skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And in particular, don't be deterred from applying to Y Combinator with a hardware idea, because we're especially interested in hardware startups.

This is great news. I felt a bit old and stupid at Startup school, because I want to make hardware (albeit for a niche rather than a mass market), but anyone I talked to seemed to find the idea weird and most of the concepts from the stage were along the lines that software - particularly internet software - was, is, and ever shall be the sole basis of a successful startup. It was a relief at the end of the day to hear Joel Spolsky discuss the viability and possible desirability of building a nice little $10m company in just as much detail as building a $1b one.
installed it to ubuntu 12.04 with postgresql, can not login with default username and password.
the postgresql section in the documentation is plainly wrong.
The simple answer is that it's no different than a software-only startup: spend 10 years learning how to build [software/hardware], then the logistics are straightforward.
SecTor 2012 SlideShare: Hitting Above the Security Mendoza Line, Ed Bellis
In this SlideShare presentation, Ed Bellis describes how the mendoza line (a term normally reserved for baseball) relates to the security industry.<p>A video recording of this presentation is available here: http://2012.video.sector.ca/video/51236111
> It's hard to convince people to pay anything for software,

If that software is for "entertainment" (e.g. games, social networks, cool email clients), yes. But most companies and professionals will gladly pay for software that makes them money or, equivalently, saves them time.
crosses fingers
Please use libavcodec!
Please use libavcodec!
Please use libavcodec!
reads article and is disappointed
8% of such a tiny sample isn't anywhere near close to being able to extract trends. In such a volatile arena as investor funding even if the number of hardware companies doubled from 4% last year to 8% this, it's still noise.

We (as a tech community) need to careful thinking so small. YC is tiny. If the article was the result of talking to other investors and a similar trend was identified across the board it might be newsworthy, but to anyone with any statistical background this isn't a trend, it's noise. That doesn't mean there isn't a trend, it just means this isn't in and of itself, evidence of one.
Then you set the updates from automatic to manual and install them when or if you ever feel like it.

Most people never update their Windows PCs and they end up using a PC with bugs and performance issues that have long been fixed and security holes you could drive a truck through, I'm glad automatic updates are now turned on by default and that you also have to option to opt out.
Yeah it's a good idea to do that for anything you 'lease', at least when there isn't supposed to be an expiration on that lease.
CS != software engineering (which is what all the things mentioned fall under)
>But, we also believe our readers are smart enough to put these columns into context and understand the impact of CrunchFund’s investing on the editorial.

That's like soda companies saying that their consumers are smart enough to recognize that the sugar content in their drinks can have adverse effects on their health (without mentioning neither their tremendous and ubiquitous marketing efforts, nor the way their drinks are chemically designed to cause overconsumption)
They also include scripts from (at least) 9 different external domains, similar the minecraftwiki and they monitor page activity. Every few seconds a ping packet about browser information is sent to some random advertisement corp.
Nothing special if you just want to make the most money possible with a community, that besides hosting, you have absolutely nothing to do with :(
It's not mentioned in the release note, but I find implementing "Mix commit notes with merge request notes on MR show page" (https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/1630) the greatest change in 3.0. We are using merge requests as a tool in code review, and this commit finally allow us to go through all comments of an MR in a single page. It would be perfect if the issue "Save few lines of code with Merge Request comment like github does" (https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/1007) is implemented, as this would allow us to finally reliably comment directly on the "diff" tab.
Pretty good apparently. My current small employer was almost bought by IBM. Only because it is privately owned, and the owners didn't want to sell.
Love rubular, use it every single time I write or edit a regex, just to test some weird cases while I think through the syntax.
>I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view

Your view is welcome but please take care with comments such as 'women in general take less risk than men'. The second statement you make may be a fact but your first statement comes across as a cause for this fact, and there is no data that suggests this. My personal experience, as a woman, would be quite the opposite: women make more risks than men. Would that because of my gender bias and who I spend time with talking about such things as risk, on a deep enough level to for to consider it substantial? Quite probably, which is why I would never make such a statement to back up a fact.
I realize that but I for one clear my cookies/cache pretty regularly in my browsers while I hardly ever do so for my native apps. I may not be the majority, but my point remains that there is still a higher barrier to entry for browser-based apps.
Viajar nos campos de Wicklow de carroça - Irlanda
If I log out of my Google account in the browser, I have a reasonable expectation that things on that computer can't log into my Google account in the browser without my credentials.

Edit: I think I accidentally downvoted you...
Copying every pixel would be smarter than trying to reinvent it from scratch. Knowing how much split testing Github does, I don't understand your logic. "Better" is a subjective (and perhaps moving) target, but 'just as good, while keeping it open source' is a more objective route.
Which would be the companies mentioned in the essay? I have tried to search for a list of yc companies, but the sites I've found were quite outdated.
Gordon Bell's testbed was outstripped by the possible data collection years ago, and he's admitted he rarely did anything with his archives after collecting what he did, serving more as a reference library for others.

