skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect his issue is with their attitude towards anything longer than a soundbite, not that they laughed because he didn't know what it meant.
"I don't think most of us fall into that category."

I'm calling bullshit. People all the time refer to Maps as one of, if not the biggest advantage of Android. Same thing with the Gmail client. In this very thread you refer to a Chrome for Android (not Chromium afaik) feature as Android (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4734771).

"What do you call the OS running on the Nook or Kindle?"

Properly it's AOSP. That fact that Google has, whether intentionally or unintentionally, created a lot of confusion between AOSP (which you can't even use the Android mark with) and "what most people call Android" (the one you can actually use the Android mark with) doesn't mean you get to have your cake ("we're open") and eat it too ("android is so great because of <list of closed source features>!").

http://marketingland.com/what-is-the-one-true-android-and-ho...
A prison sentence is a game?
Shining a light on how pitching to publishers works
Jan 15, 2002 email from Bill Gates to all MSFT staff [1]. Includes some real gems, like;

>So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve.

1.http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2002/01/49826
I've always seen this as an odd convention. Why not

if (typeof result === Error) {
Joel Spolsky Startup School Takeaways: Business Models
I loved his talk. Probably my favorite of the day after Silbermann's.
Shameless but very relevant plug :)

My startup is doing what you describe: http://vergencelabs.com/
Apparently the prolbem is that Unity3D still doesn't deploy to Linux, although the next major version will.
skaipa - thanks for that - definitely something I've not taken advantage of so far. The "giving it back" spirit is really interesting...
Stereotyping is such a sloppy way of perceiving the world, and dangerous - especially when others can relate their own experience and feelings to a misguided abstraction (and subsequently support it in a public forum to make it seem validated).

How about instead of generalizing a large, disparate geography, identify the specific events that are bothering you? Don't make it generalized, don't make it personal. Be constructive - drill down to the facts, closer to reality. Similarly, share a better way in terms of your own results and experiences instead of philosophy.
The kids character, Thomas the tank engine, is a great example of this. It all started in 1942, with a dad telling his sick kid stories to cheer him up. The kid liked it so much, that his Dad turned it into short stories, and then books. Today there are 42 books, with the last one released in 2011, a TV show that has been running for 27 years, and kids all over the world know and love Thomas. And the little kid, now 72, is still involved in the franchise.

Full story on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Tank_Engine
Because on average, LTE does not improve UX that much. For example for me, the UX improvement would be zero (I don't have LTE coverage). It also uses more battery. And for me, 3G is fast enough (about 2Mbit/s where I live).

I don't think that 2x faster GPU improves UX a lot for the average user. Accurate maps are more important IMHO.
Great comment, Samuel_Michon. One thing that is interesting to me is that your newsletter requires ppl to click through to read the entire article (as does Peter's newsletters). This probably also helps with the accuracy of open rates. Even if a reader doesn't display images, Mailchimp (as well as other email service providers) will know if he/she opened the email via the click. So, it may be a more accurate count over an email that doesn't have any links in it... (just some speculation)
I have some experience with Galera. It's pretty slick, but you probably won't want to split writes. It technically works, though you can run into some unexpected deadlocks due to optimistic locking on remote nodes vs. pessimistic locking on the write node[1]. What you really don't have to worry about is replication being behind and loosing data if you lose a host.

On the other hand, your overall throughput is constrained by the network, since all commits must at least ping all of the nodes.

Which setup are you referring to? MySQL 5.5, or MySQL NDB cluster?

[1]http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/08/17/percona-xtrad...
Reading http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792250/IT_Threat_Ev..., I find it surprising that the Netherlands manages to be the best malware exporter in the world (third in 'production', close behind Russia and the USA (both with a much larger population), but also in the top 10 for 'least consumption', a list that neither Russia nor the USA made).

Does anybody have any idea how that comes about? The only reason I can think of is that Amsterdam is a huge node in the Internet backbone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Internet_Exchange). Malware authors might want to host their stuff close to such nodes, so that they can distribute their wares efficiently.
keywonc - intriguing links. Will investigate - thanks!
Yes, naive ways cause big problems. While I've seen people do many ill-advised things in home and studio audio, professional concert audio is decidedly more buttoned down:

Grounding is not isolated, but NEC-compliant star grounded (See NEC 400.8, 520, 525, 530 (movies), and 640 (carnivals) )

Loop area is actively minimized

Signal transmission is via instrumentation amplifier topology (i.e. differential)

Shielding is designed to minimize shield current induced noise (SCIN)

These Rane tech notes gives a good overview on some of the topics above:
http://www.rane.com/note165.html
http://www.rane.com/note166.html

The AES standard for audio interconnects is here:
http://www.aes.org/publications/standards/search.cfm?docID=4...
Help Maz Jobrani to make his movie.
I don't know him personally, but as a technology guy I learnt to appreciate the rare moments with my family. I could not stop laughing during his show in San Fracisco a month ago. So I think that will be good if we can help. So give your contribution too if you like his work too.
Or hope you have engaging enough content that they click through one of your links. For example, email newsletters like HackerNewsletter are essentially just links, so there is a good chance a person will click through and be counted as an "open" (as well as a "click").

