skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aside from prices and selection (for some reason the number in USD is equal to the number in GBP for almost everything, even when GBP is 1.6-2.2x the USD), it's size and layout of stores and staffing.

There were two main kinds of stores -- pale imitations of Best Buy, Circuit City, and Microcenter (out in the suburbs/small towns) (which is ironic since those businesses have had serious problems in the US market now, too, 10 years later), and urban small stores. The smaller chain stores (Dixons high street locations) had very limited product selection and you had to wait in a queue to get a salesperson to handle your purchase, rather than staff out on the floor to push products (often on commission) and then take the purchase to the registers. The big stores mainly had cookers and other white goods/appliances, with really limited selection of anything tech. This was 2000-2002. EU stores were a lot better in my limited experience (NL and DE). The only way to actually buy computer parts was to go to fairly sketchy flea market type buildings or fairs, mail order, or a small number of independent shops (at least in London; never found anything outside London).

Staff were even less educated on products than at a Best Buy in the US today, terrifying. Even getting people to take a model number and look it up in their inventory system was a minor production.
3G doesn't come close to approaching those speeds in most areas.

It's not about how long it takes to run a download of a media file, you're completely missing the point. It's about the drastically improved latency and responsiveness in downloading complex modern web pages, streaming, and caching stuff.

For example, The Verge homepage is almost as big as a song. If the question becomes do you need to make every page load .5 seconds instead of 2 seconds then "yes" wouldn't seem so ridiculous.

Why would I do that kind of sustained downloading on my phone? That's what the server & home internet connection is for. LTE on the phone isn't for blowing through 6GB In 11 minutes, it's for grabbing the data you need as quickly as possible.
Ways to Stay Productive in a Power Outage
How in the hell is that even somewhat similar?
Sure, whatever. Maybe the "next Dropbox" will apply last minute.
I agree it would have been very strange for the letter to be signed by both Tim Cook and Scott Forstall. For one thing, it would make Cook look smaller than Jobs, who, if I recall correctly, never had a co-signer on such a letter. It wouldn't have looked much better for Cook if Forstall had signed the letter alone, given its significance to the company and its customers.

My guess is that Forstall refused to sign off on the public apology. Nobody was asking him to sign the letter, but he was asked by Cook to stand behind it. Failure to do so was probably the last straw for his remaining in an active role at Apple (a role he clearly was at least contemplating leaving after his big stock sale).
A day?

I lost ten days of power/connectivity in Isaac.

I'm not in this YC run, but to be honest, I don't think a day's really enough.
It's refreshing to hear someone suggest they got in due to their ability to build something, rather than a shortcut or gimmick.

Good luck with your business.
Most importantly, 75 Broad just flooded; pretty soon they'll lose 55 Broad, 25 Broad, 60 Hudson, and potentially 111 8th. The problem is the generators are not on particularly high floors, and people only keep certain amounts of fuel (<24h, often around 8h), and even with "guaranteed refueling contracts", a lot of people won't be getting diesel in time.

(EDIT: these are the main carrier hotels and colocation facilities in the Northeast, all in Manhattan.)
> He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of direct underlings - he should have been in the trenches talking to the developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly.

True enough, but my point is that there is a bigger problem: He ran an org in which nobody tackled him in the hallway and said "WTF This is a piece of crap! We can't release such a POS, and if you do I quit!"

An organization is not fixed by chopping only one head, there are no doubt lieutenants that need to be axed.
"Show HN: Cleaver - simple, interactive HTML slideshows from JSON"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4622645

Unfortunately I didn't get the response I wanted, but I got some stars and forks on GitHub, so I'm happy. I'll continue developing this weekend project in my spare time.
Android 4.2 lets users contribute panoramic "Photo Spheres" to Google Maps
The problem is I can just as easily come up with a situation where Google is being "evil" and doing everything it can to screw Apple:

Apple and Google have become serious competitors. Apple realized that and started working on its mapping solution, but recognized it wasn't ready in time for iOS 6. Unfortunately, the license was going to run out before iOS 7, so a new contract would have to be negotiated[1].

Google came back and said "piss off" (or "pay $50/phone" or whatever "evil" terms you want). Apple couldn't make the terms work within their constraints, so quickly made a deal with Tom Tom and tried to integrate their data into the nascent mapping system[2].

The iOS 6 beta comes along and the data is nowhere near where it needs to be. Apple has a decision to make here and, with a choice of "go for it" or "pull a major feature in iOS 6.x"[3], they decide to cross their fingers and go for it.

Now, iOS 6 release hits. They know the maps aren't ready, but the bridges have been burned. Their choices now are "put some lipstick on a pig" or "pull a major feature from iOS 6.0". They decide on lipstick. Sometimes you get away with it; sometimes you don't. They didn't.

