skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jailbreaking voids your warranty.
This is absolutely retarded.

a) The market will figure this out. If developers don't want to code in just Cocoa touch or make apps for other platforms a priority because the language is easier, they will.

b) Things are in such a nascent stage. Android is growing like a weed. A suit like this might make some partial sense a few years down the road if there was enough data there.

c) The department of justice will probably hire a bunch of people with no real domain expertise to look into the subject.

d) The potential precedent set could be scary. @archgrove mentioned the xbox example. So now, microsoft might HAVE to allow us to build XBLA games using any tools out there. If I were microsoft, I wouldn't want sub standard crap getting in there.
It is true that humans do use situational context. In the cases where semantics is important and complex for understanding an utterance a computer will fail even more because it won't get the semantics or the speech signal.

On the topic of dialog, this is arguably the area that speech recognition has gained in over the last nine years. Prior to 2001 there were not many usable dialog systems and (depending on your definition of "usable") there are many usable dialog systems deployed in call centers around the world.

Most call center dialog systems have a rudimentary system asking for people to repeat things when it doesn't understand. Although, if it asks more than once the callers tend to get very angry.
It could certainly get to $500/bbl, but it's unlikely that it would. Before reaching this point, it would have wrought misery on the world economy, as you've described (and "recession" is an understatement).
Learn PHP, but please, please, learn to write clean and manageable code. I highly recommend picking up a framework along with php.
Good ones are Symfony and Cakephp.
I would have suggested Python but php is much easier to learn and deploy.
As with any major postgres update this calls from a full dump of the database and a restore into the new version-you can't simply update the database files.

pg_dump -clean makes this a snap so you shouldn't have any problems upgrading. (oh and if you're doing backups-you are using pg_dump --clean right? Its really the best way).
A pair of queues should be enough. The first queue is the one being fsynced, the second queue is open for writes. The first fsync call starts the first queue flushing. The second fsync call marks the second queue as read to flush once the first one is done. The third has no additional effect. Writes can still proceed against the second until it actually starts flushing. At which point the queues swap and you're back where you started.
I don't think that Facebook per se is a fad, but you're probably right that it will be gone or irrelevant in five years, because the aspects of its service that Facebook is trying to build its revenue model around are almost certainly a fad.

Facebook to me is an enhanced contact list. Most of the people I know treat it the same way. The ability to stay in contact and re-connect with friends, contacts, and acquaintances who you no longer interact with on a daily basis is its main feature.

But the "social" aspect of the games and apps available on Facebook's platform is a novelty, and once that novelty wears off, what's the attraction? Facebook as a layer on top of the open internet to signal what I "like"? What's the point?

I think that Facebook are scrambling now to try to find a viable business model, and trying to establish themselves as a _platform_, broadly defined, because they realize that there are severe limits to how far you can monetize social networks, but they haven't really figured out how to leverage their success as a social network to expand into something that can sustainably generate revenue.
Interesting, because I always click the comments link in Google Reader rather than the article. I read the comments first to get a sense of whether I will read the article or not.
tl;dr? I'm not really a video guy.
Would this also include other healthcare related startups?
pg has always been more interested in targetting Oracle users, than mysql users.
> doesn't seem like a sound legal foundation for anti-trust action . . .

Don't get me wrong. I'm right with you there.
Banglore has always been the silicon valley of India. May be I will come there to get a summer internship if I can. Do you know any electronics related startup that will give internship to second/third year students? Somewhere I could actually learn?
Yeah, but I don't know why they couldn't have just said "We're moving the buttons to the left to acclimate users and make way for a new feature we'll be introducing sometime in the near future, but are not ready to discuss right now." It would have been a lot nicer than their "because I said so" deal, which actually cost them at least one good developer (to my recollection; there was a story about it on here not that long ago, but it would be hard to find) who felt that Canonical became calloused to community desires.
other links in the topic:

"Brain Workshop is a free open-source version of the Dual N-Back mental exercise to increase Working Memory ..."