And the tracking pixel of course. Some clients auto-show images, some don't. Some people allow emails to show images, some people refuse. It's all just a "best guess".
Absolutely. It's impossible to gain traction unless you simply your product and start with one feature. The problem that then arises is how to choose the "killer app" out of your entire model, something that is groundbreaking, evaluates the market opportunity, and leaves you with a cliffhanger to prepare for the next step in increasing complexity.
"Musk: The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative."

I nearly cried. This is my company, and it is so very disappointing.
San Francisco, CA or remote fulltime (near pacific time)

CircleCI: designers, frontend, backendend engineers.

At CircleCI (https://circleci.com), we're building Heroku for Continuous Integration. We have traction and revenue. Our customers love us, because we move quickly and provide amazing support. All employees talk to customers and are on support rotation.

We're written in Clojure. We eat our own dogfood, DevOps, A/B test, do Continuous Deployment and Customer Development.

The frontend is a fat javascript client, using HamlCoffee, Less and Knockout.

Backend engineers should know Clojure or another 'weird' language (Haskell, Scala, Scheme, etc), and Linux Devops (C compilation model, make, packaging).

We're looking for: designers that can write HTML & CSS, Frontend Engineers and Backend Engineers.

We're still a small team (we just hired employee #1 off a HN who's hiring thread), so you'll have a large impact on company culture. We're highly influenced by Valve's Employee handbook.

Contact us at jobs@circleci.com. Include samples of awesome stuff you've done.
Fracture the Empire-States to Enhance Democracy - Global Separatism
The YC logo on HN is not the site's logo; it's a very small banner ad.
and rc4algorithm - I have that in a bookcase somewhere!
And will HCJ (HTML5/CSS/JavaScript) ultimately win the mobile app platform war?

Right now, native apps do a better job than Web apps, so they tend to be Plan A. You do one if the market justifies it. Plan B is a Web app for market segments too small to write a native app for. But if Android takes enough total market share with its motley crew of incompatible devices, it could push iOS into being just another of the small fragments, and mobile development could become dominated by HCJ.

I would like to see Google use its leverage to actively, explicitly work toward making HCJ the Plan A for the great majority of mobile apps. If they reached the point where enough devices used HTML5/CSS as essentially the native UI, they could even make the Plan A for native apps be browserless HCJ on the client with an option to use compiled Go instead of JavaScript (behind the HTML/CSS UI) where it made sense. The Web app and the native app become nearly the same stack.
Agreed. Starting to focus, the initial 5 minutes, is the toughest..
Am I the only person for whom snapping a photo of an experience and uploading it to Facebook doesn't ruin said experience? Am I the only person with the capacity to engage in social media at-will, without feeling compelled to do so because otherwise my experiences "didn't happen"?

I don't understand either of these sentiments.

Humans are social creatures. We always have been, and always will be. Engaging with people face-to-face is great. But when we're separated from others we care about, we'll resort to whatever means possible to share our experiences with them. In the past, that meant writing letters, talking on the phone, having film developed, etc. Today, it means whipping out your phone, snapping a photo, and touching your screen a few times.

Has the nature of how we experience life really changed that much? I can't help but feel that complaints of this nature are really just nostalgia in disguise.
So you'll agree that the iPhone 4 & 4S are also poorly built? Lots of people cracked the back screen on those phones.

Nice cherry-picking on the benchmarks. So the second fastest phone in the world is "slow". Gotcha.
This also has the side effect of making your email list have better deliverability. If you consistently have good open rates, Gmail and other email providers tend to mark your content as spam less often.

Mailchimp recommends [1] pruning out inactive or "low star" members semi-regularly for this reason.

[1] http://blog.mailchimp.com/segmenting-your-email-campaign-bas...
I write in all kinds of languages professionally and have been doing this sort of thing for a long time (since I was 9 and I'm now 31), so, I'm mostly over the language war thing. Yes, I prefer some languages over others. Or certain languages in certain situations. But I try not to let my opinions get out of hand. Everything is pretty much the same anyway.

Java? I can see the appeal. It's really come a long way. The only thing I can't get over about Java is the goddamned verbosity of it. It's _excruciating_ to write anything in Java.

Yes, I know. Use a modern IDE. The namespaces are designed that way for a reason. Just deal with it. It's not a product of Java itself but of the libraries. Blah blah.

