skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They need the core applications more than they need random developers creating led notifications and keyboards.

My assumption is their target market is corporate. They need Citrix, Cisco, Remote Desktop support, banking applications and Bloomberg.

Edit: they did try to get developers to port their apps by floating a free z10 for them, oddly enough none of those apps are configured for the q10 their flagship phone currently. Also for end users such as myself the android ports work to a degree.
Aside from the catchy title and the mention of recent planet-finding successes, this article doesn't say anything that hasn't been said by literally hundreds of other people. (And actually, I'd be amazed if this author is the first to come up with the clever "When are..." formulation.)
Can you give me your website url, please?
> no evidence to support any indication that this these practices are harmful to human

You haven't heard of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease)?

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/bse/

The likely cause of that disease was farmers feeding cows other cows (in the form of meal).

Lots of strange stuff happens in the name of making a profit.
You just exposed a cynical assumption I tend to make, that government continues more or less unchanged over long periods of time no matter who is elected. Much like a human replaces most of their cells every x years and is essentially the same organism, government just replaces most of the old faces with fresh faces that do much the same as the previous generation.
What is "bizarre" about opposing big data surveillance exactly? We know you believe in "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear", since you've said as much in previous comments, but it seems unfair to claim that the opposing view is bizarre.
Took this with Erickson back in Fall 2002 - go to all the lectures, they're worth it! And find a good study group, some of these homeworks are hard when learning them for the first time.

have fun!
Oops, yes, my bad. I meant gross. Geez, even I can't get the terms straight.
I wish someone would redesign Paul's site. I always think I click the wrong link when I initially land on it.
considering you can get a fail-over for another 30$, why not?

the pi is a just a tiny computer, the usual rules and best practices apply.

ffs, if you want, you can run a mail server on your _phone_ which has more raw computing power than a pi and similar power consumption.
it really depends on how much you want to be pushing through it.

considering my ADSL only syncs at 6MB, and not 200MB or whatever, it's fine for my purposes. Most of my machines are also still connected with 802.11g, so locally is not really a big problem either.

I would think twice about using it as a straight fileserver though, because the ethernet and usb ports share bandwidth.
I think it's really time to move beyond VCs.

We need something like YC-to-launch.

Open source has greatly reduced the cost of starting a business.

I think if you can't get to profitability on $150k, you're building an aquihire rather than a business.

But then, that's just my opinion, man.
That's a 20Kg backpack for those outside the empire.
From a purely natural perspective, the "goal" of life is to reproduce as much as possible.
It's because the CIA is a major backer of Palantir. Palantir put out the site https://analyzethe.us/ Tracking and analyzing is what they do.

The CIA is also a major backer of mongodb and they aren't getting called out. http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/mongodb-maker-10gen-closes-...
If I were Wyden, I would just pen an entire new bill that describes exactly what is going on already and send it to the Congress to be voted on. I would be the best way to publish what is happening. Everything in the bill could be written in the future tense, so it can't be seen as declassifying what is going on in the present.
Short answer: talk to hippie looking people in real life. Research on erowid too.
It is really annoying that drugs proponents ignore the obvious negative effects of drugs. Pretending that LSD is harmless is utter utter bulshit. There are so many cases of serious mental problems including permanent insanity caused by psychadelics. And of course there are also the thousands of people that are not exactly insane but have their brains pretty much fried and are just not very good for anything useful anymore. I get to meet a lot of those in LA.

To mention one of the more recent fruits of psychedelics -- the guy that shot that US congresswoman in the head fried his brain on mushrooms.

Yeah the drug war is horrible but people that promote dangerous drugs and lie about their safety are almost as bad. A convenient lie is a very dangerous thing. Because if people want to believe something they are much more likely to believe it. So I bet this disgusting essay will cause a bunch of kids to try LSD and a percentage of them will be completely fucked because of it.

There are a few writers that have tried drugs and are completely honest about them, but they are very few. It is very hard for a drug user to be honest about drugs. I would recommend Philip K Dick. If anyone wants to try hard drugs, please read "A scanner darkly", and then read a Philip K Dick biography to see that he knew what he was talking about.
As a German, tell me when there's a statement saying "We are doing this, this and that" instead of "we demand".
I apologise for not being clear enough. The "mashup" style also happens between apps/processes as well as within them. There are resources tracking counter parties.

For example the canonical way to structure a music app would be an activity (gui) for visuals, a content provider to provide the library and a service to play the actual audio. There is no requirement for these to be in the same app/process and it is pretty much immaterial to the code. But if your activity is communicating with the service (eg to send play/pause/next in one direction and getting the current play position and file in the other) then Android does housekeeping to make sure the right thing happens such as what happens when either side crashes or exits.