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

----------------------

"Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list at Google Groups :"

http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training

http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/files
I second the recommendation to tune the subpixel rendering using your OS's wizard. Both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 make this very easy. The difference is very apparent and worth it.
It's not actually clear what we hear at this point, there is evidence that we respond to something like frequencies, pitch, volume, and other things. But the jury is still out on the low-level signal processing that is occurring in the cochlea and the primary auditory cortex. What's happening further downstream in the brain is even less clear.
http://steveblock.com/r/sgiscreen-ttf.tar.gz

Looks pretty good at 14pt in Terminal.app. Thanks.
My pet peeve is that Eclipse crashes when I set Consolas the default font. Crash occurred within libpango. So I'm stuck with Andale Mono (a decent substitute). I will have to look into it again one of these days.
> Societal complexity is a function of excess energy availability

That's true in it's most trivial sense, and false in any non-trivial sense. Quick examples - Qatar, Venezuela, Japan.
Also it's unclear what is getting approved, and what not. And for what time.

This can totally destroy small companies that have invested heavily, and are still waiting to be approved.

In a sense it reminds of the XBLA slots (commercial Arcade).
Paul Graham Topics
All-Nighters: Miles to Go
You may also be interested by my implementation with / without various form of tail-recursion using recur or without: http://github.com/kototama/ansicommonlisp-book-clojure/blob/...
They look much better with sub-pixel rendering but thanks to different sub-pixel geometries taking a screenshot doesn't really work.
What's was so bad in this explanation?
Top ways the Droid Incredible can kill your iPhone
BTW, if you read the thread on AtariAge.com and were wondering, Curt Vendel is the head of Legacy Engineering, who designed the 'Atari-on-chip' that was used in the Atari Flashback 2 that was sold in stores a couple years back.

Apparently he doesn't think too highly of Nolan Bushnell...
Yeah I applied for a job there once, it appeared like they run a dozen little startups with one set of funding. Didn't seem like an incubator.
Apple sells 1 million iPads
I agree that its at the heart of it (and I'm presently writing a paper where I'm using articulatory-phonetic features rather than phonemes). Unfortunately, there is no large-vocabulary speech recognizer that uses articulatory phonetics (yet!). Every large scale speech recognizer and most small scale use phonemes and are trained using speech that has been transcribed into phonemes. There is almost no data that is annotated with articulatory phonetics (a problem I'm working on right now).
If you use "pg_dump -F c", pg_restore is able to parallelize the restore, which makes things go a lot quicker.
This worked great on my iPad. I'm trying to find apps that work (well) on iPad. So far I've only installed the following:

- RockApp - much faster/better package management than Cydia; works great on iPad.
- Backgrounder - works great on iPad - true multitasking.
- OpenSSH - also works.
- Vi Improved (vim) - works great.

What I really want is a terminal app that uses the iPad screen and has full bluetooth (hardware) keyboard support for Control keys. I tried MobileTerminal, but the app is formatted for iPhone (comes up in a small window) and crashes immediately on iPad so it won't even run.

Warning: I tried SBSettings and it made my iPad almost unusable; like an iPhone with no wallpaper, only 4 icons in the dock, many apps didn't work, so I had to restore. Apparently SBSettings is not iPad friendly yet.

It would be great if others who have a jailbroken iPad could post apps that they know work or are safe to use, since the jailbreak ecosystem for iPad is still in it's infancy.
The brouhaha about SSH was the result of people installing OpenSSH, using it once or twice, not changing their passwords, and then forgetting about it. The developers who packaged OpenSSH could have taken steps to make it more obvious when it was running but in the end the problem was user error. These jailbreaks should never install more than the bare minimum of software onto the device.
The public school system in the United States is a wonderful undertaking. Unfortunately it is deeply flawed and in its current state does a great disservice to the students that attend school within the public system.

