skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait till you see the laws surrounding the sale of liquor and cigarettes. There are many protected industries, some protected for business reasons and some for tax purposes.

Tesla is not only upsetting the apple cart when it comes to sales but service; I do not agree with their service side changes because it takes choice out of the hands of the consumer. (disclaimer : I work for a parts distributor who happens to own repair shops too).

Dealers are rightly upset because the current system requires them to put up a lot of money in facilities that must be built to specific guidelines. Throw in having to meet manufacturer set requirements for sales and service they do have a large investment. Contrary to belief, the majority of new car dealerships are very good people who do go out of their way to help people.
Show HN: Push targeted messages/offers on your website, in realtime
This issues is not specific to India though. I face the same problem here in Lebanon.

It is actually cheaper to buy things from Amazon, pay shipping to my forwarding company and customs here than buying from local retailers. The only problem is if there's a problem with the purchase then returns are a problem.
We had a flooded rack in New Orleans after Katrina. We had tape backups, but during the evacuation frenzy the wrong tape was pulled from the library (we should've just yanked the entire magazine). Not recovering the data would result in thousands of lost man-hours of work, so when we discovered that the tape we had was blank, it quickly became a do-anything-at-any-cost situation.

Things were dicey post-Katrina and they weren't letting anyone in the city. We had to charter a sea plane and land it in a canal behind our office to gain physical access. We were escorted by mercenaries armed with automatic weapons. Once inside, we grabbed every drive and tape out of every server and array enclosure.

We ended up being able to do a full recovery from tape once we got back. Sometime later, when we were able to get the entire rack over to another data center, I was curious if any of the gear would work so we reconstructed everything. Miraculously, after being submerged for over 4 days, nearly every hard drive and server booted with zero data loss (one or two drives didn't spin up, but they were RAIDed). Perhaps even more impressive is that they stayed running that way for years after in our staging and test environment. It's pretty crazy how well-engineered and reliable the server-grade stuff can be these days.
America has anti-trust laws. Companies are not supposed to be allowed to wield undue market power (e.g. be able to set the price of their type of product). Now this is obviously complex. But basically a lot of anti-trust battles led to the de-verticalization of numerous businesses: from film studios which owned theaters, to Standard Oil which owed oil, railroads, refineries, distribution centers, etc.

The idea is to make sure there is market efficiency, e.g. competition, in price throughout, so the consumer doesn't get screwed.

Now the idea of a franchise law like this one is done in a similar vain: it appears to ensure better competition for big car makers to bring their goods to consumers.

The problem is this law is written from a perspective of a couple major car companies that dominate the market.

There has always been an argument that a small player cannot be considered to wield market power, and that thus they should be allowed to be vertical. Apple for a long time avoided any anti-trust issues (while Microsoft didn't) even though it was very much vertical, by being small! Tesla presumably will use the same argument.

Bottom line there are two sides to laws like these: on the one hand, in Tesla's case, they seem anti-competitive. On the other hand they are made to bring about a kind of competition. Clearly the courts will need to resolve this...
I couldn't agree more. I've heard _very_ few flattering stories from coworkers and friends over the decades of their experiences with car dealerships and their service.

When you factor in something unusual, like a Wankel engine, the experience gets exponentially worse. Just browse any RX-7 or RX-8 forum and you'll see nothing but horror stories whenever anyone asks "where should I have my car serviced?".
So much for the dealer's investment in "expensive equipment and training". They don't... they hire the cheapest labor that meets their loose requirements.

Now take that difference even further and eliminate the ICE and replace it with 6k+ Li-Ion cells with their own cooling system, an AC induction motor, high powered inverter and the related heavy cabling, and you're going to have massive confusion and problems in a dealer whose primary sales and training is for conventional vehicles.
Of course, a possible answer could be _exclusive_ dealerships with _extremely_ strict requirements for training and such, but I'm sure there are probably laws against that as well.
Impressive cms demo (german)
GERMANY MAY ATTACK USA
Verticals and localization. I believe there are 50 Groupon clones in Turkey alone and you can find a deal site in every single niche you can think of.
You have personal experience with "Africa"? African countries have much less in common with each other than non-Africans tend to imagine. That being said, I agree with you regarding computer adoption.

A new, low end Droid can be had for roughly $50 contract-free in my city, Nairobi.
Tips for Building a Mobile Developer Community
Remember, "It is all about them".

