skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ubiquitous computing will finally arrive, with smart cards/RFID on our bodies seamlessly interacting with computers in our environment. As you walk up to your refrigerator, for instance, you're logged in and presented with a customized display. Same goes for the car or the entertainment surface at the Dentist's.

I wrote my PhD on ubiquitous computing, and I can tell you that I heard "this is the year" for ubicomp every single year I spent writing it. I finished it last year, and stuff I wrote back in 2002 was still relevant. It's an incremental design that will slowly, slowly come, but nothing dramatic anytime soon, even across a decade. I'm hopeful there'll be decent advances though.
Don't forget our giant basement:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/robert_ballard_on_explorin...
And nobody even remembers the iPod HiFi.
Afghanistan of course. I would venture to guess that it'll still be Karzai by that time.
To tell the truth, I've got no idea. I'm just spitting ideas out.
WebMynd · A better way to search
Ask HN: Predictions for 2009 -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416530

Evaluating the results of that set concludes the following predictions:

-All predictions in the form of "X is going to die" have a >~90% probability of being false. The market tends towards diversification, fellows!

-~90% percent of "X is going to increase / decrease" are non-quantifiable (esp. technologies, and tool usage), and thus have a predictive power of exactly 0.

-Interestingly, there were a single quantifiable stock prediction ("I predict Apple stock goes up a lot."), and it also had merit (a 100% growth in 1 year, how's that fellows?); alas 1 datapoint does not make a trend.
(while we're at it, anyone else noticing the 200% growth G produced over 2009?! )

-The rest of the predictions are either non-quantifiable, or have a massively sub-optimal prediction result.

In conclusion, strictly from a predictive perspective, these threads have exactly 0 merit. Have fun synchronizing your agendas :)
Ask HN: Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names
10 million Apple tablets? Here's how other Apple products sold.
It's hard to imagine it playing out otherwise -- you need to start somewhere, and that stuff is:

a) more familiar to the ear

b) more plentifully recorded

c) more widely discussed and recommended etc.
Never going to happen. Far too many people like the person you replied too are going to scream that we're just not using the regular tools 'right'.
7610 Keypad Ways Problem Jumpers
I want to be able to file documents in one place, but tag them for action.

I've been meaning to find which one of these fits my workflow:

Quicksilver tag plugin [http://lifehacker.com/169971/metadata-as-a-filing-system]

TagBot [http://bigrobotsoftware.com/]

Punakea [http://www.nudgenudge.eu/punakea]

They all use Spotlight metadata to accomplish the tagging, Punakea seems the most modal, which I like less.
While the title of this article is misleading (it's really about communication, not scheduling), it is food for thought.

Though I can't help but boggle at the author encouraging a team to abandon all milestones/deadlines in the pursuit of quality. While perhaps the given team really was looking for a convenient excuse for any quality problems, I can't help but look at it as pragmatism.

"Take all the time you need - but make sure it's perfect," is a good way to discourage completion.
I've found maven to be useful.

It standardizes the layout for the majority of java based projects.

It also lets me deal with dependencies in a decent manner. Maven should not be downloading dependencies on every build unless you are using SNAPSHOT versions.

There is a free book available:
http://www.sonatype.com/products/maven/documentation/book-de...
I understand this is meant to be humour, but it brings up a very important problem - the mapping between the profit from software and the processes that create it, and in some sense, measuring programmer productivity.

Here, though the program size was 0, the idea was what the cost was for - to come up with this idea, one has to have deep knowledge about the machine and about the way programs are executed on it in particular. One should also spend some brain power (and have the ability to do so) on how to use that to our advantage.

Now, imagine a program of say 100 bytes, whose idea was conceived by one programmer but the implementation written by another. Then, how would you divide the profit from the software among them (assuming you do that)? It perhaps depends on how detailed the idea was, how much thought had to be put in to implement it, how 'brilliant' or 'out-of-the-box' the idea and many other factors, almost all of which are qualitative.

In short, determining salaries and increments for programmers seems a very hard problem.
It took Pandora a long time to get classical music into their system because they weren't sure how to classify individual pieces. I mean, once you have a dozen versions of the same song by different orchestras with different conductors, the "What's your favorite song?" interface kind of breaks down.
One of the problems with no schedule pressure, which I believe is best, is that software can always be better. Clicks can be removed. User interfaces can be made cleaner and easier to look at.

To remove the schedule pressure, you have think differently. Instead of, "This project is done on Friday," Think, "This project is done when no one has complained about this form for 3 weeks." This project is done when no bugs are reported for 4 weeks. Etc.
All the device needs for phone functionality is a blue tooth radio and a cellular radio, which is nearly free in terms of component cost, especially since a cellular radio would be required anyway for ebook and eperiodical functionality.
That's an utterly biased and thoroughly wrong accusation.