My wife works with undergraduate students at a major university every single day and she is a first hand witness to the poor quality of public education nationwide. The students that she encounters are often woefully unprepared for a college education-they have a poor grasp of written English, have low reading comprehension and their grasp of basic mathematical skills is better left unexplored. These students ARE NOT the bottom of the barrel either-the admission system filters most of them out. Its a very sad state of affairs.

Our children will be attending private school-even though I don't agree with their religion (most private schools here are Catholic) I can't argue with their results. My wife left her private high school with English, math and science skills that rival most college graduates.
Maybe the issue is that in order to develop for the iphone or Ipad you are forced to use the SDK which in turn requires apple hardware (MAC) and apple software (OSX) to run. software that you are also prohibited from virtualizing?
it would be really interesting to hear what you find. Maybe a grease monkey script could block the facebook cookie gathering on non-fb sites.
Wow-thats a great tip. Thanks!
Feh. Yeah another example of why I stopped reading Forbes: if their articles in an area I know well are abysmal then how can I trust anything they say in areas I know little or nothing about?

In this case, the author confounds the real Moore's Law, which states that in a certain time period---1 year in 1965, 2 years later---the number of transistors of the lowest cost you can put on a die will roughly double with the resulting "speed".

Amazingly, Moore's Law is still holding up, but not the implicit promise of increased speed:

There was a corollary of generally increased clock speeds as everything got smaller, but as noted in the article we hit a brick wall there due to power dissipation (e.g. see the Netburst (P4) microarchitecture disaster).

But from my informal understanding of CPU speed, the greatest gains have come from better microarchitectures. There are fairly clean examples of this in e.g. the evolution of the 680x0 and 386 and beyond lines of microprocessors, and we can see this today in examples of x86-64 and ARM processors that are superscaler (or not?) and in or out-of-order (Atom vs. most everything else, Cortex A8 vs A9, etc.)

Our problem here is of course that the microarchitects have run out of the big wins, e.g. "Per Core, clock-for-clock, Nehalem provides a 15–20% increase in performance compared to Penryn" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_%28microarchitecture%29...). Nice, but not a big win, not like the 386 -> 486 -> P5 -> P6 steps, where among many other things cache was added, it went superscaler and it went out-of-order superscaler.

Maybe the author gets this but it didn't emerge in the final draft, but I have no way of knowing that....
* Capital-M Mathematics in general.

* That learning style link is a pay link (but I did it anyway cause I am trusting you.) Here are the results: http://files.me.com/shawndumas/jxy4p0

* I easly understand up to 'Venn Diagram Problems' but the next section says, 'You are undoubtedly familiar with graphs of functions from your experience in algebra courses...'

Thanks!
Might not have been the same one, they've got 8 DCs across three cities. http://www.theplanet.com/data-centers/
ShiftIt : Manage Windows on Mac OS X
I found this tool a couple of days ago and I think it is crucial for any Mac developer. Thought I would share...
Should we criminalize difficult exam questions?
My wife MUST jailbreak to have it for themes/styles. In fact, I bought her a 3GS for Valentine's day that has been sitting around collecting dust because it couldn't jailbreak (she's still using her 3G).

I also made her icons that do 1-click SMS to me for quick things like ("On my way home" or "Call me, I'm driving and can't text."). I used bash scripts and a tool in Cydia for command-line SMS'ing on the iPhone.

Also things like iLocalis are cool for tracking down your phone if lost/stolen, and purportedly for keeping a sanity check on your kid's location.

Basically, if you want to do any heavy customization to the phone, you'll need to jailbreak. Every year, Apple takes a little more away from the jailbroken app category by adding new features, but there will always be some things they aren't so keen on.
Audiences, and Hollywood, Flock to Smartphones
I have that bookmarked but was unsure where to start. It seems a bit overwhelming.

Can you suggest an entry point?

