skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think something must be wrong with Norvig's approach, because humans can learn a lot faster. We don't need one billion voice samples to learn understanding. So there must be a better way than the ginormous dataset approach.
I have to work really very hard to overcome this tendency and I'm pretty sure that it has cost me over the years to find little or no interest in doing the 'grunt' work of running a business.

This is my biggest problem. I am interested building things or attempting to do things that I am not sure that I am capable of. The moment I finish building or even recognize how to do so, I lose interest. It's not great.
Obviously, if you run the wrong algorithm, even infinite computing power won't help. Hence I don't see how you arrive at that conclusion.
:-)

Thanks for the tip on parse-date. That's one more thing on my list of to-dos; I really have to find some time for Lisp hacking again :-|
Samsung ships phase-change memory for mobes - Throws NOR out for PRAM
Wow so when was our CC gateway going to tell us this?

Just before July 1 so we're scrambling to get code out to we can continue to make money?

Or after the giant business murdering fine arrived?

And we are with one of the really BIG ones . . .
Ask HN posts shouldn't point to articles; they should just be threads.
They have a monopoly on iPhone development.
Office/Bedroom crossover:
http://nthselector.s3.amazonaws.com/23662_1300223916977_1571...

I absolutely love the workspace, but I'm in great need of a larger monitor or three.
Great post jac. 1, 2, 3, and 5 sound perfect answers for the "What is your biggest weakness" interview question.

> I was raised in an environment where almost everybody simply spoke the truth.

I'm the opposite. I was born and brought up in India and went to a boarding school at age 10. I will give people the benefit of the doubt initially but I will not fully trust them till they've proven themselves, usually by their actions not words.

> 3) I either delegate too much or too little

Proper delegation is easy when all you have are managerial/people-skills. You delegate to the best coders, artists, and accountants that you can afford. But when you consider yourself as a viable candidate for a task that can be delegated, you end up with the "I should have done it myself" half the times. On the other hand, a manager with no-tech/domain-specific skills would think "I should have picked a better person." Over time, the manager gets better and better at finding the right people to delegate the task to, whereas you don't. Meanwhile, you get more and more prone to either doing it yourself completely or not doing it at all and completely relying on someone to do it all.

My advice to anyone who fits this bill (as do I), next time you think "I should have done it myself", stop yourself and instead ask "What could I have done differently to help someone finish this task better?"
They are responding to their users' preferences.

So they claim, but users already had the option of making everything public. Removing options is not motivated by the wishes of the users.

The site is designed to shared information about yourself.

The site was designed to share that information with a particular group of people selected by the user.
That sounds like a recipe for every app doing it differently, and lots of confusion.
Last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307294
(URL had '?ref=rss' tail)
Microsoft Builds Open-Source Tool for Biologists Drowning in Data
Good Design for Everyday Living (it gets funnier)
FOX on Demand - 24
huh? looking at your karma of 4135 , I'll assume, you know who Arrington is, and probably know TC = Arrington just to keep it short..... ;) , so lte us agree, this was a funny joke. :)
Good points, but I think we underestimate how much situational context humans use when they interpret language. Sometimes we can communicate with very little language simply because we know what the purpose of the interaction is.

Another thing I keep wondering about is why so little emphasis is put on dialog. When humans don't understand something, they ask, or offer an interpretation and ask whether it's the right one.

Speech recognition systems don't seem to do that. They say "Sorry, I could not understand what you said. Please repeat". That's not very helpful for the computer of course. It should say: "Huh, Peas? Why would anyone rest in peas for heaven's sake??". Then the human could sharpen his SS and say "PeaCCCEE!!! not peas. I'm not talking about food, I'm talking about dying!".
That doesn't show in that Wikipedia article, though. All it contains is some self-referential links. Ie I didn't follow the "qualia" link, but I am pretty sure if I go there, it will just point back to the "hard problem of consciousness".
Was speech recognition software ever any good for anything other than having fun with your kids?
> The PCI specification seems to have been written to protect the payment card industry, not the merchants.