I'm not saying this is what happened!

My point is that when major companies are in "coopetition"[4], nothing is simple and obvious. Maybe Apple thought they could shroud everybody in a reality distorition field. It is possible, even plausible. I just don't think it is the most possible scenario, and it is tiring to hear it expressed as the "only" possible solution.[5]

1. http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/timing_of_apples_map_switc... (that's the best I've got to "source" the end of the Apple/Google deal happening before iOS 7 would release)

2. http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/427347/apple_signs_glo...

3. iOS releases seem to have stabilized on an October time-frame. Based on my experience, it is unlikely that you could pull up the release of an OS by 6 months, so maps would have to change in a "dot" release.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition

5. Regardless of what really happened, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in those meetings. Those would have been awesome bizdev meetings...unless Apple really did say "piss off". :)
A cursory read of the '883 patent suggests that the claims are anticipated in the prior art and that the patent would likely be found invalid were it litigated or re-examined. Just understanding what the "invention" is and constructing claims charts for prior art candidates requires an enormous amount of energy, time, and money. It is not to be approached lightly.
Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps organization.

By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself, which would mean adding a page search engine to the browser. When a user bookmarked a page, it's contents would be indexed (taking into account the security implications)

I believe people already do it today on a sense, it's most of the time easier to search Google than browse dozens or more bookmarks.

As for organization, any machine learning (if im addressing the correct concept) would probably be better than my current method, because a correct bookmarking process "pain" increases exponentially with the number of bookmarks a user already has.
Most of Manhattan is without power. While some people may think it's badass to hack through the storm oblivious, the situation out here is pretty intense. I would encourage some leniency with the deadline, especially since as far as I know for NYC, things won't be back to normal for quite a few days.
Michael O'Church seems quite happy to share what went on. What's stopping you?

Michael O'Church's arguments are internally consistent, and more persuasive than vague statements impugning his character.
Trains in NYC are expected to be down through the end of the week, Connecticut has closed highways to non-emergency traffic, chunks of Manhattan have no power and patients at one NYC hospital are being evacuated due to generator failure. Homes in NY and CT are being flooded, some banks are being closed indefinitely.

I imagine that a lot of YC folks may be scrambling to check on homes and loved ones and trying to keep generators working, etc.

I think a deadline extension would be appropriate. I know there's an argument to be made that folks should be prepared, but this (like many of the weather events I got to experience in Western Mass last year) really is unprecedented.

(I have no stake in this, I just think extending the deadline is the right thing to do).
Google is a fascinating place. From what I gather, it used to be Valve-like back in the time when Google-culture was established. It was pretty much open allocation. You worked on what was interesting to you, and as long as you were achieving something, you were in good graces. Back then, I can see why people would get emotionally invested in such a place. Now it's just another corporation.

The problem, in the past couple years, is that it became a place where if you have an unethical manager, you're just screwed. He'll burn you before you can serve your 18 months and get away. But it seems pretty clear that if you get a good manager, Google is a pretty great place to work.
My relatives are in NJ and from what I hear, they lost power all around them. Given last year's snow storm, it will take a week to get electricity/internet back to normal. At this point, a day won't make a difference.
This is definitely something I have considered before. I often have many many tabs open, usually as a means of remembering things that I should go back and look at. I use tree style tab [1] to organize them, and I try to keep things in groups by subject. I think that rather than having the user organize their bookmarks / long-term tabs, it might be easiest to group them automatically by subject or hyperlink trails. If a group wasn't visited after some time, it could be dumped into a designated bookmarks folder. I don't think it would be hard to set up filters which look at the content or titles of web pages and determine what type of group they are. For example, reddit/slashdot/hacker news posts waiting to be read could be grouped and dumped in one bookmarks location while stackOverflow and github tabs being used for a project could be in another.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Ah, the dilemma of Wikipedia math articles, which all kick off with mouthfuls like "nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field."

If you don't have a PhD in mathematics, they're unreadable. And if you do, they're unnecessary.
I'd say Colin is substantially more "successful" than tarsnap has been as a business -- he's well regarded by basically everyone in the BSD community, crypto software community, etc. -- but that's because (IMO) tarsnap is a fairly niche product, executed well for that niche, but without much effort to make it a larger category product. Which is fine -- the effort to turn tarsnap into a more consumer-friendly or enterprise-IT-department friendly product might not be something he wants to do, and since he doesn't have external investors, no one is pushing him to do it.
How to get into YC as a single, non-technical founder, in 4 easy steps:

1. Graduate from Harvard College (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude are pluses)

2. Work at JP Morgan as an investment banker

3. Graduate from Harvard Law School

4. Work at a major law firm

So easy, anyone can do it!
Internap evacuates LGA datacenter
This is exciting news right? AMD might get back on track AND more ARM for everyone!
A few Heroku add-ons have also high availability options. Along with a new add-on status page http://status.addons.heroku.com/

RedisToGo - http://blog.togo.io/status/redistogo-hurricane-preparation/

MongoHQ - http://blog.mongohq.com/blog/2012/10/29/monitoring-the-weath...
Yes. In my experience with events, at least, most of the proposals come in on the last couple of days of the CFP. In an ideal world, I'd say.. that shows how unprepared they are!.. but I'm pretty much the same and it's just how people work ;-)
It's being considered: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715829
I knew someone would come in and say that! (And I enjoyed my classes on automata.)