Thanks!
I'm not sure what you base the less conservative approach to development comment on. As far as I know, the development process and patch application process is the same as it has been in recent years. Stability and quality of code are still #1.

Edit: clarified the conservative approach to development.
Using a complex generic filesystem with too much metadata is a bit part of the problem. If your app is write oriented try a logfs-style filesystem. Or perhaps it's time for a new minimal filesystem.

Direct I/O is another option but too crass, IMHO.
College students devote less time to studying than ever before
Hiding contradictory past policy eh? Now to wait for the inevitable explanation of how changing market forces have made closed, patented software more viable today than it was in 2002...
Corks
No I think they are just responding to user demand, as the first sentence in the notes states:

Based on overwhelming user demand, this release of PostgreSQL adds features that have been requested for years, like easy-to-use replication, a mass permission facility, and anonymous blocks.
There's no "marketing" direction; the project is not trying to capitalize on anything. It's adding requested features when they're stable and able to be implemented in a way that has consensus among the committers.
good stuff :)
>There is no deep conspiracy behind Apple's and Microsoft's support for HTML5 video and h.264.

Who said there's a deep conspiracy theory? Saying "they aren't being entirely open with their motives" is an observation that is almost always true of almost all businesses.

This is a classic conflict of interest. It's like finding out that your doctor who is telling you that you really need to remove a kidney has a lucrative side business selling kidneys.

This is really all so ridiculous, though. The video thing is a giant red herring -- the truth is that Flash as a video container is almost always used to thinly serve up h.264 these days. Yes, the stream should be decoupled from the player. No doubt.

Yet that blanket idea about video is used to mask the incredible gap that HTML5 currently has on mobile devices.
Phillies regain the upper hand on Mets
I'd say the project has been more interested in making its own space than targeting users of any particular product. Now if you take companies like EnterpriseDB, they are specifically targeting Oracle users. That, however, is entirely independent of the project itself.
Review my app please
It's a public holiday (Labour day) and I built this quickly. Please try it out, tell me what's wrong with it, and I'll iterate.

Thanks!
Google's database of private wifi router locations
Latest Fashion Trends in Apparel
I wonder if HN adoption is at the point where HN subs would be an option. Maybe not wide open like reddit.com/r/ but a controlled set of HN sub sections.
Perhaps the submission itself? From the first paragraph:

"While past major releases have been quite conservative in their scope, this release shows a bold new desire to provide facilities that every new and existing user of PostgreSQL will embrace."
I'll look at those.

Thanks!
The way I always thought Apple avoided Anti-trust is that it controls the entire stack from software to hardware. The fact that they let you develop any apps at all, for any of their platforms, is their choice which they should be able to deny at will. You as the consumer don't have to buy their things if you don't like their policies.

Contrast this with Windows on any number of manufacturers of PCs. Where Microsoft went wrong is that they said, "We'll give you OEM pricing if you agree to this, this, this and this. Otherwise we'll make it difficult for you to compete." It's that sort of bullying that's a problem, because they don't own the entire stack.
I wouldn't draw so much from what looks like a local minimum - especially when the abilities of people imply that there is a suitable algorithm. The problem is its no longer a successful marketing gimmick - it won't help to sell software/hardware anymore until it works as well as people do.
How do you know something is substandard just because it's made with some other library / language ? Especially with an "yet to be created" library / language ?

If you think "the market will figure this out" (which I think in itself is wrong) why don't we let the market figure out which language is better ? If the users don't like some products, they won't buy them. If all Cocoa touch apps make money and all the Flash apps lose money the market will fix itself, no ?
I find it more and more difficult to believe that AT&T would be able to tell the difference without looking deeply at the traffic; the iPad loads full web pages and videos, so they probably couldn't tell from bandwidth alone.
Question: Should we criminalize proposing something crazy by prefixing it with "One might say that..." or "One could make an argument that...", relieving the author of the responsibility of actually substantially defending their crazy remark?

