skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its always a bad sign for the legitimacy of a technology rant when the author can't get his facts right in the beginning: "I am not trying to say that the MVC Framework is better than Ruby on Rails."
What?
> Reading this article reminds me that there is a huge demand for mobile Internet in developing world and few companies are capitalizing on this.

I think IBM has recognized this and they are indeed trying to develop unique solutions. I know of one project called "Spoken Web" which is an Internet of spoken websites than traditional textual content. This was meant for people who can't read or write but can speak in local languages. There was at least one pilot study which was conducted with farmers. I guess they have even deployed the solution in one of the Indian states.

[0] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php...
As a modern example: look at luxotica for an example of a monopoly. They own large shares of the manufacturing and retail for eyeglasses, and they charge exorbitant prices.

They own Oakley, Ray-Ban, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision and Sunglass Hut. They also operate Sears Optical and Target Optical.

They also produce eyewear under license for names such as Coach, Anne Klein, Bulgari, Prada, Polo, Versace, Ralph Lauren, and Tiffany.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870451890457536...

Making manufacturers divest of retail operations is a way to break up their monopoly.
The odd thing here is that the satire description predates the patent monopoly by six years, and may count as prior art.
Except that if I knew that was their way of business I would simply avoid buying their products.

Isn't this a case where the free market actually would account for that scenario? It's not like they have a car monopoly.
I think one of things that is a key de-motivator for devs is having to work with other engineers that don't really care about the quality of code they write, as they don't perceive software as an art-form or craftsmanship, but more as something that pays their bills. A lot of dev orgs don't spend enough resource/time evaluating dev work on a technical levels, leading to lots of bad code and frustrating the hell out of the good devs. The places who do instill passion and draw great devs, much like Apple at its height.
Yes. Exactly. That is how the free market works.
Then no one will buy a Ford.
People would probably wise up and buy toyota, nissan, gm, etc. There is more than one car maker.
The Volkswagen dealership I've dealt with was not too horrible (though this is also in Canada, where car dealerships in general have a marginally less awful repuation). I think it's a you-get-what-you-pay-for kind of situation, in that if you're not buying a used Sunfire or something, the dealer is less likely to have to screw you over to make a buck.
This is one area you don't want to hack a solution quickly, but want to use something that's been tried and tested in the field. You can be on the bleeding edge when you have time to iterate and fix things, not when you have just one shot. When it comes to having just one shot no one does it better than NASA - http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/9/3232160/curiosity-mastcam-2...
Look, I've been trying to explain this to my junior developer who has always used windows boxes. "None of my instructions translate to windows. But they translate to everything else but windows." Its just plain and simple that microsoft's salesperson driven strategy is to create a little windows island. Thats why microsoft is anti-developer. Maybe not anti-microsoft_developer, but most of us have just given up on windows. Its absolutely nothing personal.
Most of the time google.com works (but slow, maybe because the data has to pass the GFW), but periodically, or when you search some sensitive words, the search engine become unresponsive. It's been like this for many years - I'm an extensive user of Google in China.

And recently I also have found that, the search result list displays normally, until you click to open the target pages.

There are millions of things would make me hate that evil gov, but this one thing makes me...sorry, out of words to describe as a non-native English speaker.
I agree that no industry deserves a guaranteed profit margin. I just think that if one believes an industry needs to die, then talking of innovation is really just a tease.
It is called "Stellaris Launchpad":

http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/stellaris_head.html?DCMP=s...
Bjarne Stroustrup: How C++ Combats Global Warming
Microsoft Patent Could Monitor Your Living Room for Copyright Infringement
In my opinion, you should not tell people who do not understand how analytics will improve your caching optimization that you are working on analytics. You should tell them you are working on improving the caching layer. If you sound confident that implementing analytics is required for this job to be done properly they will have to trust you in this, _you_ are the programmer.

You are correct in your assertion that when people ask you what you are doing, they want to know what value you are providing for them. So don't answer with technical details, you already know they're not interested in that :) Whenever a business stakeholder asks you what you are doing, trace back how what you are doing provides value for them and inform them of that.

Note that value does not have to be very direct. Caching makes your application faster, its business value is that the customers are happier when using the product. It is for the marketing department to decide wether that is worth it.

I would not bother too much with figuring out the exact numbers, they are not important. You should for yourself decide wether something is useful or not, if you are an experienced programmer I think this intuition will be right. Almost always, tooling will reduce your technical debt.

Tooling is not only automation, it is also process documentation.
It is so sad and so true. Some people work just to get a place to talk, a warm meal, and a place to seat during the day (and the salary of course).

They could not care less about what they are doing or why.