It's still a painful environment to deal with and, with developer time several factors more important that just about anything else, I value my time highly and I'm not going to waste it on AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean bullshit.

Now, yeah. If you're a huge corporation that is bumping up against the law of large numbers, where most of your developers are mediocre and yet still have to work together, then I guess Java is OK.
Honestly if something is silly as several musical notes can be copyrighted, I don't see how you could argue something as complicated and full of creative work as an API can't be. Instead, I think we need something more like the reverse-engineering or parody laws. Allow them to be reimplemented as long as it is clearly called out that they are not the original creative work of the reimplementing party. It would lead to effectively the same thing and would give the original creator credit.
I don't think he means the literal geographic area, but the VCs and startup folks that most people think of when saying "Silicon Valley". I don't consider this title misleading. I didn't think for one moment he was talking about the firemen/teachers/doctors of the Silicon Valley.
Exactly!
It's a parser, not a substitute.
Thanks flexx! I didn't hit that one, but I'll try it now.
This misses the point badly.

If you and me owned a unicycle factory... let's say we're #1 in the world for sales and quality and let's say that China's leaders wake up tomorrow and decide to ban bicycles and push unicycles, turns out the new leader of China's nephew runs China Unicycle. Now the fact that we're rapidly losing global market share to China Unicycle is going to be far less relevant to us than the fact that our sales are going to be going through the roof.
Ah Shockwave, good to see you again my old friend.

I can't believe it's still around and kicking, given the last release of Director seems to be about two years ago.

I don't play any online games, but can somebody vouch for whether it is still used to develop browser games anymore?
Screw the world, let's get rich
Since we don't manufacture much in the US anymore it's becoming unpatriotic to not worship intellectual "property." It's almost all we've got. But still, some very successful people have chimed in to the contrary:

Napolean Hill (Think and Grow Rich): Ideas without action are impotent

Thomas Edison: Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration (he became a litigious bastard anyway)

If you're in business to make money, almost without exception it's going to be all about making and keeping people happy. That takes ongoing work, it only starts with an idea.
Starry-eyed lover melts meteorite into engagement ring
That's significantly more expensive though.

A 5KW gasoline generator is $500 new, significantly less used and definitely much more reliable than car batteries. It would also probably out last them. And it requires practically not maintenance whereas most car batteries that aren't in use would die without constant maintenance.
http://thenounproject.com/ for Icons.
Hi there, we like to say that dotCloud is cheaper than regular hosting at equivalent level of best practice.

For example, compared to AWS (pulled from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4694689):

* For a clean architecture you want to isolate each Mongo and node process in its own system. So you need 6 instances, not 3.

* You'll need load-balancers in front of these node instances. That costs extra on AWS, and is included on dotCloud.

* Did you include the cost of bandwidth and disk IO in your estimate? Those are extra on AWS, but included on dotCloud.

* Monitoring is extra on AWS. It's included on dotCloud.

* I love to have a sandbox version of my entire stack, with the exact same setup but separate from production. That's an extra 2 instances on AWS (+io +bandwidth +load-balancing +monitoring). It's free on dotCloud, and I can create unlimited numbers of sandboxes which is killer for team development: 1 sandbox per developer!

* We only charge for ram usable by your application and database. AWS charges for server memory - including the overhead of the system and the various daemons you'll need to run.

* For small apps specifically, you can allocate memory in much smaller increments on dotCloud, which means you can start at a lower price-point: the smallest increment is 32MB.

I didn't even get into the real value-add of dotCloud: all the work you won't have to do, including security upgrades, centralized log collection, waking up at 4am to check on broken EBS volumes, dealing with AWS support (which is truly the most horrible support in the World, and we pay them a lot of money).

+ Our support team is awesome and might even fix a bug in your own code if you're lucky :)
No, Android is a open source project. Open Source does not require a community driven process. When Google releases a snapshot of Android under the Apache license, then this code is open source.
As a note, I have not done any of this yet. I think it's a good idea but I'm stuck in between the HN "growth!" and a personal "quality!" mindset.

Reaching 100k subscribers is my Everest so I hope I can start pruning slowly once it crosses that psychological threshold ;-)
I'm the aforementioned employee hired off a who's hiring thread... and I'm having a great time :)
Like I said, you can try to narrow it down, but it's pretty hard to define a rigid line between art and not art in any medium.

Although your particular example is kind of amusing, given the prominent role of the Prisoner's Dilemma in discussing elementary game theory! :P
I would think there is value in the NDA for the legal side of VC/Funding. Isn't protecting one's Intellectual Property seen as prudent, and one of the checkboxes to check in evaluating a business plan?
Ah, yes. The old game of taking a perceived flaw of a product that is competitive to a product you like, and blowing it way out of proportion. I'll play a round.

- The camera on the iPhone 5 has the 'purple haze' issue.