Dolphin's chief architect shares tech wisdom on community building inspired by Diane Bisgeier from Mozilla at HTML5 Developer Conference.
As a physician, I routinely do this. I may know the answer, but the patient just sees me as a primary care guy. This is quadruply true if it is a friend or ten times true if it is a family member. Politically far more favorable for me to consult. The specialists (aka, consultants), especially in private practice, are often happy to get an occasional easy consult, and the patient/friend/family appreciates me "recruiting big guns for the problem". If I stuck to insisting I know and I'm right, then I lose credibility, no matter how much evidence I cite. It's a social/political problem, not a scientific problem. And specialists consult each other constantly. There have been days in training I wrote more consults than orders (eg: meds, tests).
From what I understand, India has a fairly high import tax on electronics. FWIW, it looks like the 16 iPhone 5 retails there for ~$850.
I mean to say, Padfone 2 has already been showcased to a wider public through tech media sites and ASUS India made the Padfone (now almost an year old product) available in India a few days ago.

Thanks for the information about customs duty in India.
>We've got some really healthy revenue and within a month or so based on our current growth, we'll break even. Not bad for only launching a couple of months ago.

A blog post describing this would be more interesting to me than how you e-mailed a TechCrunch author and he wrote an article about you.

I don't mean for this to come across as snarky or belittle your post—it's just that you basically e-mailed a short pitch to a TechCrunch article and got an article out of it. That's not really revolutionary; lots of 'unsexy' (see: Enterprise) startups get covered on TC.

EDIT: Or, comparing the effects of your TC coverage against more targeted 'focused coverage'—since I think a lot of startups fall into the "we need to be techcrunch'd" trap and don't realize how effective other less buzz-worthy but more targeted media can be.
Evil Writing Prompts
What percentage of the populace could afford such a device and the data plan? For what percentage would that be true for with a $25 device?
Show HN: garlic.js - don't let your users lose their form data
You miss the most common issue:

4 The task requires interacting with a system that was not designed with automation in mind.

For instance you have a third party GUI which you don't have source to that you have to push a button on based on what it is showing you. So you wind up having to research this, work around it, etc. Often you can use a GUI test kit to solve it temporarily, but that is going to be fragile - on the next upgrade it will likely break.

In this case automation may not be worthwhile. What you're learning is not connected with what you do. The automated solution is more fragile than the human one. The time saved is not that important.
What options are available for Linux/Mac developers? Can we just install Mono and Nuget and start hacking away?
Same reason we need any type of human salespeople -- sometimes people don't want to do all the research & comparisons by themselves and its nice to have someone guide you in the right direction.

Now - that being said - I don't disagree with the sentiment here. The traditional car sales model sucks and I think is ripe for disruption. But don't necessarily throw the baby out with bath water ;)

For example - I bought an espresso machine for a friend the other day. I called one of the better retailers out there and spoke to a super-helpful saleswoman who talked me through the various options, gave me differences between models, what's worth paying for and what's not, and based on my personal preferences, helped me pick the right one. It was a totally pleasant experience.

But what made it particularly excellent was that she wasn't (to my knowledge) pushing one particular brand/model. She had at her disposal about 20 different brands and guided me to the "best fit" based on my needs.

Maybe that's an opportunity for car dealers in the future -- maybe manufacturers sell directly and we get independent "car sales consultants" who don't work for a particular brand....?
whoa!!!
Tesla has an online reservation system (https://www.teslamotors.com/own). From http://automotivedigest.com/2012/10/dealers-annoyed-with-tes... :

> Tesla’s stores are a bit dif­fer­ent – essen­tially show­rooms to gain con­sumer inter­est and edu­ca­tion. For those impressed and want­ing to buy, they’re directed to a com­puter to make their deposit and place their order.

Tesla here is clearly navigating on purpose through a gray area in which the customer is technically not buying anything from the show room.
That's exactly what Nikon does.
Actually iTunes on Windows also calls IsDebuggerAttached and exits for YES. This though can be easily by passed by hooking the function call.
I know a few guys that follow this pattern.
Will Obama Let Washington and Colorado Keep Their Legal Pot?
"multi-platform"
My initial response was that I would use it but I'm price sensitive thanks to 500px accounts ($20 & $50 yr).

Flickr also includes video so that might be something to iterate.

Maybe you could offer subdomain for that price?

Excellent design. I prefer the static display as default over the slideshow. I want to appreciate the image quality not use it as a digital frame.
Lazy Evaluation in C++11
>a little more than 'take a guess',

go on..?
So you feel it would have been preferable that the auto companies go bankrupt, get liquidated, then have their suppliers go bankrupt and liquidate?
If you're the prez and express a significant reaction to common scanner technology that's 12 years old, that's news, whether it's "amazed" or "curious".
The video quality is not sharp and it's got ads from YouTube so it doesn't look professional. Other than that, congrats!
Sure, I'd be happy to write something about that, and I love the idea of comparing the TC "results" with the other, more targeted places that wrote about us.