As the author said, "they were there to turn the crank on whatever you put in front of them, and flavor A vs. flavor B didn't change things either way."

They could be plowing fields - it wouldn't be any different for them I guess.

They are just waiting for death, because they are already dead inside.

No passion, no nothing - an empty mask, barely held together by the things they still manage to get some meaning from (tv, sport, family...)

They have no purpose in life.

If you find a team like this, run for your life.

(for any lost soul, the fallen cogs usually meet in a Galt Gulch - I'm sure there is one near where you live. There you will find great people working on great things - and more like you and I)
They werent forced to 'say' anything, it was more the equivalent of a dodgy restaurant being made to put up a poster or a leaflet in a shop window informing customers that they only got a C on their hygiene inspection
I too, started young. This is from my personal site:

I was born in the mid-sixties and got in touch with software programming at an early age. It became my hobby, along with the field of electronics. I was very keen to get to know exactly how things worked and what was happening, even up to the level of the silicon. In those days I spent more time reading datasheets and computer manuals than I did reading comics.

During my whole career in secondary school (VWO-B) I have been able to follow the development of the microcomputer. As far as that goes, I grew up in a very interesting era. It was the period in which the 'computing power' migrated from the centralized mainframes to various decentralized systems.

Due to my innate interest I became acquainted with all sorts of programming languages and fields of application for computers; I absorbed a lot of knowledge regarding the subjects that interested me the most. At the time, the topics were C, data communication, audiovisual applications, and relational databases, first on C/PM and later on MSDOS. Some years later, C++, Unix, and Windows were added. And after a while I also acquired knowledge of the Internet, the WWW, and programming languages such as Java, Java script, PHP, and Python.

When I was twenty years old I managed to get a job as a software developer, and since this line of work has never ceased to interest me I am currently still active as a developer.
Related HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762303

An early version of the joke email (suggesting they actually took about 11 years): http://lists.sucs.org/pipermail/jokes/2001-November/001176.h...
agreed. i'm just describing the ostensible reason for the law...
TL;DR This guy claims he was previously a free software enthusiast, but then he grew up and now he's a microsoft enthusiast.

Yay for stereotyping free software enthusiasts as basement-dwelling pre-pubescents.

Other than that, the article is pretty light on insightful content.
Could they not already sell their fan belt to dealers for 500$ if they wanted to?
I'm not ignoring what you're saying, but...

There are no local producers of indestructible soccer balls. What will this undermine? I'm not trying to defend all comparable initiatives. I'm trying to understand the opposition to this particular one. Tom's shoes is a completely different issue.

Further, one cannot live on soccer balls no matter how indestructible. We aren't talking about giving out food for 10 years and then expecting someone to provide for themselves. We're talking about something that, where livelihood is concerned, is completely useless. A toy. I really do not see how giving a toy could create or perpetuate an expectation of handouts for any "real" aid. And I also don't see how handouts of toys can do any harm. I'm open to being corrected. I'm just letting you know why your argument hasn't convinced me yet.

Finally, asking someone what they want is not necessarily the best way to determine how to help them. I'm not suggesting that this is the best way to help. I'm just pointing out that, "If you want to help, ask, then do that," isn't foolproof.
UK resident: no, there is no 'sacrosanct right' here at all. If a company chooses to take legal action in the UK, then they have to comply with what the court decides. If they don't, there will be consequences.
Palantir[1] will probably get there first.

[1] - http://www.palantir.com/
Factual errors: padfone2 is only released in taiwan and will be launched in other countries in december, the customs duty in India is 25-30% for "entertainment" devices which include other "luxury" items like GPUs, Tablets and kindles (I know this firsthand).
Pretty cool, but has no graphics out, which excludes a lot of what people are using the raspberry pi for.
Let's see. The current Mexican drug war seems to have taken about 50k lives.

The Nicaraguan counter-revolution backed by the CIA took an estimated 29K lives.

The two seem comparable. And the comparison in this case is reasonable because the Mexican war stepped up when mercenaries who had fought in Central America joined the cartels.
It's not the only choice, just the most likely one.

