skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The sarcasm and glee displayed in the German media (and by German politicians) was quite intolerable when Google admitted their mistake. Everybody seemed to take it for granted that malign intent – not a screw up – was the reason why Google recorded the WiFi data.

It’s true that you need to have a good understanding of various very technical issues but that’s not a excuse for leaving your viewers (and voters) in the dark and gleefully suggesting that malign intent could be a good explanation for what Google did. What Google did was most likely illegal, it was also a pretty bad screw up on Google’s part but it is very unlikely that Google intentionally recorded the data. That just doesn’t seem like a good explanation.

Why do I (as someone who has some understanding of the technical issues involved but not a very deep one) have to read in blogs about good probable explanations? (I read another very good and quite similar German blog post on the topic [1].) Why don’t I find something like that anywhere else in the media?

(I must say, though, that the German Google spokespeople who were interviewed seemed pretty bad at explaining the issue at hand. Maybe just quote mining, but they didn’t look good in front of the camera.)

[1] http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2860-Wie-man-aus-Versehen-... (German)
Generally no.
yes, as the video makes clear, you can't compel the police to testify to anything you said, but they can use it all against you. its hearsay when you want to use and the unassailable truth when its used against you.
The first-gen iPhone had a really good web-browser. Even if Microsoft miraculously finishes IE9 and ports it to WinMo 7 in time for the launch, it's still going to be a substandard mobile browser, and thanks to the all-Silverlight development platform, there will be no other browsers available.
A 'one-in-a-million' occurrence from a movie and the police framing a stranger from out of state?

Trust me, it's not one-in-a-million. As far as the U.S. has come in race relations, I would never as a young black male consent to a search without cause. It's just too easy to be railroaded and have your life ruined. Why would you take that risk?
ZDDs. A ZDD is a DAG of outdegree two where each node represents a set of subsets of some arbitrarily-ordered domain. A node's left child contains all subsets which lack the smallest element in those subsets; its right child contains all subsets which do contain the smallest element.

This allows for tremendous compression of search spaces -- one example Knuth gave in a talk I went to a few weeks ago was representing all five-letter words in the English (represented as subsets of {a_1, a_2, ..., z_4, z_5}, where e.g.: {k_1, n_2, u_3, t_4, h_5} represents "knuth"), and efficiently making queries such as finding all words that, when a 'b' is replaced with an 'o', yield another word. More impressive to me was representing all of a certain class of tilings with only a few hundred thousand nodes, when the total number of such tilings was, IIRC, on the order of 10^20.
At traffic stops, behaving very friendly and polite and sober and knowing exactly where your license, registration, and proof of insurance are goes a long way, even if you play dumb about why you were pulled over. Sometimes there is no reason. They might ask you what you're out for, but that's just to make conversation so they can size you up and it won't lead to anything (unless you say something stupid like "buying some weed").
Note that this is why standalone MP3 players have been unable to garner marketshare in Japan: everyone's cell phones were already their mp3 player (and they bought the music OTA via their phone, to boot). As is, the days of standalone music players are likely numbered.
What programming language to learn RoR or PHP?
I want to learn a programming language that would help me quickly prototype ideas. I am debating between Ruby on Rail or PHP. Could you guys share the pros and cons and your personal advice?
My thoughts, exactly. Why would they use more resources and slow down page load for users who couldn't care less?
"-Werror=implicit" would be more useful here. -Wall won't prevent that from compiling, but there's hardly any situation where you'd want it to compile.
Just did it. Only a 44mb download and a surprisingly fast update.
Yoga Meditation Relieves Anxiety
Let's hope that neutrality extends to fish-oil.
I would argue from an information theory perspective that ever speaking about anything may be self incriminating for any crime you have ever commuted. Also, I am fairly positive federal immunity does not protect you vs the hague. So you could still be convicted of say war crimes based on testimony even if you had immunity.

Unfortunately, the law does not agree with me.
Eventually, phones will be good enough to replace them 100%

Only if you an easily use them by touch, without having to look at them.

I plug my Sansa into my car stereo, and can skip or pause songs without taking my eyes off the road.

With a glass screen and virtual buttons it becomes much harder.

Plus, I like have good, inexpensive, dedicated devices.
Now that you have a free Evo 4G, are you at all interested in picking up an iPhone 4G?

I've been using a G1 for a year and the lack of quality apps for android (good design is rare) makes me want to pick up an iphone.