You are right, all I did was pitch them in a certain way. I wouldn't call us an Enterprise focused start-up yet and I wasn't trying to come across as revolutionary— just sharing an experience of how I managed to achieve something :)
A friend and I used to try to make the grandest structures possible together, on servers that had monsters/death (ie, not creative mode), including a hardcore pvp server (12 hour ban on death) where we were the only ones to attempt to build beautiful things.

With fear of death, and materials running, and the needed exploration to get some things it became extremely more fun than playing alone. We'd also discuss and argue about building dimensions, often resorting to meeting in person and doing some things over on graph paper.

Surprisingly, on the hardcore pvp server, everyone either left us alone or protected us after a short while. I had to die maybe 20 times for everyone to more or less agree that we was nonviolent and had little worth taking, and that the thing we were building was pleasing. Some people even donated materials.

I wish I took more pictures. Here's the start of Sophia[1] and the start of a library on the Hardcore server[2]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/NYFSi.jpg

[2] http://i.imgur.com/fMdcx.jpg
They don't make their own fan belts. The dealer would simply switch to another brand. They are standardized, after all.
Getting covered by TC is easy. They posted 34 stories on the front page yesterday alone. There simply isn't that much tech news. If you give a decent story to a reporter that he/she can publish it with little work, you're there.

Why you'd want to be covered by TC is a different story.
> I can use default project templates that are included in Visual Studio, download starter projects from the web, or, if I prefer, start with a completely empty solution and use Nuget to cherry-pick functionality that other developers have made available.

It's not about just the templates(I have personally never used one). Rails has useful code generation(scaffold, controller, model, migration). I would rather not type what I can generate. This isn't something you can solve with project templates.

How is this a myth that you can bootstrap a project faster using Rails? Here, take this:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#creating-...

Show me how I do the "10 minutes blog" in your framework of choice.

> Myth 2: It's Easier to Manage Packages Rails

Great. Good on them for realizing adding assemblies using Visual Studio dialogs is a fucked up way to manage dependencies.

> Myth 3: It's Better to Develop with RoR Because it's Open Source

It's better to develop with RoR because it's open source, and when something breaks or I need to augment, I don't need to wait for my overlords.

> If your personal opinion or corporate agenda is that it's "better" to develop on OSS solutions, then good on you.

It's neither. How hard is it to understand that black boxes are a pain?

> Myth 4: I Get More Options for View Engines/I'm not Limited by Microsoft View Engines

> First of all...what limitations? The Razor view engine â the default for MVC â is likely one of the best view engines around right now.

And how is razor one of the best? http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/views/introduction-to-razor... This looks like another run of the mill template engine.

> Maturity isn't dictated by age, and what is really important is how comfortable you are with your tools.

Maturity of a framework is independent of how comfortable you are with it.

> but it doesn't mean you can dismiss VS for what it is

Umm. RoR isn't an IDE. What has RoR's maturity got to do with VS? If you want to talk about tooling, please do, but how does RoR's tooling the same as RoR maturity?

> You're likely to find just as many bad questions, answers, arguments and features in any language, if you look hard enough.

Are you seriously positing all languages have same amount of activity and features?

> I know exactly where my models go. And my views. And helpers. And filters.

And I am least interested in learning a new project layout every time I work on a different project. You know your project layout - I don't and I am not interested in learning it. The point of a standardized layout is "it's more clear where things go".
You can install Mono(on Linux at least; don't know about Mac). NuGet wasn't working last time I checked.
But at the same time understanding the web itself has become much harder. CSS3 / html5 / ECMAscript 5.1 / JS 1.85 (I looked them up, I can't remember any real fundamental JS changes that have happened recently since they added let) are all much more complex standards. I mean, the number of tags in html5 was increased by, like, 50%?.

Sure, at least now the standards are much more stable than in the 90s (I can't imagine trying to keep up with the rapid and constant platform lock in gotchas between netscape and ie...) but learning all that stuff takes a lot longer.

It is like how you can start a car easier today than you could in 1920. The car is much more complex, but the abstractions built on top of that have made it as easy as turning a key rather than having to rev the engine, crank it up, etc. But anyone trying to be an automechanic is expected to know the fine grained details of the modern combustion engine and all the quirks auto manufacturers use to make them more efficient and performant, or else they don't come off as "professional".

I feel the same way with any development role. It doesn't feel professional if I don't know the whole stack behind it. And the stack, like the car, has only gotten taller. Average Joe can pick up Drupal or jquery + bootstrap + rails and crank out a pretty neat web app, but the second their tools don't cover some use case and they are forced to look at things like the TCP stack, packet headers, http headers, etc, and they look lost, they also look bad at what they are doing.
Outdated Printer Orchestra Reprogrammed to Play "Times They Are A-Changin’"
--"Let's say consumers really liked buying from a factory store. That would put dealers in a tough spot because they've been saying for years that the franchise system is actually good for customers," he says. --

This is like saying the shit the horses leave behind is good for the road/environment and also smells nice. I think we all know the real answer.