That goes for almost anything in the credit card world. Witness the way chargebacks due to failed approval policies on the part of the credit card companies are taken out on the merchants, lending policies that are totally irresponsible get taken out on the general public and so on.

Credit card companies are amongst the biggest scum on the planet, unfortunately they are so entrenched now that you can hardly move without them.

Try renting a car or booking an airplane ticket without a credit card.

I've outsourced each and every bit of the handling and processing to third parties, we still get hit with the chargeback penalty.
Are there any hacker meet up groups in SA?
If your company computer is a 1960s mainframe and you have to input code via punch cards, this is probably an effective interview technique.
Cars are replaceable. A few years ago I bought a Toyota. Then I got tired of it so I bought a BMW. No one has me locked in, I'm free to switch. So they have to compete to keep me as a customer (or in the case of BMW to get me back, I was a former BMW driver).
What does Wealth Mean to You?
Let me make it simple: Unless you are huge (that is doing well in excess of $200K in charges per month) there really is no point in handling all this yourself, you will spend tons of money in keeping up with the compliance requirements, which change way too frequently and are contradictory in many places.

Outsource and be done with it, unless your turnover is so large that the accumulated fees for having some third party take care of it outweigh the costs of doing it yourself.
im all for inovation. But his example was the worst.

Removing the status bar from the browser and using more space on the title?

Ive been using no title on my browser (go gtkrc) even before chrome. Because the tabs do the same work as the title (display page title) plus added funtionality. So its only natural to remove the title bar. Not add stuff there.

Also everyone uses xterm titles as a status bar.
>since not all windows can be minimized, maximized, or closed.

This is one of the worst usability problems on the desktop. Granted, it doesn't show up in the "default configuration" but do a little thing like change the text size and that dialog box that won't let you resize suddenly is completely broken.

Though I suppose this is part of a bigger problem, that changing fonts is by design a "power user" feature.
If you have your own merchant account you should have received a message via email.
> recent work in 2.6

So, since 2003?
"But weren't you scared to trade again?"
"No."
"This thing with the S.E.C. didn't even make you a little nervous?"
"No."
"No?"
"Why should it?"
roger that.
Microsoft Pivot: Cool New Microsoft Lab Project
Ho-ho-ho: "Lebed.biz/Jonathan Lebed is not a registered investment advisor or a broker / dealer. Lebed.biz/Jonathan Lebed does not recommend whether to buy, sell, or hold securities. All opinions expressed by Lebed.biz/Jonathan Lebed are not a solicitation to buy, sell, or hold securities. "
I would say usb killed floppies and serial ports.

Built-in modems aren't dead, they are still on a surprisingly number of laptops.

He killed OS 9 so he could sell OS X. That's like saying Microsoft killed Win95. That's planned obsolescence.
Internet Explorer Falls Below 60% Market Share
Steve's Job: Restart Apple (1997)
It could be the iPhone. Or just Apple's old interfaces. Or tiling window managers, whose philosophy is to maximize screen usage by default. For instance, the Netbook edition smart panel example would integrate beautifully with Xmonad.
FWIW, all of Weinberg's arguments apply to early employees as well.

Perhaps they should ask for 4 weeks of severance. Of course, since startups are risky, the best way to do that is to pay them a month in advance.
Have you considered timing the average wait time for fsync() and continuously adjusting a timer to fsync() every N milliseconds based on this data? You could queue all of your response-to-client messages to wait on this fsync(), and do tens of these per second, even on a slow drive. This technique can potentially get client responses down to fractions of a second, even in high throughput scenarios.
great comparison. You should have put this together in a blog entry or something like that.
Apple Sells One Million iPads
Or, you could look at the Netbook Edition smart panel, which eliminate the need for a title bar. Unless you don't use a global status bar at all, this could do.
Or, alternatively, we figure out that startups as all-consuming obsessions which require the sacrifice of everything we hold dear are not the whole of the solution space.