I've tried my coworkers Nexus One and its many times more usable than my G1 (pure speed) but it still lacks the apps and iPhone 4G will have comparable performance.
El danielito...........
They're allowed to search your private property with your consent. Silent acquiescence is considered consent. If they knock on the door, you open the door, and they step inside, and they start poking around, and you haven't said anything? You consented to that search.
Nathan Myhrvold, CEO And Founder, Intellectual Ventures on Charlie Rose
The Federal Court is the ultimate appeals court and thus can overrule the Patent Court, hence forcing the German Patent Office ('Patentamt') to grant the patent.

What's more, and potentially worse, judgements of the Federal Court serve to interpret and further develop the law. Hence it is very much like a precedent in the common-law sense - except one that isn't open to interpretation by other courts. If legislators now think that this is not what they intended, they are free to change the law. But you'll find other courts very much basing future judgments on the opinions of the Federal Court.

The European Patent Office has granted a fair number of software patents for technical solutions (indeed, the issue of "technicity" is key) using software. So this may point to their validity in Germany and increase litigation.
I like relaxed balanced red-black trees. In those, you're allowed to violate the balancing conditions; you can go back and fix the violations later. This is useful if you want to use them concurrently. The balancing transformations tend to cause lots of contention between threads, so deferring that rebalancing for a later, clean-up thread can really help with scalability.
There's no end to the questions raised: http://jacobian.org/writing/gpl-questions/

…and no answers for them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702369
Just an update.

Got a guest. Successfully recorded.

Doing post-production over the next few days and will be posted shortly after.
Isn't it very inefficient to heat with electricity to begin with? That's what I was told anyway. You are right, transforming electricity into heat is probably very efficient. But generating electricity is more inefficient than generating heat directly, hence heating by other means is a lot more efficient.

He might be excused, though, if it simply was another era when there wasn't yet any kind of consciousness for that kind of thing.
Wow, fantastic essay, both for its technical and historical content. I worked at ILM during the digital restoration of the original trilogy, and most of the author's account is news to me.
Banning it in one country simply guarantees that another country achieves supremacy first, leaving the UK behind.
Wow. I bought that book some time ago, and it's been on my Must Find Time list for, well, some time. I completely forgot he was the editor.

Damn.
Kidneys are actually more likely to be grown in vitro from your stem cells, using some sort of scaffolding material, and then implanted into you. They're one of the simpler organs, so I think they'll be one of the earlier spectacular applications of tissue engineering.
> though he does make a few minor technical blunders

Such as?

> I mean he says it's better than H.264 baseline. If you're watching it on an iPod or iPhone then that's the only profile they support. In other words Android phones will have better maximum quality video than Apple's. Is that part getting overlooked somehow?

"Better" doesn't mean "much better"; a better residual coder is useful, but H.264 has better reference frame system - On2 seems to love idiosyncratic systems which aren't as good - and much more flexible adaptive quantization. Which is the basis of x264's psy optimizations, so the same (fundamentally good) ideas probably can't be implemented as well.

> It's only a matter of time and at least the Xiph guys have experience of doing exactly this on a similar codebase and they've been working on VP8 for weeks already.

IIRC Theora barely implemented rate-distortion optimizations in the first place, let alone Psy-RD - you have to get that out of the way before you can do the really interesting things.
However, I don't think VP8 uses the weird Hilbert coding of the older system, so it might be easier to implement all of that. Besides, you can just copy it from x264.
i didn't have the patience to wait; downloaded it manually. I wonder if your chances of getting the OTA are improved if you turn on wifi.

froyo looks great!

they made good use of the extra space at the bottom of the screens by adding the phone and browser icons next to the drawer button. it frees up two spots on your main screen!

chrome-to-phone is unbelievably slow even with a nexus one and a great internet connection. it takes literally one minute for the map to show on the phone!
"If you don't die within a short time from eating wheat (without treatment) due to an IgE antibody surge, you aren't allergic -- full stop."

What? With all due respect, this is a ridiculous definition of "allergic" and not at all the standard one. Are all the people with, say, pollen allergies not really allergic if all they get is a runny nose? I feel lousy when I eat anything containing cow's milk, and I have high IgE antibody levels for it, but I don't die. Nonetheless, that is an allergy.

I'm well aware of the difference between an allergy and an intolerance, as I thought I made clear by mentioning gluten intolerance as well as wheat allergy.