Android can do memory management within a process - for example if you switch to your email app, the music playing service can keep going, and the activity can be terminated (it is usually told).

This isn't remotely the same thing as swapping out pages as is done by the kernel. Additionally a whole bunch of the pieces have no kernel representation (eg a content provider). There is an IPC mechanism (binder) that has both kernel and user space components working in harmony.

To have something analogous in C, your "app" would be a large number of shared libraries (dozens), and they would be dynamically loaded and unloaded. They would talk to each other and shared libraries in other processes. There would be garbage collection, lifetime management and possibly reference counting. Calls into them could be asynchronous, as well as calls out. Managing all that would be non-trivial "scaffolding".

> ... almost everything has near-seamless support for calling C API functions

Dalvik already has that - using JNI. The pattern is to implement your interface to Android in Java and then call through to C when you need to.

The problem with Go is that it isn't designed to play well with others. It doesn't support dynamically linking, and expects to own the process - being in charge. The work the posting is about is some toolchain hacks that make it so a dynamically loadable binary is produced instead of an executable. There is then work to make the Android API available which is non-trivial, and Java flavoured.

> I would be plenty happy if they would just provide a native C API like GNU/Linux does

The "native" API it would provide would need to be analogous to libc, glib, X (and extensions like xrandr), gnome, systemd/udev, dbus, sdl, ibus, garbage collection, shm, reference counting etc all combined (in addition to whatever I forgot). There is no "just providing" that!
Is it abandonware or is there still commercial interest in it?
Revelation space is a speculative fiction novel set in the far future during the golden age of space colonization. Spoilers ahead.

Throughout the novel there's alien civilizations that use different kinds of way to cloak constructs and settlements. Examples include devices like artificial moons and holographic, multi-spectral holograms that emulate gas giants to hide stuff inside.

The one I think andrewflnr may be referring to is a device that one race used to cloak entire regions of space to hide their civilization from technologically superior aggressors. Essentially they set up variable-gravity devices at strategic points around their region of space, and had the devices resonate to build 'waves' of gravity that would constructively interfere at a massive scale at the borders of their space, which would essentially tear any intruders apart using the amplified+alternating gravity waves. Several million years in the future, observers/scientists of other races on the outside would dismiss these chaotic space regions as an unexplained anomaly.
If we don't, China will.
Seems like PG is advocating the following to VCs:

1. Don't grow pessimistic over the growing number of startups because there will be a growing number of great founders. If you focus on finding them, you can make more money than before.

2. To find them, you need a competitive advantage which could be doing what founders want/need: smaller Series A rounds and quick decisions.

He's practically daring the VC community to see who will step up.
There have been very, very few documented ill-effects of LSD use. Like, an astronomically small number given the range of use. Those people you describe in LA are most likely suffering from the effects of other drugs, namely alcohol.
Another red flag is that the "Risks and Challenges" Kickstarter mandated doesn't actually disclose any risks or challenges, just generic statement that could apply to literally any manufactured product and a bunch of puffery about how great they are.
>> There are so many cases of serious mental problems including permanent insanity caused by psychadelics. And of course there are also the thousands of people that are not exactly insane but have their brains pretty much fried and are just not very good for anything useful anymore. I get to meet a lot of those in LA.

Do you have numbers and studies on this? Was it just LSD or have they been chronic multi-drug users for multiple years?

Because your statements directly conflict with the state of the art of current research.

>> There are a few writers that have tried drugs and are completely honest about them, but they are very few. It is very hard for a drug user to be honest about drugs. I would recommend Philip K Dick. If anyone wants to try hard drugs, please read "A scanner darkly", and then read a Philip K Dick biography to see that he knew what he was talking about.

PKD and his friends were indeed into all sorts of things, and got into all sorts of trouble.

His main complaint seems to have been that nobody told them what was safe and what was not, and that through innocent experimentation all sorts of bad things happened.

Hysterical disinformation, which is all we've had from government for around 30 years now, does nothing to help this. Nothing.
Modai: a modular phone concept inspired by human behaviour
I'll second that. Having done my share of psychedelics, rest assured, you will meet the devil, and he will laugh while he plays you like the puppet that you are. Just ask Adam and Eve.
It occurred to me yesterday how powerful Twitter must be. They must have a good portion of most peoples' web histories, which could sell for a lot in certain markets. This is all just wild speculation, but I also wonder if they made a data-sharing deal with CNN, given CNN's constant Twitter promotion over the years.
A charter flight from Russia to Ecuador costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and approaches the distance limits of private jets. I doubt they even do this for themselves.
Stop charging for your time and start charging for the value you are providing to the business.