That Samsung patent sure is interesting, though. The US filing of March 31, 2012 is interesting, too, as I started work on something similar in February (I see their foreign patents are from last year).

You might be interested in this (rather large, dated, from May) slide deck PDF of what I'm looking into: http://s3.amazonaws.com/vitorio/Automated%20Storytelling%20M...

Feel free to contact me, links are in my profile.
It's good to know that I need to get my guard up higher, as his return may up the ante on not only TechCrunch's reporting style, but also those of its competitors as well.
Semi-related, but what's the fastest vi way to get to the space right after the first word? For example, I might type

> ls /etc/foo/bar

and have my cursor at the end when I realize I want to type ls -l instead. I know there's got to be a faster way than what I'm currently doing, but I'm blanking.

(Yes, I know sometimes tacking on the command line switch at the end will work, but that's not true for all commands).
My best guess is that folks hear about an app from the media or friends, download it, but then forget to use it or never hit the intended use case.
The question would be, would Intel be guilty of anything with AMD out of the picture that they are not guilty of now? Being the only player in the market is not illegal, the illegality is in keeping others out. If Intel didn't continuously crush upstarts, they should be fine.

I guess a question would be, would Intel be found guilty of illegally causing the demise of AMD?
I've always just sort of tolerated the Kindle.

Lately I've been doing most of my reading via Safari. I pay for the "library" level plan and feel it's worth every penny, in spite of the horrendous mobile app. Every few months, I spend Safari token on an ePub copy of something particularly good.

I'd like to see all publishers offer the option to purchase a print + DRM-free digital copy for not much more than print alone just as O'Reilly and Pearson do today.
$100 Invested in Politics
I think perhaps the issue is that there are more integrated "apps" available on mobile platforms. For example Netflix provide apps for iOS and Android etc but if you are using a PC they want you to go through the website.

This isn't a technical issue per se, since it would be possible to produce these apps for the desktop.
I am not a lawyer, but I do know a little bit about DRM. I believe the DMCA makes cracking all forms of DRM illegal except in certain cases which are outlined by the Library of Congress every three years. The last time the exceptions were updated was July 2010 [1], so they will be up for review again in 2013. If I'm interpreting the current guidelines correctly, you can only crack ebook DRM if it is preventing you from using text-to-speech (presumably for blind people or people with poor eyesight).

[1] http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2010/Librarian-of-Congress-120...
I love rubular too. Question though... Why isn't it open source?
Apple announces iPad Mini with a 7.9-inch, 1,024 x 768 display - $329
Not only is this cool and pretty to look at, its actually really useful. Looks like I'll park the car this weekend and use MUNI to get around SF. And I'll use Rover to do it.
Also meta: i appreciate the irony of an informative article about a tablet-friendly OS on a site with the worst tablet presentation of pretty much all mobile-optimized sites I've seen (it took almost a minute to load on my ipad 1, and crashed the browser partway through).
As someone who 'speaks' Ruby, Python and PHP I don't think you can just say good coders use Python and Ruby and the 'journeymen' coders will use PHP. There's really little difference between all of these. Ruby and Python are simple languages for anyone to learn, just as PHP is. The biggest challenge I see isn't language, but thinking in terms of data structures and having an intuition about the right way to solve a problem. The language, or tech stack (most of the time) is irrelevant.
With these images in my head, this xkcd What-If is suddenly more frightening:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
I've sensed a bit of a trend (e.g., with YC startups like BoostedBoards and Double, and popular KickStarter projects like Ouya), but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the capital requirements and ultimate profitability of these startups as they attempt to scale up into larger businesses. Maybe I just have to shake off naive preconceptions about hardware businesses being hard and difficult-to-pivot.

pg: if possible, I'd love to read your thoughts on how the economics of these businesses might evolve as they attempt to grow, especially as compared to software-only businesses.
O'Reilly will put your ebooks into your Dropbox folder if you let them. Amazon could do that. Problem solved.

Link: http://shop.oreilly.com/category/customer-service/dropbox.do
PyPy: Cape Town 2012 sprint report
Any reboot the user did not authorize is effectively a system crash. It's unplanned unwanted downtime. Forcing reboots is okay as a policy that can be enabled in enterprise environments, but it really shouldn't be a default.

Windows 95 could run for 45 days before crashing. Out of the box, it looks like Windows 8 won't be able to manage that feat, with Patch Tuesdays every month.
Perhaps it was just a bad example, but your minority use case rivals my own, which is that I do not save credentials on my Facebook app.

Again though, if app_x implements login-less transactions, perhaps using phone number or phone SSID, or Google oAuth, then they're ahead of the Facebook app, login-wise.
>>It was the first big success in its space

Success that is not sustainable is not success.