I know, I know, my salaryman colleagues thought it was heresy, too.
> Many governments will only, or preferentially, purchase and use products that are standardized

Thanks for pointing out that govts act as customers.

Yes, govts prefer standards in some cases, but I'd be surprised if it mostly was standards driven. Consider all the vehicles purchased - not a single one is "standard" and they all contain exclusively patented components.
Simple and Effective Ways to Build Trust
Do you get e-mail rage?
Sibling commenters please note that May 3 is International Sarcasm Detector Battery Replacement Day.
Top One on One Fight Movie Videos
The iPad is already roaming 3G networks around the World
Pharma Startup: Pharmaceutical Start Up and Entrepreneurial Network
PostgreSQL 9.0b1 with built-in replication support
.. but it's May 3rd.
I am not sure why this particular UI layout (and the infamous left-side buttons were at all necessary). There is another equally viable alternative, without all the complex re-engineering needed for "client side window decorations".

let the window controls and buttons stay as they were pre-lucid.
The left side button – the window control menu – will glow/shine when the application window has updated a status.
Clicking on the window control button will show a drop down that has (in addition to the “To Desktop”,”Resize”, “Maximize”, etc.) an alerts subsection. Clicking on the events in the alerts subsection will behave exactly the way windicators work in the above design.

Cons: rather than have all indicators in front of you at all times, you have to take the bother of clicking the window control button (or press alt-spacebar).
Pros: My mother doesnt need to be puzzled about what the green shiny button is supposed to indicate, in the drop down, I can have text as well as an icon.
To me, "trawling Facebook" means using publicly available information. Pretending to be interested in friendship is "social engineering," which is a polite way of saying "lying."
Apparently, here is the vocabulary test used at the GSS and referenced in the last graph:

http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2010/04/gss-vocabulary-test....
A/B tests result: Website Design: Less is More?
If your app touches CC#s it should be so good and so secure that it is PCI compliant without even trying to be. The PCI specifications read like a laundry list of common sense practices.
It's clearly well past time for early employees to start negotiating preferences as well.

If we're not in the same boat ....
This is a wonderful exercise. Everyone has hamartia [1] ... the "fatal flaw" and you would greatly benefit from figuring out what it is and staying mindful of how it can mess things up for you.

It can be hard to see this in yourself. Ask people you trust to be honest and who know you well to help you evaluate your weakness(es)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamartia
That reminds me: why didn't we have any public debate about electronic money? We just let the Big New York Banks slide credit cards in, despite the badness of the format, and indeed, the whole system.

I guess we're all going to find out how a privatized monetary system works, at least on the consumer level.
Could somebody summarize why what he did was illegal? I gave up after ~1.5 pages. If all he did was to give stock trading advice under false names, is that really illegal? I am actually surprised.
Ick! So they are taking the functionality of dock/bar icon apps and reproducing it in each window title bar? Seems needlessly complicated and cluttered to me. I prefer a simple, streamlined design myself.
I wasn't aware (never actually programmed lisp) of the handling of numbers being so strong. I wonder if some of that could be worked into Ruby.
Ask HN: iPad 3G-Is Apple ripping-off money from it's loyal customers?
1) Why use micro SIM on iPad? While apple might give innocent answer of moving to latest technology? Sure there is more to it.

2) Why is Apple hell bent on ripping off customers and make BIG RICH (AT&T) company even richer ? For Eg. use of different sim card (micro sim) and force customers into buying another sim card data plan. Making iPad 3G AT&T exclusive for time being

3) Why would any device with 3G SIM not have telephone and SMS? This is insane !!

4) Why is Apple penalizing there loyal customers and early adaptors? For Eg. When they introduced iPhone it did not have 3G while all other smart phones had 3G. Again iPad does not have camera but I am sure later versions of iPad will get camera. While it is clear with camera in iPhone 4G that they already have technology to get camera on iPad.

