dollars, and that does not include any of the design and engineering costs, that's just the price if you hand a bunch of electronic data to a PCB house.

A stencil for screen-printing solder? That's steel, laser cut, can only be used for your PCB, and if you change the design of the PCB you might need a new stencil. Each stencil costs a couple hundred dollars.

A cropping plate is steel, or sometimes fibre glass, plate that has holes drilled where you have through-hole components fitted. An assembly-operative would have the cropping plate held in a jig, with PCBs on it, and they'd stuff the PCB. When they've fitted all the through hole components the plate is put on a machine which slides a blade under the plate and crops the leads. The operative then takes the PCBs off the plate, and sends them off for (probably) wave soldering. Each cropping plate is individual, and cannot be used for any other product. You'll need as many cropping plates as you want people to build PCBs. Each plate is going to be a couple of hundred dollars (steel) maybe a hundred dollar (fibreglass).

So far you haven't got any product that you can sell to the end customer! You've just got setup costs that you hopefully amortise over the number of product you produce.

You're right that an electronic assembly house would tend to outsource all this stuff to other people rather than doing everything in house.
That's a fair point. But I think if you look at most non-startup companies that stay around for 3-4 years they don't typically have the valuations that the startups do in the same time.

For example, Joe's Plumbing shuts down after 2 years because Joe realizes he has to manage his books, do advertising, manage any junior plumbers etc. In the end he spends 50% of his time doing plumbing and 50% of his time doing "business." So he pays off his small business loan (maybe) of $100k and goes to work for Tom's Plumbing where at least he gets to do plumbing all the time.

He had a run of 2 years, but at no point was his company sitting on millions of dollars.
It's been said that Amazon is taking either no money out of their tablets, or slightly losing money, to compete.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19907546
I'm a little dubious too, but Amazon has a track record of doing things like this (The Animal Farm/1984 fiasco), whereas Apple seems to respect that they've sold their customer something.
I was so ready to buy this but a non-retina tablet at the end of 1012 sounds like a big no no for me, I pass.
If my primary use were reading, I'd get an ePaper-based eReader. No LCD screen can compare for readability, and the battery life is through the roof.
Startups are hard.

Even big startups are hard. Zynga is startupy, even though they're public.

There's a lot of schadenfreude on HN when it comes to Zynga. Articles about Zynga's problems regularly make it to the top of HN.

Some people think games are frivolous. They're not. Entertainment is (almost) a basic human need. Some people think Zynga players are somehow being tricked. They're not. They're being entertained.

Some people say that Zynga steals ideas. Firstly, I'm guessing 99% of the people who say that are just repeating something they've heard. The other 1% should know that everyone steals from everyone. Unless you're the first guy to ever make a dynamic website, have usernames, top-bar navigation... you stole a lot of ideas too. And the ideas you stole are more fundamental than the plot of a game.

(also, if you know my history (i used to make fun of companies like this for a living) yes, i understand the irony of me writing such a supportive comment.)
Double and BoostBoards come to mind.
I also like in their video how they say that it's perfect to use with one hand.

With the iPad mini and the iPhone 5, have they completely forgotten how small thumbs are? It's marketing BS.
Larger screen, thinner, lighter, better camera and better performance. It's got a lot of better specs.
This is rediculous if true. Clearly, patents are important public policy. They should be funded as such, and if need be, taxes from profits of patent-holding companies should be dedicated to the USPTO. Taxes from fees (1) dont scale; and (2) are orders of magnitude off the economic impact, so any distortion from bad decisions is also.
Mel Brooks Producers as a model for startups
They have yet to pull a stunt like this. As far as I'm aware, they are unable to remotely modify Apple devices. Until proven otherwise, I trust them.
Show HN: Schedule meeting time
The original blog post that broke the story is here: http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/10/patent-office-tentatively...
Unless you are a good lad and do as Google says it's prohibitively small.
A6 is 32nm, A5 was originally 45nm and then was reduced for the new iPad2 to 32nm.

Intel might be fabbing at 22nm, and probably some DRAM and NAND is on 22nm, but nobody is doing anything complex on 22nm right now. The rest of the ARM industry is on 28nm, and one of the things Apple gets by moving to TSMC is 28nm (TSMC are generally ahead of Samsung's fabs, but not by that much).
Know some people out in Boston, checking to see if they are ok.
pg didn't mention China but I think the increasing ease of accessing Chinese manufacturing is hardware's AWS equivalent.
I doubt it. This is typical for Apple's stock. There is always a run up before an announcement, and a drop immediately after.

It's the old adage: buy on the rumor, sell on the news. I wouldn't read too much into it. The only time I really pay attention to what the street thinks about Apple is when earnings are announced.
Shift-T (the opposite of up`t`o) and then `s`.

You can hit `;` if there are multiple incidences of 's'.
Yeah, but the point I was making, and that you missed, was that some fraction of people will voluntarily publish. They will set their photo album, or video feed, publicly readable. Because they want to.

If that's a large percentage of people, it's going to be hard to avoid being on somebody else's camera, even if you don't have your own.
I have a Kindle Paperwhite and it is awesome for reading. I gave up on the iPad for reading a while ago.