You're right, though. Which goes back to my question around what should be part of a formal education? I bet HN could come up with 10 years worth of courses that are "essential", plus another 10 that are "nice to haves".
And some people disagree with the notion of money. Why is your value system better to indoctrinate the young with over theirs?

I don't disagree with you, mind. It's just that accusations of indoctrination are responded to in kind.
You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't. I don't know if that's what happened here or not, but if it did, then there is in fact such thing as "it's not my fault."

If Steve Jobs was talking about himself when he made that statement, then it's spot on. He micromanaged the shit out of that company and nearly always got his way. Fortunately, he did a hell of a job. If he screwed up though, he would have had not a single person to blame but himself, because he personally called most of the shots.

While I haven't been an executive at a billion dollar company, I have a good amount of leadership experience from my time in the military. I always try to be blatantly honest with myself and others. If I personally fuck something up, I tend to immediately own up to it and propose a solution. However, there have been a few very rare occasions where I've either had myself and my team thrown under the bus for something that was beyond our control, or failed to complete a task because it was simply impossible to achieve under the given deadline. Only a coward would let someone place undeserved blame on himself or his subordinates.
They already did in China. My wife bought a Galaxy S2 in January, and it came with Samsung Apps instead of Google Play, no Google Maps, no Gmail or Google Talk etc. Yes, it's a legitimate Samsung product, not some Chinese knockoff.

She's hugely disappointed with it and refuses to buy any more Samsung products. (It doesn't help that she refuses to let me root it and install CyanogenMod, but you don't expect to have to do that if you're paying the equivalent of over $600 US for a phone)
The post talks about how a page minimum had the effect of rewarding useless verbiage. I've found that page maximums in proposal writing have helped me to sharpen my writing considerably. I had to write a 5 page proposal for $100k in a very competitive program earlier this year, and it was really a challenge to get all the ideas in.

Another thing I learned along the way is inverted storytelling. Tell it once in a sentence at a high level, again in a paragraph later on, and then again at greater length in the body of the document. Put the key stuff first and the supporting details later, even if (because?) the supporting details are technical, intricate, and show off your mastery. If you can't put the idea in a sentence, you're doing something wrong.
By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself...

Opera, circa 2008:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/indexing-and-searching-in...
Had Sushi Delivered During A Hurricane. I Guess NY Has It's Perks
Sorry it seems I came across as critical. I wasn't suggesting you guys should do anything differently. It was more to outline things to consider for others reading.

Out of curiosity, is the main thing for you Database level integration? Like what RJMetrics does with analytics?
No, don't destroy a generation of children with bad science.
Empty America - NYC
Point taken. (The problem with hyperbole is that there's always an exception: I know some very bright technical minds in "developing countries".)

But we're talking about "formal education": how do we develop strong technical thinkers?
Well, yes. You don't want one bull to do 100% of cows, but one bull can easily do an entire herd, and using In Vitro methods the most valuable bulls fertilise thousands of cows.
IRC. (with people who lived out of colos in Lower Manhattan after 9/11, since if they left the area they wouldn't have been allowed back in -- living off vending machine food for a week or two reconfiguring equipment for themselves and other networks to account for the missing part of the city)

Also, woo, no more 111 8th. Building power is down for most of the building (all of it?) (per floor), although some of the areas have their own generators (Level(3) and the old AboveNet area)
It's not academic research. The guys is primarily an author selling books, and rigorous academic treatises tend to end up in journals nobody reads.
I don't know what's more insane: the N10's 2560 x 1600 screen or how hard is to find a laptop with a measly 1080p screen for twice the price of that tablet.

The N4 is bonkers too. Sure there are other phones with HD screens now, but with a quad Krait? the only other I know is the Mi2, and good luck getting one at launch.

The N7 with cellular is really tempting since with a little hack you could have a tablet+phone hybrid (using a Bt headset). Too bad it still uses the Tegra3, a SoC that couldn't keep up with the dual Krait.

But overall I think Google just brought a gun to knife fight...
The "Why not"'s don't outweight the "Why"'s, imo, so go for it. No need not to be humane, civil, and all that jazz.
I personally have fallen quite significantly out of favor with Erlang. There are many reasons for which I would absolutely use it---soft realtime being key---but it is an absolute bear to work with.