I think not. If you are one of those people who can relate to snippets of melody, then you are, by definition, not one of those people devoid of melodic perception. Or, are you assuming that your particular perceptions represent the entire spectrum of listeners of electronic music. I doubt that's warranted.

What you do is fundamental to the human experience -- having a bit of music stuck in one's head. Most of us are born with some ability like this. There are entire musical traditions where this facility has been expanded and developed to a very high degree, however. I can pay something like 350 distinct tunes from memory off the top of my head, well enough to perform in front of a festival crowd. I probably have the "stuck in my head" impression of another 700 or so tunes. I am not a prodigious talent in this way, however. I know of traditional musicians who know something like 10,000 tunes, and 2 or 3 distinct versions of many of those.

I posit that musicians like that have a better appreciation of melody than I do. Their brains are very good at processing that kind of information, and have processed much more of it. I also suspect that I have a slightly more developed sense of melody than someone who can recall some catchy hooks.
As if all the increase-your-productivity/get-rich-quick self-help twaddle wasn't bad enough, now there's a notorious internet racist at the top of HN.

Anybody know a tech news site that sticks to tech?
b) more plentifully recorded

That's a big one.

There's some more obscure classical music that I happen to be a huge fan of. Problem is, with that music I came on listening to it as if it were a song and not a composition. When I listen to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, the first music I think to compare it to is Sufjan Stevens, who's a pop songwriter. Or I'll listen to Philip Glass and think of rock riffs. The problem is that for those more modern musicians (and for certain older, less well-known ones) is that we don't have the same conservative respect for them, and we have fewer interpretations of their music. When I listen to Einstein on the Beach, there are only two known recordings, and they're of music that's so innovative that your thoughts aren't about the interpretation, they're about the design of the music period.

(I'd also like to add, as an aside, that Hacker News sees the most bizarre stories submitted. Every article I've written that's at all tech-related gets passed over; without fail every article I'm insecure about writing and worry will be passed over finds its way here.)
Facebook will be the Google of the decade.

Google will be the Microsoft of the decade.

Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.
Positive Thinking - Justified Lions
There's an inverse correlation to early rising and income, so I guess no. But that probably boils down to low wage people waking up to do shift work. Also, to my observation, less well off middle class people wake up early to commute in from the boonies.

Lots of high income deal maker types do business in the evenings.
Advantages of Conscription vs. Volunteer Service
I've had a go at Maven a few times, hoping to make it work but I always run into the same issues:

1. It is very difficult to configure a hermetic Maven build that doesn't rely on external resources. There are third-party repository managers, but none of them worked well enough to replace the 'dependencies in SVN' model.

2. Maven artifacts were often far out of date. RedHat has its own Hibernate-focused repository now, but this wasn't always the case. I'd find myself trying to get the latest version of dbcp or another commons project to get a bugfix and finding that it wasn't packaged.

3. Support for multiple source-based projects that depend on each other felt bolted on. I can't remember the details, but you couldn't build more than one project from source without specifying a link to a parent project from each child project, which then referenced each of its children.

I've written and rewritten countless build systems (from batch files last millenium to Ant/NAnt/MSBuild) and they always end up being simple wrappers over javac/junit that manage transitive dependencies and build cycle ordering. The tricky part is ensuring that your IDE's dependencies match those in your build system.

I recommend Ivy as an alternative to straight Ant or Maven that does dependencies and ordering well, but doesn't require you to buy in to any special build philosophy: http://ant.apache.org/ivy/

Quick addendum: Ivy has its own quirks and is far too complex under the hood for my taste, but does the job well if you stick to straight dependency management. If you can avoid using anything on top of pure Ant scripts to build your project it'll make your life way easier.
This article doesn't mention the cause of such high rates of inbreeding, so I'll provide that information (kindly supplied by a Muslim friend). Basically, when all the children of the family are young they play and do everything together. Childhood friends are likely to be mostly cousins and siblings. Once kids reach a certain age the genders are rigidly separated (with the burka, and adjusted living arrangements). The upshot of this is by the time a young Muslim man is ready to marry, the only women he is familiar with are the girls he grew up with. That is, his cousins.

Further, the etiquette of marriage is extremely complicated in and involves the mutual cooperation of the entire family of both the bride and the groom. So it's a much less complicated affair if the bride and the groom come from the same family--there simply won't be as many disagreements.