WTF is happening Steve Jobs !! I am not sure what you are doing is Ethical.
A non-blocking lexing toolkit for Scala in less than 800 lines of code
What is an argumentative essay paper 
Not every essay can count as an argumentative essay paper, even when they all are, some way or another, trying to capture the reader’s attention. But when it comes to writing persuasive essays,
See how long that arrangement works. Be prepared to watch many "Elmo" videos! Enjoy your little blessing.
Examining your personal programming style
The diagrams are informative and makes me appreciate the fact that I don't usually need to worry about UDP and TCP/IP low level things anymore (different in the 1980s, at least for the work I did back then).

BTW, a comment on UML sequence diagrams: I used to be a proponent of UML (Paul Harmon and I wrote a UML book together in ancient history) but sequence diagrams are the only type of UML diagram that I use anymore in my work: the most bang for the buck, communication wise.
Buy panoramic jigsaw puzzles
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Especially if he is often on the road and therefore not subjecting himself the Washington's high (I think 10%) sales tax.
Awesome read for a Monday morning!
The Myth of the Sophisticated Investor
I think that's why Lisp is pleasing in a mathematical sort of way. You start with your basic axioms, which are simple to understand. The real test, however, comes from your ability to build up from those axioms an elegant, abstract framework which gets closer and closer to describing your problem set. This is why smug Lisp weenies say that in other languages, you wrap your problem around the language whereas with Lisp, you wrap your language around the problem.

There's definitely a mindset behind building Lisp programs that makes it worth using, but sadly those benefits require lots of work to arrive at and are often buried in pages of elitist, manic-depressive drivel on certain newsgroups when trying to describe why someone should use Lisp.
Beware the black market rising for IP addresses
Only very few people have all the necessary skills to successfully build a business from the ground up and grow it, and that's OK, really.

In this case Jacques has a few character traits that are real liabilities. So it's easy for us to laugh from the sidelines... knowing that we would never make those mistakes ourselves... (oh, the naivete) but we're all making critical mistakes, and only very few of us are introspective enough to realize what our real weak points are. (We tend to dismiss those things we're bad at as unimportant and we overestimate how introspective we are compared to other people. I'm no exception).

It wouldn't surprise me if the mistakes Jacques has listed are pretty inconsequential in the big picture. Sure, it only takes one big mistake to kill a project, but in the course of 24 years everybody is going to make so many mistakes that it becomes easy to lose the forest for the trees.

Too gullible? That's not the end of the world. Everybody gets burned occasionally. Well, almost everybody. People who never get burned tend to be pessimists who never see opportunities, even when they're looking right at them! Maybe in this case there is a different problem, such as "doesn't make contingency plans" or "too impulsive". Even if you trust everybody completely you can still become hugely successful in 24 years. I suspect "gullibility" is only on the list because you feel like a fool when you get taken advantage of, not because you've been consistently cheated in the past 24 years. I also suspect that if you had become hugely successful you wouldn't feel so bad anymore about trusting the wrong people.

Or take "seeing potential in people, not reality". Perhaps in combination of the above this can be simply summarized as "bad judge of character", if that's not too harsh. Other things hint at this as well "surprised when other people zone out", "surprised when people burn out", etc. Or maybe you do see the reality in people, the "spark" as it were, but perhaps you just don't have the reality distortion field to turn those people into passionate followers.