There's a sea change on the horizon.
The people at the "tech giants" who would be involved in such a buying decision are by and large located in Silicon Valley, and by and by likely to hear about things happening in Silicon Valley.

Furthermore if a tech giant buys you, they are hoping that you will grow. This requires making hires that are easier if you are in Silicon Valley. Questions about your prospects for making those hires somewhere else limit the top-line growth that they can hope for.

Moreover if they wind up buying something away from Silicon Valley, they know that there is likely to be less competition for the company, so they can probably get a better price for the same prospects.
As I saw this in person presented at the London Erlang Factory Lite on Thursday, I rely recommend giving it a through read - very interesting stuff!
Or a dozen people are doing it dozens of times a day.
> Completely agree with the author. mvc3 and razor are fantastic to use.

Then use it by all means. But mvc3 and razor can be awesome without the flamebaiting.
Sleaford Mods, one laptop, one mic, cool new sounds.
Well, we do have some options here, but part of the reason why it was so easy to setup over there is lack of laws around the movement of money.
You say "yeah, that's straightforward to do" and also you "really doubt" that their claims are true?

Reminds me of Freud's story about the peasant who says to another, "Hey, you broke that kettle I lent you", and the other says, "It was fine when I gave it back to you, it was already broken when you lent it to me, and I never borrowed it."
I'm not sure about Lenovo as a whole company, but the Thinkpad line has the characteristics you're asking for. The only characteristic I've encountered that really goes against this is a hardware whitelist for things like wireless cards.
As baby boomers hit 65, startups helping older adults stay safe in their home
Approximately 13 percent of the U.S. population is 65 years of age or older, and this number will only continue to grow since the baby boomer generation has started to turn 65. This growth does not come without serious implications for society, especially the healthcare system. Technology has the ability to help seniors by reducing social isolation, improving physical health and encouraging independence. While some might think the elderly and technology don’t mix, startups are rising to the challenge by designing products for older adults and their caregivers to keep them healthy and independent for as long as possible.
Having ported significant code-bases to both Linux and Windows with both GNUStep and Cocotron, I'd say this is possible today, though how easy it is depends a bit on the scope and complexity of your codebase.

What I like about Objective-Cloud (apart from the name!), is that it allows you to go to a hosted solution quickly, and then when there is a further scaling requirement you can decide wether doing a port is justified to lower costs.

I also really like your succinct summation of Objective-C benefits: close to C performance [..] with sane OOP as default (not sure about the pointers...)

I've blogged a bit about Objective-C web performance, for example compared to Ruby and Node.js here:

http://blog.metaobject.com/2011/01/nodejs-performance-httpd-...
http://blog.metaobject.com/2011/12/ruby-and-rails-scalabilit...
http://blog.metaobject.com/2012/03/30k-requests-aka-wrk-is-f...
Show HN: Postbound - collaborative giftbook creation
This is great. I can't wait for Rackspace to have their offering available too. The current cloud offerings here are quite lacklustre.
I think you're missing a trick. Genuinely chrome-less could be pretty useful, and more attractive.

The small black navigation bar at the top of the screen could be done away with, if you change your URL structure to be more easily understood & manipulated.

From shoulder surfing various people of various levels of tech experience, i've noticed they are quite happy to edit a logically structured url in the address bar to navigate where they want to go quickly. For example, if the site doesn't provide an easy "up one level" ability.
I'm referring to SIPRNet security policies that gave millions of its users access to the same "Top Secret" data, and where the DoD decision tree strongly correlates to seniority.
Why David Petraeus’s Gmail account is a national security issue
Mismanagement can cause 1 as well.
Yes, we know for a fact it would be better because our ideology tells us that is true. We don't need to actually care about or measure specific outcomes, we can know all things just by applying the simple principle that "the market" is always right.
1) Newly funded companies have fresh pots of capital to invest in online marketing. The auction dynamic of most online marketing tools means a new entrant drives prices up for everyone.
2) Other new entrants have local advantages (existing salesforce, merchant relationships) which are harder for Groupon to counter.
3) New entrants often heavily discount in their launch phase, further hurting Groupon competitively.
While the dictionary to http mapping is a nice touch, will it be possible to deploy our own http servers?

While CocoaHTTP isn't bad, I've got my own lib that is not only around 3 times faster (request/response), but also has other benefits I'd like to keep.