It should be noted that cousin-marriage is increasingly uncommon among the more affluent Muslims in countries like the UAE and Bahrain.
Ask HN:Places to apply for machine learning?
I am currently pursuing my masters in CS with an inclination in machine learning from a reasonably well reputed university. With a reasonable background in AI, I wish to take up a summer internship in a related field.
Could people here guide me to apply to places they know for a fact employ machine learning techniques? Any help on this is greatly appreciated. Thanks...
For the love of god don't remove it! I played for like 4 hours straight the other day and I can't afford to waste more time. I wish you had an Android app though, cause I'd buy it right now.
I look at it another way. When I play classical music, I find that I develop an appreciation for its nuances that I don't initially have. I start liking every individual line for its melody, whereas at first I only hear one or two things. And the more I listen to music, the more quickly I'm able to break down new music that I listen to.

Most of us are born with some ability like this.

Exactly why I'm confused as to your initial point:

A lot of people just don't have the wherewithal to appreciate melodic music. Melody just escapes them.

Now, in modern music there is a branch that focuses on rhythm more than it does on melody (in classical music as well as in pop). However, that branch is still exceedingly rare compared to the rest of what's coming out. People who listen to Lady Gaga, the Jonas Brothers, and J-Lo are all listening to music for its melodies. So it's not the fact that classical music is melodic that turns them off.

My suspicion is that a part of it is an inability to really sympathize with the music. Pulsating beats are more instantly relatable than a complex sonata, which can be more readily dismissed as "tinkly classical nonsense" if a listener's apathetic.
In order to worry about Friendliness, you have to be first (otherwise it was pointless, as whether the first mover's AI was Friendly is what matters). So, you have to be relatively confident that you're already going to be first in order to spend much time researching Friendliness. I only know of one group that appears to be confident in that way (SIAI), and I have no reason to think that their confidence is less misplaced than all the other people who've been convinced they'd figured it out.
It seems to me like you need to make the demo somehow not as good as the iphone version, but someone also giving you the same feeling. What about sprucing up the animation/graphics of the iphone version? Or create special features that are only available when you buy the game? That way, when you remove the level limit, players will get hooked on the demo and want to play more, and everywhere they go.
Clojure on IntelliJ Gets Paredit
Bumping asteroid from Earth could cost more than $80B
> unalone accepts Pulitzer for blog

That was really nice of you.

I was going to say: So in 2019, the Pulitzer's continued its devaluation?

Also: A chuckle for "Mark Zuckerman".
Steve Jobs probably has at least one particular annoyance in mind that this tablet solves for people. But it may be an annoyance such that we're not even aware of it so much as a problem. It may be a "fact of life" to us.

With the iPhone, I was aware that there were many times I was annoyed that the data on my phone didn't match the data on my computer. I was also tired of carrying around an iPod and a phone and a PDA.

If the tablet has enough computing resources, then it could solve the data sync problem. I can simply have the "master copy" of all of my data with me, all the time. You can do this with a USB stick, but you can't do anything with the data in transit unless you stick it in a netbook. With tools like Bonjour, Apple should be able to make all of your devices and MobileMe seamlessly sync with a master copy of your data. You always have it at hand. If you have an idea, and want to make a quick note or a sketch, then you do it, and it's a part of your main data and not in some note-taking thing off to the side.
That would probably work. I just hope we don't end up with another SARBOX where the requirements outweigh the benefits
OK, so he said that classical music and the community around it is more rigid than most newer forms of music and their communities, and that it's dying, and the former might cause the latter. What is so unexpected, I wonder
From the FAQ:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Thusly, as a hacker or someone that knows them, I can't help but find this to be highly in the Off-Topic category, uninteresting and certainly not gratifying my intellectual curiosity.
Hia.
This was the response:

Thanks, the survey is cool, in perfect hindsight it could of course be better, but thats life. Regarding the flat file of the data. It will be publicly available, no problem, but not yet as we are doing analysis ourselves. Hope you understand.
So what? Classical music will never have the same level of prominence that it did before the 1900's. That's his point.
Then it might interest you that Panama requires only proof that you made $500/month to get a retirement visa
Family Fitness and its Factor, Top Ten Family Exercise Tips
How to Train the Aging Brain
Probably because I'm from Kerala and as mentioned in the article you linked, the incidence of cousin marriages were just 4.5%.
I see this as a good opportunity to retain startup oriented students attending US colleges.
Unexpected not perhaps for a vast audience, but for me. What you didn't mention was perhaps the core of the post: Classical music isn't dead, it's living and breathing and subject to interpretation. Then the points you mentioned carry with them certain implications, namely that classical music could benefit from irreverence and innovation, and that modern music would benefit from classical music's being made more accessible.
First of all, you don't write _great_ blog comments. If you have something really great to say, you publish it as a blog post, submit it to social news sites, and put a link to your post in a comment to the original post. People do that and they are successful. Comments are for losers.