Erlang's reliance on spawning processes as a central abstraction conceit leads to conflating a lot of best practice OTP ceremony with your domain logic. You end up with a Service Oriented Architecture at the application level---people rarely write pure libraries, but instead bootable applications that you communicate to handle needs asynchronously. Additionally, launching processes is not as simple an interaction as beginner Erlang tutorials have you believe. Instead, there's a lot of reason to wrap in the OTP boilerplate leading you to split out things into multiple files and applications.

Dialyzer/Typer is a mess. They're crucial tools for using Erlang successfully, I believe, but they're also only mildly tied into the language and have weird, difficult to understand error messages. That said, they're really good at discovering the myriad errors you'll make passing tuples around.

There's also an enormous amount of black magic surrounding rel creation and management. Using Rebar and reverse engineering Riak I was able to figure (most of) it out. It is, as the author states, a very smart system, but it's also very difficult to get all the pieces firing together.

I would today use Erlang for creating simple, bombproof server architecture. It's a joy for doing lots of independent, network things in parallel. Mochi Media seems to be an obvious example, and I remember reading that [forgotten game name that isn't ROTMG, thanks!] is an MMO game which models every interacting player as an independent Erlang process. Those examples are both beautiful, as an infrastructure language I think it's unparalleled and begets great technology like Riak---I'm seriously itching to use Riak Core sometime. I just wouldn't want to be the guy who wrote the player logic to run one of those processes.

(Edit: to qualify, a lot of these flaws are more my own than Erlang's, but despite spending 3-4 months with it I put it in the box with C as a Right Knife for the Job kind of language)
Interesting. Would you mind sharing the name of your startup? I'd love to check it out.
I think "Firefox's fancy-pants bookmark features are too complicated and confusing" would be a much more accurate summation of the article (and a point I'd agree with) than "Bookmarks are broken," but I guess it wouldn't grab so many eyeballs, either.
1920 x 1200 is nowhere near 2x resolution. Its more like 1.2 or 1.3.
Yawp, an iOS App.net client
Sandy Blows Upcoming ShmooCon Dates Out … & a Special Announcement
Text selection mostly still sucks, there isn't any ability for third-party developers to modify the systemic behavior, there isn't any ability to allow different user accounts, as most PC OS's do.
Pentagon Losing Members to Its Cybersecurity Program
Hurricane Sandy Brings Focus to Disaster Plans
I hope I'm reading the situation incorrectly, but all I get out of this is that Forstall has an epic ego.

He is asked to sign an apology letter for the short comings of an app that he was in charge of and was at least confident enough in to present to the world. When it was time to pay the piper and accept responsibility for the app he told the world was great, he shirks all responsibility.

I fully support the decision to remove him from his position.
The problem with the "10,000 hours" principle is may be you will be immensely successful following it. But don't be surprised if you don't.

For you to be successful "10,000 hours" might be one of the many thing that need to fall in place. In many cases it might not even matter, to give you a simple example- If you are born in a society full of tribal wars in some poor country in Africa. I seriously doubt merely putting in 10,000 hours of work will help you out of the situation. The fact is luck, opportunity, being at the right place all matter.
Gawker, et al. down no BCDR?
rdl, do you know what the water level is at 111 8th? Any other information about that immediate area would be greatly appreciated.
Lets see if I understand you right. Mapping is not hard. You just have to get good data. Getting good data is hard though. And getting good data is part of doing Mapping. So basically you said Mapping wasn't hard and then said that a crucial part of Mapping was really hard.

All of which is a roundabout way of contradicting? yourself.
I'd expect managers who hire young people out of universities expect the conceptual tools and the theory, with the weakness being practical experience. And I'd say this is true across all majors (even vocational schools).

And to my mind, that's the correct order: I'd rather teach someone the practical components rather than the theoretical ones while they're on the job. (Not to mention that practical components—even programming languages—are quickly out of date. Theory has a much longer shelf life.)
The rationale for ditching microsd slots is that different volumes (mount points) for the built-in flash and the microsd flash complicates the UI, and creates dissatisfaction when someone runs out of space on one while having plenty of space on the other.

The modern usage pattern seems to be get enough built-in storage for what you want to do, then use wifi or usb to transfer stuff between the device and the cloud or a desktop with a larger collection of media.
Seconded! This looks perfect.
Do you really like the gamecenter popover?

To me it's one of the worst designs on the iPad. The buttons are way too tiny, they are arranged differently for every game, and each game seems to compete for the least intuitive layout and labeling.
We'll put them out of business with a superior product. :)

userfox will be freemium business. (what you see now will be free, though.)