It's certainly possible for a business dedicated to distribution and sales to provide an experience superior to that of a manufacturer doing sales on the side. It's tougher in this case because cars are a big-ticket item, so manufacturers have an easier time justifying their own distribution and sales network than somebody who makes a trinket you need to sell at Walmart. However, the bigger problem is that car dealerships today are in no way optimized for providing an experience superior to anything.
Great article. Sharing the actual emails (full version) really makes the difference. I struggled with this problem as well in two different startups (getting B2B product into main stream tech blogs). Two things helped me - 1). trying to wrap it as horizontal product with fun videos and interesting customer stories 2). Admitting we're not sexy, the "we're not sexy but doing something really important" works. I like this part from his email : "It's not a particularly sexy problem, however it's a complete pain in the arse for those who manage the process of content collaboration & organisation"
Shellacked: Groupon fell 30% today in regular trading
Image that the Ford dealership was the only dealership within an hour's drive of your house (not an uncommon situation when these laws were enacted).
We're looking for world class UX Designers in Amsterdam
"Toshiba simply doesn't want its service manuals to be distributed by third parties and it might not even want to distribute its service manuals via its own channels. My lesson is to avoid Toshiba and companies with a similar behavior – I take such behavior as a signal."

Indeed.

I recently bought a phone from Cricket. A major thing that helped me make that decision was that Cricket provides pdfs of the manuals of all (most?) of their phones online, on the public shopping pages. You don't even have to be a customer. You don't have to be logged in.
Having never been there. Are silicon valley hires really that much better than those found elsewhere? The most ambitious surely. Perhaps very hard working (as a consequence perhaps). But really significantly more able?
There are three cases for a task that takes a regular human 5 minutes and a computer programmer 5 hours to automate:

1 The task is very complex, this means that there's a lot of room for human error. A well-tested and specified program will reduce this fragility and improve predictability.

2 The programmer is inexperienced, the programmer either is not a very good programmer (yet) or is using tools that he is not familiar with. The 5 hours mostly go into the learning process of the programmer, not in the task itself.

3 The task is simply something computers are not very good at, or hasn't been fully explored. For example speech recognition. The 5 hours go into exploring the domain, creating something reusable that the world could profit from.

In my opinion, it's always worth it, isn't that nice?
>why even say that the dealership industry needs to innovate?

You've misplaced the emphasis. It's the people working in the industry that need to innovate (by finding something else to do). The industry itself seems to be obsolete.
"legalized outfits would be co-opted by the drug cartels and used to launder money"

If you were looking to launder money, why would you pick a front that probably had some of the most intense government scrutiny of any business in the country?

Furthermore, do you see many legal aspirin manufacturers co-opted by illegal aspirin cartels? Beer manufacturers co-opted by illegal beer cartels?

Organized crime has been getting in to cigarette smuggling as high cigarette taxes have made legal cigarettes prohibitively expensive and created a black market for them. But this problem did not exist when cigarettes were plentiful and cheap.

We should learn the lesson here and keep legalized drugs plentiful and cheap, so that organized crime has no incentive to get involved and there's no demand for a black market.
When Google Wants To Buy Your Startup, It Sends You An Email Like This
PwnStar latest version with new Exploits released
I have actually automated myself out of a job before so be careful! Fortunately the company saw the value of this and contracted me on an adhoc basis.

I wad the unfortunate administrator for a large virtual mail system in the uk which was run off exim and flat files across 50 machines (one per client). This took 3 guys full time to manage as the machines were all over the uk and needed regular maintenance. I centralized everything and moved it to two virtual postfix machines backed with postgresql and wrote a web interface and set up scripts for backup and administrative operations, including integrated dns management.

Now, 12 years later, these guys are one of the larger hosting companies in the UK...

Automation almost always pays off, but not how you anticipate in some cases.
As I'm sure Patrick knows a first degree of accuracy you could of course substitute "Ireland" for "outside Silicon Valley" and the point about acquisitions is especially well made.

Even in London we're seeing that the companies here are giving investor valuations that simply 1/5 of the valley and on most levels I have to say that I can't blame the investors for their pessimism as there are so, so few exits here.

Exits (large or small) perform three important roles for establishing a startup scene:

1. They create wealth for founders who are themselves much more likely to become investors

2. They create wealth for investors. Whether an investor is actually in on a deal or not this changes their attitude and their optimism and makes them more likely to invest due to the perceived good climate

3. As Patrick said, they increase the likelihood of high calibre individuals doing startups. Good people can do very well in other jobs and if they see the likelihood of success in a startup as being negligible, they'll stay elsewhere.

All of these three tend towards self reinforcement which is powerful. It's worth noting that none of them depend on the net P&L from angel investment to be positive, only that the net gain in perception to be positive.

One of the simple reasons it's very hard to sell the types of companies we discuss on HN outside the valley is that to sell a company you really need to actually meet someone willing to buy a company. These things still tend to start face to face.

Outside the valley there are far fewer biz-dev teams and, perhaps more importantly, far fewer engineering teams. The types of companies that create a lot of wealth are usually product focussed and get bought by product / engineering teams. Most of those acquiring teams are based in the states. FB only has a very small outpost in London and while Google's is huge and does include engineering it's predominantly sales support and does not (as far as I know) make many purchases.