>>and a lot if its downfall comes from how easy it is to copycat it.

No, I don't think so. The real (and perhaps the only) reason Groupon is not sustainable is because the fundamental assumption that the business model rests on turned out to be false. Let me explain.

The original idea was that Groupon would team up with a business and provide deep discounts to consumers to encourage them to try out that business. The assumption, which Groupon's sales folks used aggressively to push sales, was that a significant portion of those consumers would like the business so much that they would become repeat customers, thereby (in the long run) offsetting the cost of the original discount. In the end, the business would turn a profit.

Except it didn't work that way.

What ended up happening instead is that the vast majority of consumers never actually went back to the business. The reason is simple: while they could justify paying X dollars for the business's product or service just to try it out, they couldn't justify paying X times three or four. Because of this, most Groupon clients (the businesses) end up losing money, and never offer a second or third discount via GroupOn.

This is why GroupOn has such a huge number of sales reps: they need an ever increasing number of clients in order to postpone the inevitable sinking of the ship.
Ridiculous. While I thank you for the confidence, only someone extremely ignorant would believe that they could predict, let alone understand the complexities and resultant ramifications.

Perhaps I could superficially understand that there is a conflict, but that's about it.
Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office
Rubular is one of my favorite examples of a perfectly designed site. It has everything you need and nothing you don't.
The One Simple Social Tactic That Will Get You In The Best Shape Of Your Life
SXSW Interactive launching new conference, V2V, in Las Vegas in 2013
IPad Apps Shrunk Down To Work On iPad Mini, No Change Needed For iOS Developers
You can likely mitigate the drop off at the signup stage quite drastically by first creating value, then asking users to sign up.

Signing is a conscious decision on part of the user to accept the possibility that your app will spam their wall with achievements and updates. If you ask them to take the risk before you show them why they should, it's natural to expect such a large drop off; I've personally deleted several apps because of it.
What would be gained if it were? I suppose you could run it locally. Come to think of it, that would be nice.
Apple Officially Unveils The iPad Mini
Did anyone else find the bottom line about the (250 word) piece being reviewed by 7+ folks a bit excessive? Honest question. Just feels like a very heavy burden to meet before getting public word out on an idea.
That article is a blurb, when compared to the length and detail I've come to expect from Slate articles. Really, it starts by telling how a bunch of lockpicks broke at a lockpick convention, then jumps into the excitement of Kickstarter.

The article discusses how this guy abandoned his friends, launched their project without them, then went money-crazy when the project was funded. This guy is spending on conferences, unlimited air passes, and $24,000 worth of locks and Open Locksport swag, but doesn't even have a source for the lock picks he's "sold" to people.

Maybe the best part is where he has to spend $2000 to hire a go-between to talk to lockpick suppliers, as he was too insecure to do so himself. Maybe one of his friends could have done that, if he hadn't abandoned them. No...the best part is where all the conferences and flying and vacations has caused him to become depressed, so he checks himself into a hospital. sigh

Oh, and I think the friends he abandoned came back to sell his locks and sell this story. I'm not completely sure if they're his friends, because the Slate article is very unclear about this.
It may be that complaints over Metro are inevitable, but that doesn't mean these "crazy shitstorms" are such worthwhile reading that they deserve a spot on HN.
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/025nov06/features/xkcd/

"Actually the domain name came after the instant messaging screen name, which I picked late one night. Five, six, maybe seven years ago, I was tired of having names that meant something. Skywalker4, Animorph7... I wanted to pick a name that I wouldn’t get tired of. That would just always mean me. So I just went down combinations of letters that weren’t taken, until I could find one that didn’t have any meaning, didn’t have any pronunciation, and didn’t seem like an obvious acronym for anything."
Both theories resonate with me, empirical evidence suggests that your's is the more likely.
Happiness highest among people who eat 7 portions of fruit and vegetables a day
Zynga just laid off 100+ employees during the Apple Event. 2 hours to vacate
For A Good Strftme - Easy Skeezy Ruby Date/Time Formatting
Well, I guess I was wrong - $329 it is
Same URL for Apple event, works on Safari, "available soon" on Chrome
Same URL for Apple event, works on Safari, "available soon" on Chrome. Is it me, or are we going back to the old messed up IE days?
I've used timeoutd to disconnect idle users.
Yapmo: Enterprise Social Networks for Ideation, Sales, Productivity
The problem is, previous versions of Windows and really all versions of every OS will allow you to defer the reboot. Windows 8 was the first I encountered that didn't let me do that. I don't want to not reboot every time, but I'd like the ability to defer it once. I was expecting that. Maybe that's my fault, but there wasn't a warning that this has changed.
Why should the courts let them have another bite at the apple, though? Apple ought to have known that one of their patents was likely to invalidate the one they'd sued over because they wrote and filed both of them. In fact, in a sensible world the courts ought to take a closer look at why they were trying to patent something for which they themselves had prior art.
Apple Event: iPad Mini, 13" Retina Macbook Pro, 5mm Thin iMac Revealed
Ask HN: Where do you get your Startup / Vc news?
I saw a lot of hate today on Techcrunch. I don't like it very much either but I found it's the best source to get information on new startups that raise round / launched.