Answer: No. That author should only be liable in civil court.
Many years ago, I TA'ed a class that did exactly that, teaching Scheme to gifted students ages 12 to 15. The text we used was "The Schemer's Guide" by Iain Ferguson, supplemented with a large helping of locally-prepared material about propositional logic, recursion, Turing machines, etc. In that way, Scheme comes across as a natural implementation of these concepts.

It's worth noting that 90+% of the work in this class, including programming projects, was conducted as pen-and-paper exercises, not on a computer.
For one thing, I am skeptic about the notion of "mirror neurons". Or maybe the name is badly chosen. I think what happens is that certain neurons (or regions of the brain) associate with certain abstract concepts. It is not surprising that the same neurons light up no matter if I kick a stone with my foot myself, or see somebody else kick a stone with their foot. Both times "abstraction neurons" for things like stones, feet, kicking, etc. would light up (and by that I don't mean there is a genetically encoded brain region to encode "stones", I don't think there is). Why not? As an engineer, the concept of introducing specific "mirror neurons" seems unnecessary and too wasteful to make sense. I am not a specialist for his mirror neurons theory, so maybe I am doing him an injustice. As I said, the name could be badly chosen. And what I could imagine is that the brain is prone to make certain abstractions - just as it is prone to learn a language (it seems likely to me that parts of the brain are structured to facilitate learning languages, or recognizing faces - a bit like there being general purpose CPUs and specialized digitial signal processors in electronics). So in that sense they could be on to something, although I think their way of describing it would be rather misleading.

The main thing is, though, that the question "what is consciousness" does not make sense, therefore if he gives an answer to that, it has to be nonsense.

Now I only skimmed the article, and it might be that he is not actually pretending to give an answer. Rather, he is redefining the problem in terms of his mirror neurons theory. So it would only be marketing (it sure makes for good marketing to pretend to answer the "hard question"), which would be a bit more forgivable, but ultimately still be rubbish.
The intent was not to speak to the development process per se, but the roadmap for Postgres.
They monopolize their own stack. Hardly a monopoly in my book.
"[O]nly Apple's programming tools." This is completely wrong. Apple isn't restricting anyone from using, e.g., Textmate, they are requiring use of c/c++ and objective-c. These languages run on many other platforms, obviously.
To further your comment danh, Apple has an absolute monopoly on App Stores on iPhone devices.
I can't get an app onto the device without going through them.

If i have an xbox, I can get a game from Best Buy or Amazon, etc. Even though those are closed systems.

If I have an iPhone, I can only get apps from the Apple store.

I'm not positive if this is unique to Apple in the mobile space or not. I know I can get blackberry apps from anywhere, same with WinMo.
I'm not sure about Android or Palm.
JSConf 2010 Slides compilation
It worked! What interesting apps and games can I install on my iPod Touch?
I wonder if the "trim the SIM" workaround (and lack of any logic-board constrainst to AT&T) is a signal that Apple is betting that the ATT-binding is nearing end-of-life? (A fella's gotta hope, right?)
It doesn't - it actually goes to a very long and detailed article.
"a girl that's okay with splitting the check"

I thought those days were long gone. I've never not split the bill with a girl in my entire life.
Reminds me of the model of UK economy constructed as an anolog computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer)
Fundamentally, stats in the article are based on a survey, asking students to report studying time. Probably worthless, if the students thought anybody was going to read it.
I don't understand how they are being anti-competitive. They control the entire stack from hardware to software. The fact that you can write any software for their platforms is more of a privilege than a right.
Self-Tracking
I tend to agree with this piece:

http://www.osnews.com/print/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Vid...

Mandating strong legally enforced controls over image compression algorithms do result in a READ-ONLY CULTURE:

http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strang...

The above should answer your questions in detail.
Besides the jailbreak-only apps, there is unlock, which allows me to choose the carrier, not vice versa :)
does microsoft also prohibit 3rd parties from producing compatibility layers on top of .Net?