Anyway, I admire the way you've described some of your mistakes, but I don't believe, not for a second, that these mistakes are actually what have kept you from getting the success you want.
Look at the antitrust lawsuits against printer manufacturers for ink refills. You don't have to have a monopoly in a sector (printers) to be subject to anti-trust laws, having a monopoly on consumables designed to work with your product can be sufficient.
Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
I've long lamented how none of these are anywhere near as beautiful as a decent printed map. Some of the OSM projects (e.g. toposm) are better, but still not as good as (say) Rand-McNally or ADC. On my hope-to-do list is to write a renderer for OSM data that produces really beautiful maps meant for printing rather than viewing on a <100dpi screen.
Yes I confess I have a Facebook Account
Looking for web server logs?
Unconscionable Public Education Practices
Or somewhere in between.
Nice writeup. I bought David's book on consciousness after having a long talk with him at a Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics meeting about 10 years ago. I think that this is interesting stuff. Really, why should we have evolved with the kind of inner life (qualia) consciousness? What evolutionary advantages did it give us?
Network Outage at The Planet
Ask HN: Help Me Learn Math (Please & Thank you)
I made a Faustian bargain in High school. Once I figured out that I could coast all year long and supplant those bad grades with whatever I got in 3 weeks of summer school that was it.
My family was not rich enough to take summer vacations so I was home all summer anyway. My friends where all ether in summer school already, didn’t wake up until after I was home, or where rich enough to be gone all summer. So being in summer school was not a burden and never having to worry all year long about homework, tests, notes, midterms, or finials, made it all seem worth it.

Alas, now as an adult making a living as A Web Developer, trying to understand Mathematics, I finally realize the true costs. I lack a foundation that makes even some Algebra intelligible even with perspicuous explanation. I need an overhaul from the foundations up. Where do I start? Are there any shortcuts I can take? I’ve checked ‘Better Explained’ [1] but it seems to not be systematic enough.

I am also having a hard time finding a clear demarcation of what I know, what I know that I don’t know, and what I haven’t a clue exists. How much should I learn – the rabbit hole is deep – and I am unsure of how much time to put in and how far to go.

I would greatly appreciate any help I could get climbing out of the hole I have dug for myself. Thanks.

.

[1] http://betterexplained.com/
Compared to SF, or even Seattle? Obviously not even close. There are jobs though if you're set on being there, not to mention the possibility of (tele)commuting.
Notes from the Collaboration Summit (Linux, IBM, Google, etc.)
You're not allowed to spread rumours you know to be untrue or create a false impression of trading activity for the purpose of manipulating share prices.
being well-read implies being exposed to different things [...] But those who are exposed to a wide variety of things are highly correlated with those who wish to take risks to be exposed to new things

I don't follow this reasoning. Being well-read implies being exposed to a lot of different books, not a lot of different activities. In my experience, people that read a lot are not people who take risks to be exposed to new things, precisely because they have rather intellectual hobbies and they have less free time due to reading a lot.
Mark Shuttleworth uses Balsamiq Mockups. That's a great endorsement for Balsamiq.
Although Steve's reality distortion field is strong, it is not strong enough to force people to purchase a device that they do not want.
Related discussion on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058946

I'm still a bit sad Schumacher Clean never shows up in these lists.
If you want to make an easy and tasty sauce: Buy one can of San Marzano tomatoes (must be San Marzano!), one onion (yellow works well), some fresh garlic, fresh basil and some olive oil. Chop and then saute onion in pan with some olive oil. While onion is cooking, tear off a few leaves of basil and chop. Once onion is about done add some garlic to the pan (pressed is great) and let it cook for a minute. Add onion, garlic, basil and tomatoes to blender (or food processor). Blend to consistency you like. Bring to boil on stove, then turn down to simmer. Add salt, and pepper to taste. (Red pepper if you like it spicy.) Once you have drained your pasta (see above) you can toss the pasta in the sauce. Depending on how much sauce you like, you can optionally store some in the refrigerator for later use.
Is AT&T able to detect you tethering? Or, if I tether, will I get a huge data bill even though it's "unlimited"?
The use of technology to take people with radically different opinions and worldviews and create and mold a conversation where both parties feel emotionally rewarded for participating and that it was time well-spent. This could be for any topic -- the business model works best for things like corporate policy-making, but it would kick ass in things like local politics and getting consensus in charity organizations too.
Related, quoted, links:

ELC: Android and the community - http://lwn.net/Articles/383276/

Contributing to Open Source projects - http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html
Much further in you are informed that this is basically what all of Wall Street does.
Why Hacker News was down this morning