What other websites/blogs do you read to follow that kind of stuff?
hurry, Windows 9 might never appear :) I, for one thing, am going to use that $40 upgrade offer on a 3 Xp/W7 machines.
> but it's real and it's in your backyard.

Unless you're white and live in a predominantly white, upper-class neighborhood in NYC, in which case it's in someone else's backyard.

Which is the entire problem. If NYPD tried that around Carnegie Hill, you bet the practice would stop instantly. But it's in East New York, etc., so the right people don't care.

New York has a ridiculous number of stop-and-frisks, but they're so unevenly distributed that some neighborhoods have more stop and frisks annually as they have people - ie, on average, each person is stopped and frisked more than once per year.

(Sidenote: It's not a matter of changing the law: stop and frisks, as they are practiced, are already illegal by law. The problem is that the victims rarely take the issue to court, for obvious reasons, and so NYPD has no reason to stop.)
I would trust a vampire chicken.
Leo has a soothing voice that makes even four letter words sound smooth :P
Is having a forced Facebook login necessarily a bad thing? Sure, the sign-up rate might only be 50%; but if it's inherently a social app, it'll pay of with a richer user experience once the user is 'signed-in with his graph'. Of course there are many apps that simply abuse the social grap for viral invites only - that sucks. But there are also apps that are just more fun - if they can overlay / provide access to the social graph. At the end: Every app attracts the users it deserves; those who appreciate it and those who don't. As an app developer, if my app is worth the trust of a social graph, I'd rather have the users that appreciate it.
I see. It seems to me the advantage of using bootstrap is that the final product has a look and feel that's familiar to twitter users. Therefore, it's implicitly comfortable and intuitive to use.
Thanks Niel and good luck with kenHub
There's actually an option 4: publish the invention but don't patent it, so that you have a strong claim of prior art if someone tries to sue you after patenting it themselves.
Are you trying to suggest that the market for Windows tablets is well proven?
>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.

Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/boyscouts/
I currently have 42 tabs open in Chrome (in two separate windows). Yes, it's like a todo list. It would work better if I had a mechanism to de-duplicate tabs that were open to the same URL - sometimes I find that I've got three tabs open all monitoring the same CI build. But I also keep several JIRA bugs open in tabs so I don't forget them, two Gmail accounts and twitter, I've got five-ish articles that I was in the middle of reading, some reference documents for a few projects I'm in the middle of, a couple of youtube videos that I haven't found time to watch yet...
A shared computer can still have different user accounts. There's really no reason to share an account anyways, and on Mac and Windows machines at least (can't speak to any particular Linux) this gains you access to parental controls and other useful widgets.

Basically if you leave your account logged in, it's expected behavior that anyone who rolls up to the console has access to everything that account does. This is not a security issue at all.
I agree. If you're not scared of designing hardware and you have been exposed to software, it puts you in a position where you can build a physical object and also program its behavior. You can begin product level design just as a big player like Apple does with its large dedicated teams. With the advent of SOCs, its possible to do most of the hardware side of the design at the chip level. So if you can combine SOC design with high level programming (if needed) you have everything you need to holistically design a gadget. Can one person do this? Yes, I think so. As designers, with the kind of support we are now getting from SOC design tools and software development tools, the only thing missing is your product level idea and your desire to execute it. If you do this a few times, it almost becomes as simple as writing software. This is why I agree why with Paul, we truly are at the threshold of a renaissance in hardware product design.
I completely expect this to be the consumer favourite. Maybe outsell the original size by about 2:1. People love being able to easily hold stuff.
Why does this idea exist that every company needs to be sustainable? Is it not the natural way of markets that 1) an opportunity is identified, 2) exploited for profit, until 3) competition drives profitability away?

So long as capital stays productive, from a societal point of view it shouldn't matter whether it stays in one company for 20 years or moves from company to company every three.
How is it a bad translation? I was headed to the comments with the intention of applauding Google for a truly incredible translation service! Reading that wasn't blocky or painful, like reading programatically translated texts used to be. Is the idea of what is said wrong? Did they make a huge mistake in any section? Or small mistakes everywhere?

As already commented, "did an about-face" is an English idiom
I can thank Michael Hartl for showing me this gem in the Rails tutorial.
Even if not full-time PR, I'd be astonished if Amazon had zero developers who happen to read HN and would notice what's written about their workplace.