- The iPad mini has an embarrassingly low resolution display for (almost) 2013, despite also having a larger display than the Nexus 7.

- The iPad 4 doesn't run as hot as the iPad 3, and no longer makes me scrambled eggs for breakfast while I play Infinity Blade.

Seriously. All products have flaws, and therefore there is no perfect product. Pointing out flaws to prove that your favorite company is better than their competitors is counter-productive. I really wish people would stop this childish debate and just agree that both Google (with their hardware partners) and Apple make fantastic, competing products.
What exactly is wrong with writing "Summary" at the top of an article, rather than "TL;DR"?

We live in a multi-lingual world, using real words, correct grammar and avoiding slang should be standard in most posts/article. Throwing buzzwords and acronyms around is self-indulgence at the expensive of non-native English speakers.
good point. I guess where I would have a legal objection to that line of thought is that an NDA != patent/trademark/copyright - and if it does then it is not strictly an NDA. Certainly maintaining independence of legal bindings is a nice freedom, but knowing what you sign (or choose not to sign) is probably the smart thing to do for any legal document.

"The problem with signing an NDA is that by definition you're not sure what you're about to see." - I am not sure I agree with this (sorry for being picky). To me an NDA means you won't share some material with another party. Whether you already know what that material is or not doesn't really have much to do with what an NDA is. That being said, odds are you won't know beforehand...
We get around a 50% open rate on our newsletters (40k+ double opt in subscribers).
Different MBAs have different CPUs -- I remember having the option to upgrade when I bought mine, and the base 13" is beefier than the upgraded 11".

e: Ah, but it actually runs fine on my 2010 unupgraded 11" Air. I'd guess a higher resolution screen would hurt performance, though.
Call bullshit all you want, it doesn't make you any more correct. Android is an open source operating system, saying otherwise is ignorant.

If you want to talk about Google Play, Maps, Gmail, etc., it's pretty easy to install as a user on any non-locked down AOSP based version of the OS that doesn't rip out necessary APIs. In any case I call these 'apps' which are available on Android, the OS.
Very thin bit of content, there.

I don't think anyone can be more exhausted by the douchiness of the valley than people who actually work here. But this post smacks of contempt prior to investigation – OP is from Minnesota.

> It’s amazing to me that people covet having millions of dollars, a downtown loft and private jets. Everything comes at a price and those who live that life are empty, work most of the time, and don’t have meaningful human relationships.

It's a compelling straw man, here. I'm not sure I know anyone who covets millions of dollars or a private jet. I do know people who covet an escape from debt, a chance at a self-directed life, or an opportunity to make something cool without a PHB distracting them with bureaucratic nonsense.

OP seems to have a cartoon vision of greed and hubris. And maybe that exists here, somewhere. But as a guy who's been working in the neighborhood for three years, this level of avarice isn't a frequent topic of conversation among people I know – actual, living, breathing millionaires included. (Incidentally, having single digit millions of dollars would be insufficient to afford a private jet.)

A compelling argument against the VC system could be made – they are certainly an interesting breed and their expectations can definitely pollute the potential for solid, long-term businesses. But no such argument was made here.

> Sure, I like to make things. Yes, I might not always think about my products all the way through. I may never be rich. But, damn it, I will have had fun. I will have had passion for the things I get involved in and I will love my family and my friends to the death.

This is where shit gets uncomfortable for me. It would seem that OP is rationalizing his lack of prosperity or outsize riches – or something – as a result of his principled distaste for and avoidance of that dreadful hive of scum and villainy in California.

Silicon Valley has several things going for it. Ample venture capital. Local concentration of engineering and design talent. Terrific weather. If you live in San Francisco, you even get a world city into the bargain.

Like anything, it has its downsides. You can take it or leave it. OP chooses leave it. Which is fine. But the image depicted by the post has puzzlingly little relation to what I would say is reality.
Actually, callbacks are the Intercal's COME_FROM instruction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COME_FROM).

So, it is even worst!
Great post.

Where do I find great lists to send news to and advertise on (aside from LaunchBit)?
Apple's reformed apology to Samsung makes an appearance
Did you also do the artwork?
You're really good at cherry picking, aren't you? Anandtech for the performance numbers, Engadget for battery life numbers. By Anandtech's numbers, the Nexus 10 gets 93% of the battery life of the iPad, even though the Nexus 10 uses a much smaller battery. Between the lighter battery and the grippy back, Google designed a device that can be safely held in one hand, a tradeoff I appreciate.
Congratulations on your first game. Keep up the hard work and you'll have some pretty competitive stuff on your resume for college applications!
A propritary software that only runs on Android is for sure an advantage for Android. But that does not mean that it is Android.

One advantage of Microsoft Windows over Ubuntu is that Windows runs Photoshop nativly and Ubuntu does not. But that does not mean that Photoshop is Windows.