On second thought ... Arrgh!
Actually, my point was that if we look at classical music and say "So what?" we're losing a vast treasure.
Jason Baker starts out by saying that writing good comments is under appreciated, and it seems that he is going to show us how to write good comments, but then he goes on to attack comments by listing "misconceptions" that seem to suggest that most comments are worthless.

In the end I'm not quite sure what points he was trying to get across, but I like to use comments to keep track of logic flow.

I tend to write my pseudocode as comments by listing the main steps that a function needs to accomplish as comments within the function body. Then I fill in the appropriate code under each comment. I personally use this method because not only does it make the code easy to read, but if I stop in the middle of the project to sleep or to eat something I can come back, reread the comments and get that whole mental framework rebuilt.
It's faster to read the comments than to both trace and digest the code, no matter how understandable it is.

Then you have incomplete experience with development environments. Debug/trace is so easy in VisualWorks Smalltalk, that a lot of people use it to comment by including example code snippets meant to be debugged. Yes, let me say it again: debugging is so easy you can use it to comment! For the right kind of situation, this can indeed be the best way to comment code. Sometimes no description is going to be as helpful as just seeing an example of it happen.

Does this apply to other environments? Not necessarily. In VisualWorks, it's usually no problem to spawn off multiple "hypothetical" debug sessions, with no consequence, even if you are already in the debugger. A lot of people also prefer to code in the debugger. If the cost of debugger use were different, then it would not be so.
Jason Baker starts out by saying that writing good comments is under appreciated, and it seems that he is going to show us how to write good comments, but then he goes on to attack comments by listing "misconceptions" that seem to suggest that most comments are worthless.

In the end I'm not quite sure what point he was trying to get across, but I personally like to use comments to keep track of logic flow.

I tend to write my pseudocode as comments by listing the main steps that a function needs to accomplish as comments within the function body. Then I fill in the appropriate code under each comment. This results in typically a comment for every ten to twenty lines of code, with an occasional extra comment if there is something strange that I need to specially document. This is fairly sparse to some new programmers, but verbose enough for me. I personally use this method because not only does it make the code easy to read, but if I stop in the middle of the project to sleep or to eat something I can come back, reread the comments and get that whole mental framework rebuilt.
The keyboard problem is a non-issue. On the go, you use the screen. When you place it in its nice shiny iPhone-esque dock at home, the screen is upright and a wireless keyboard and mouse can be used and it looks and feels like a PC.
Yes, Maven sucks, but for large projects the dependency management is rather nice. Java as a language is terribly dependency crazy, and being able to add three lines to your pom and get a new library in along with all its dependencies is a good thing. Though I'll now get flamed for not fully understanding every library dependency I'm importing in, which is fair, but hasn't been an issue for me for the three years I've been using Maven on various projects.

But that said, Maven has a build tool absolutely fucking sucks.. I much much prefer ant, and totally agree that mvn can be completely retarded and suck away a half day randomly.

If there was an ant alternative to deal with the library dependency problem then I'd be all for it. It seems that now that ibiblio exists, there should be ample opportunity to do this, basically rewrite mvn but use the existing repos.

But really, this single command makes mvn worth the trouble for me:
% mvn -DdownloadSources=true -DdownloadJavadocs=true eclipse::eclipse

Give me another tool that does the same thing by me just specifying all my direct dependencies and version numbers and we can talk.

-Nic
The vast majority of the time, I'm writing comments for myself so that when I'm looking back on this same piece of code tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade, I can get myself into the same frame of mind. A comment on code I'm working on today isn't very useful. A comment on code I haven't looked at in 5 months and won't look at again for another 5 months is a lot more valuable. Very shortly I have to delve into some of my own code that's almost a decade old -- I hope I commented it well.

Given the authors resume, he might simply not have enough of his own old code to get the usefulness of comments.
What I was trying to say in my reply was that "he is ignoring the fact that people still write classical music" is not a valid point. There are 6.7 billion people on this planet; if there are a couple of people with a hobby, that does not prove anything.
I've never seen value in self-describing or human readable messages. You need some kind of relatively unique identifier for the format of a given message and any optional payload, but beyond that, if a receiver doesn't have any code that knows what to do with a given message, what's the point of being able to deserialize it? And I think debugging an API without making tools is a waste of effort, for the same reason that you use curl rather than typing "POST..." into netcat.
The big guns like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are sure bets. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn also have large ML teams and probably have decent internship programs.

Many startups also have similar interships - try http://ventureloop.com