If you implement a system that will increase revenues, you should be charging based on that value. Just because you're implementing some back-end system does not mean you're not having an impact on the bottom line. Sounds like you've gotten stuck into thinking your old clients are your friends. Do you not have the confidence to pursue / win new clients if you're 'key' clients disappear?
Characteristics of Great Software Engineers
One thing I suspect will change for VCs is the 2/20 model.

Because the cost of building a startup is going down, and assuming the opportunity lies in early stage investments, VCs are going to have to make more early stage investments than they are now.

VC operating expenses are covered by a 2% management fee levied on assets under management. This incentivizes VCs to create megafunds so that they can have proportionally mega salaries.

Seed stage investments come at a totally different operating cost.

Seed-stage investing is pretty hard with a megafund because they are so expensive operationally. VCs would much rather write a 50M check in a growth round for 33% of a company than a 100 $500K checks for 5% of each company. They might have to talk to 20 companies for the growth rounds to make 1 investment, but they'd probably have to talk to thousands to make the 100 investments in seed rounds. That means they need a bigger staff and that 2% model won't work.

In fact, I've heard VCs say that the only reason they write small checks in seed rounds is so that they have a strong relationship with the founders and pro-rata rights if the company happens to blow up.

I suspect that VC salaries will go down like crazy, and they'll be forced to rely on carry for the funds earnings. Which is probably a good direction for VCs to go.

Chris Dixon outlined the problem here too: http://cdixon.org/2009/08/26/the-other-problem-with-venture-...
First you said...

The whole Lessig/Palantir issue is so illustrative of the tech community's bizarre insistence on ideological purity on political issues, and consequently illustrative of why tech as an industry has so little political influence despite having money and people.

Now you say...

Its silly to claim that "makers" are idealists by nature.

BTW, in case my usage of "makers" needs clarification, I am using "makers" in the PG sense of the word (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html) where "makers" == hackers, painters, founders.

Successful founders find ways to solve problems.

Elon Musk founded Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX on a set of ideals, i.e "principles that one actively pursues as a goal," and he has found a way to achieve these ideals that most thought were "impossible."

If Elon Musk and enough other successful founders decided to run for office, the world would be a different place.
Most of these widgets already come bundled with Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/javascript.html) and it's done better; see http://alloyui.com/examples/button/, for example, you get a checkbox then it's converted to a button after being displayed for a brief period.
Maybe, in many markets the total value to capture, while likely heading up over time, is unlikely to double because there are 2 top quality startups in the space rather than one.

So often it could be the case that the competition to dominate a particular market will just be more intense.

Of course in some spaces the quality of product/ service from more startups might alter the capital distribution of customers to create a much larger pie.
It's political and economic theater.

1. Either the EU members did not want this trade agreement from the start, or they will use this as leverage to get a better deal, or something extra.

2. The various EU member countries knew full well what was going on. And have their own spying operations and networks in place.

3. The various EU member countries would do the same type of spying as the U.S. does - if they could.

The idea that the U.S. should just "play fair" is so naive that it's self-destructive. Because no one "play's fair" in this world-wide, complicated, and high-risk/high-reward game. This is how the economical and geo-political game is.

And this is why these leaks are so damaging to the U.S. and its citizens. It exposes the truth, for the sake of the truth, and does nothing else. Because for that something else to happen, whatever it is, it has to happen on a global scale, and since countries are in a natural state of competition for resources and benefits, it can't, and the game remains the same...

That is, we can stop the spying, but no one else will. We can stop the exploitation, but no one else will. Doing so will just cause us to drop down to the lowest rank in this game, while everyone else runs to grab what's left on the table.
The article was a good read. Through out the article though, I couldn't help but feel that Paul Graham wants to change how startups are invested in, specifically the 24 hour turnaround on investment decisions and the A round change, and framed it as "I see x as a trend that is developing". It makes me wonder if a sufficiently influential person in a given industry claims to see a trend that is closely tied to human behavior, could that trend become a reality?
Your post, while I'm sure it has many literary merits, does not bring much to the conversation. Factual accounts of your experiences might though.
CRUX linux distribution
Ugh. This will eventually destroy my knees or hips someday. It's bad enough that I go running an hour every other day. I just can't imagine doing that for 6 to 8 hours. Although, I think this will be awesome for out of shape people who love games. Might be the thing we need to goad these people into shape!
"When I graduated from college in 1986, there were essentially two options: get a job or go to grad school. Now there's a third: start your own company."