I was fortunate enough to be able to sell my last startup (Clickpass) but there is no way that would have happened outside the valley. For that reason among many others we're moving back out to SF in January. I love SF and I'm happy to move back but sad to leave London and my life here too. However I too have come to the conclusion that it simply doesn't make sense to be outside the valley, you just set the odds too far against yourself.
I found the phrase "just like DOS" kind of funny - presumably the writer has a Mac, and has never touched Terminal.
Do their job better and compete. Nobody in his right mind will object Apple for selling in their own stores. Why should car dealers have such unfair advantage to prohibit manufacturers to sell their goods?
I created HnEasy.com a few weeks ago. My objective was to give an easy way to find the best Hacker news posts and comments since 2007. I use it to catch up on hacker news every few days. I hope you find it of value.
The FTC might punish Google for promoting its products via search
The calculations don't take into account the onerous taxes that are going to be imposed on legal marijuana, and probably at some point there are going to be limits on the THC levels that can legally be sold. Illegal weed is going to end up still competitive.
I really don't understand. What will stop “tech giants” from buying startup in Ireland? What the difference? All majors are international corps and it's really doesn't matter where the promising company located, moreother Ireland is an english speaking country that's a huge bonus.
I didn't really spend a huge amount of time doing it to be honest. A little research, a few emails and Skype call, half a day tops.

We've actually been talked about in a number of trade blogs/magazines/sites and conferences. We saw some really good results from those as well, and yes, obviously a higher percentage of converting customers came through those sources.

I'm not in any bubble. I'm working really hard. 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.

I appreciate your comments none-the-less :)
Seems very similar, and at a similar price, to a family of ST boards, which have been out for a while: http://www.st.com/jp/evalboard/product/252419.jsp
Are hotels a dying industry?
There are very few countries where voting is mandatory, perhaps none. And still The USA has lower voter turnout than most, probably more because of the separate registration step than anything else.

But the biggest difference is the per-state first pas the post mechanism, which is what creates the phenomenon of "swing states" where relatively few voter decide everything, and almost any expense of effort by campaigns is worthwhile.
They are intended for really different purposes:

Raspberry Pi: 512M RAM, ~700 MHz @700mA. Usage: replacement for desktop computers or media centers.
Stellaris: 32k RAM, 80 MHz @30mA. Usage: Embedded systems, sensor networks. Good luck trying to mount a Debian-like OS in the stellaris.

Anyways, another "great" technical article from Mashable.

Disclaimer: I use Stellaris, msp430 and other TI tools daily.
I'm curious to know what other consumer products are sold through dealerships (In the continental US). Why would any law make it mandatory for a manufacturer to sell their items through a dealership. Just curious.
I think it would already have been done by auto makers if it was legal.
Having never seen either service before…

objclibs shows a list of what sorts of things are available. That is huge for engaging me in your service. The author should have his color tag removed.

I go to cocoapods and it seems to be some sort of meta-framework. I'm already suspicious of frameworks, if you want to talk meta-framework you had better have brought cake.

There is a "browse" link, but it is all about the meta-framework, that isn't helping me.

So then I try to see what sort of frameworks this dubious meta-framework can bring me, and I can't find any sort of listing. The best I managed was to search for the letter "e" in descriptions, figuring most of them should have one.
I've been looking for a similar product. Wondering if anyone is aware of a product that has following features:

1. Upload web app interaction design specs (wireframes) from psd

2. Link related graphic specs (pixel perfect) from psd / png

3. Allows commenting by collaborators on each page

4. Has API for Integrating updates from 3rd party sites. For instance, noting in comments that a ticket for this part of the spec was made in Pivotal Tracker, and then updating status when the ticket is completed.

The author mentions Cageapp.com - this is the general idea, but I don't see that they have any image linking or basic APIs for integration with 3rd party tools.
A company does not self-determine itself.
I agree that it is easier to game the social influence score than it is to game pagerank. That makes sense, simply from an interface perspective (tweeting alot versus messing with the meta data or link farming). However, I'd love to get thoughts from the community about potential solutions to his circular validation problem, which I think is the largest barrier to making a real Whuffie score.
People who know how do. But most people just work with whatever software comes on their device, and maybe more importantly, they've never seen the "real" Internet, so they don't feel the need to try to get back to it.
Well, the issue is not hiring one or two good people, which is completely possible in Dublin. It's how to go from a team of 5 to a team of 40 or 50 within a year. Silicon Valley is one of the few places that have the depth of talent to do that.