This is an important observation. 20 years ago, the smartest people went to large companies. Now it's a question of "Join someone else's startup or start my own?" The alternative of career paths at large companies no longer exist. It isn't just social acceptance and lower cost of entry, it's that the alternative is long gone.
My co-founder and I have $2500 into our business http://shyp.com. This includes the domain name and all server usage to date. We use zipcars to do pickups and are already profitable on a per transaction basis.

We have a large house in SF and rent our extra rooms on Airbnb. This covers rent + food. We have yet to take any external funding.
We've been using the same method for quote some time now. Not just for privacy purposes, but also performance-wise all these scripts and iframes are a bit much. Demo and code at http://simpleshare.schuttelaar.nl/
That's speculation. Do you have factual evidence to prove that current accelerometers aren't responsive enought? Like a datasheet, a publication or something similar that isn't based on gut feeling. No offense, I appreciate the Occulus Rift as a high tech device that sets new limits in VR Technology, but Smartphones have come a long way sir.

Are you saying that the iPhone4s, iPhone5, Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4 and Google Nexus phones accelerometers are really unresponsive? Btw. just in case your theory is right (I admit when I'm wrong), then please checkout how long that theory will have legs ;)

* Quantum Limit, freaking yeah!!

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/an-accelerometer-so-g...
Facebook has stated that the sharer.php is deprecated. https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/252983554810810/

It appears to have an unclear lifespan. While it has been fully replaced by the Feed Dialog, it's still working now and is used all over the internet. I can see the case where it won't see any further development or features, but it's a tough call whether or not to incorporate the deprecated method or accept possible risks of the current methods - Like button or Feed Dialog.
I live in the Bay Area, so there are enough people with a strong skill set that are happy to shift hours to work on fun projects. I'm also a big fan of "you have 90% of this nailed and the other 10% will get you another service you can offer." Plus, I like these people, and I like working with them.

I've found that telling someone "I don't take a slice of your time" is another one of those things that demonstrates that I'm going the extra mile for them. I don't like agencies that take 20% for no value-add, especially when I'm actually bringing someone in to help me out.

I do pass through the $x/week, which has a nominal cost in time (15m/p if I'm slow), but I also make sure both sides of the relationship (engineer, client) are happy, on track, and continuing to make progress, and I handle almost all client visits. This is billable time. Generally, an hour or two of overhead with each person is more than enough time to make it worthwhile. Sometimes they spike and need help, which of course involves more time.

I pull from a number of people that I've met, been impressed by, and dragged with me like a plague from place to place over the past 15-20 years. They're all consultants (or companies of consultants) and if one person isn't available, they've always been willing to put in 5-10h/week to advise someone else who wants to master a skill set or solution domain. In addition, I've brought people into a place where they can continue to contribute after I lose interest and move on.

I'm probably the least mercenary of the group. I have enough stuff going on that I don't like to put in the insane hours. However, a lot of these guys will slam through 80+h/w to build the FU account.
I overall agree that bootstrap seems to cover most of these controls in a better way; that said, I think AlloyUI has css3 buttons that don't exhibit the 'loading' effect you described [click on css3 tab in the link you gave]
Dick's experiences were mostly with amphetamines, not psychedelics. Most don't include LSD and psilocybin as "hard drugs," either, and all of the credible drug advocates I've seen have always clearly stated that one should carefully research and consider before taking any drug into one's body, and advise against those with predispositions to mental illness or who feel that they are not ready for such experiences or capable of properly preparing for them ("set and setting").
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_t...)
There is definitely a third option.

You don't need to have an idea, or even investment to start a company now a days.

Maybe your definition of company is much larger, but there are people who has successfully launched a SaaS company with a) no idea of what they were building and b) no money to build it themselves initially and c) no development skills to build it themselves.

I am not affiliated at all, nor am i member of this group/company but I suggest you go check out http://thefoundation.com -- get the free case study about Sam.

It's loaded with great information.. But the TLDR is simple: Dane Maxwell has a "system" he teaches entrepreneurs. It's a way to source a market for an idea, then actually find paying customers who are willing to wait for the product, then you turn around and use that capital as inital investment for developers. it's a system that has been replicated, and it's quite inspiring.

There are also people like Amy Hoy http://unicornfree.com who actually hits many of the same types of "philosophies" when it comes to building a SaaS company.

"There are too many bad companies out there" -- then don't give them your money.

HackerNews community really looks down upon things like petty insults (and I believe you just called the founder of Y Combinator [creator of this site] dumb).
I think Tom Morello offered to do just that...