Dangerous Grains makes and cites plenty of references to the published literature, so it's hardly your average pop-sci book. A major point of it was that celiac disease is only one way in which gluten intolerance, that is, inability to properly digest gluten, can manifest.
Having an interesting conversation with a Korean the other day. She mentioned that in Korean there are various word and conjugation choices you have to make based on honorifics. What she didn't realize is that English has something similar but we don't recognize it for indicating formality -- often as a class or education signal, or to use differently depending on audience.

I was confused but she explained...

Most English words of German origin are vulgar or informal, while most of Latin, Greek or French origin are formal. Like "shit" vs. "feces", "fight" vs. "quarrel", "drink" vs. "imbibe", etc. In general, where we have synonyms, and those synonyms can be ranked on a scale of informal to formal, German words are towards the informal end, and romantic origin words are towards the formal end.

She said it's been one of the hardest things to learn when learning English (and she's quite fluent), is this concept of "formal" English vs. "informal" that is separate from "colloquial", mainly because nobody recognizes it and nobody teaches it.

So apparently this is also something one has to learn in English - word origin, in order to gauge proper usage.
I didn't know that there are still updates to the iPod Touch.

Would be interested in sales numbers of iPods since the iPhone emerged.

Granted, I bought one, but only as a development device because the iPhone is too expensive.
> Hence it is very much like a precedent in the common-law sense - except one that isn't open to interpretation by other courts.

I'm sorry, I don't follow this at all. I though it would be like a common-law precedent, but persuasive rather than binding with respect to future decisions?

My reasoning was that it's a different situation because civil law courts aren't absolutely obliged to follow past decisions.
Developers certainly care about OS updates. What frustrates me the most about Android fragmentation, and a really essential difference between the Android and iPhone platform, is that you can still buy a new phone running 1.5! You can't buy a new iPhone running OS 2.
They write an article about how iProducts are killing the open web, and don't think to mention Android?
"...till the company has about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do. That's too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them."

Yeah, finding a cofounder who is in "sync" with me would be amazing. If you wanna drop me a line, that'd be great. We need an OKCupid for founders, because I'd put "self-taught hacker", "into customer development" and "reads Hacker News" as mandatories.
Yes, but an iPhone 2G could reasonably run all apps except for a few hardware features not present (MMS, GPS, OpenGL ES 2.0, video camera) because it received all OS updates. And until iPhone OS 4.0 comes out that effectively end-of-lifes the 2G, one could be reasonably happy with the post-sale support of the original iPhone with two years of major upgrades, three including security/bug updates.

The thing that scares me off the Android platform is the OS fragmentation. The sheer fact that I have to hack my device to upgrade it mind-boggles me. The fact that the G1 is not receiving what is becoming the greatest OS upgrade for the Android a mere 1.5 years after release is discouraging beyond the least.
Apparently Froyo could make it possible for the G1 to be updated, because apps can be installed on the SD card. I wonder if they will actually provide an update.
I usually open pages in new tabs, so Ctrl-W is my back button most of the time. I've found that it's actually easier than using the proper back button.

I guess what I really want is this:

1. A really fast back button, and

2. Middle-clicking on the back button opens the previous page in a new tab. I've just discovered that Chrome does this, and I am overjoyed.
Man that sucks.

It was to be expected one of these days, but still to have it come true is a real pity.

Thanks for all the the insights, the brain teasers and the subtle humour.
Great write up.

I would perhaps add a comment about how they were scanning about 5 networks per second on average (per Google's blog post that spawned this story), so it's likely that only a fraction of a second of data being transmitted at that particular time was intercepted. A layperson may not even realize that it wasn't the contents of the machines on a wifi network that was being scanned, but a tiny amount of the traffic going across it.
I don't think so. For one thing, he wasn't just driving at "easier to understand", he was also after "easier to formally prove correct", which isn't at all patronising.

I also don't find a goal of "easier to reason about" particularly patronising; it makes the rather un-patronising assumption that the target audience is willing and able to reason about the matter at hand.

The language features I find patronising are the ones that make it hard to do things a certain way, regardless of how carefully considered my reasons are.
Nathan is a very interesting character. Love his idea of developing an industry around "invention capital" and his work with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is very admirable.
I'm running Android 2.1 on the G1 courtesy of the cyanogen mod (http://www.cyanogenmod.com/). Its been very snappy and has surprisingly had minimal bugs for a beta release.
Fragmentation killed J2ME development for me. It was impossible to keep doing it as an Indie, because you needed to test your app on hundreds of devices.

So I worry a lot about this aspect for Android, but I have some hopes that it won't become as much of an issue.

The main reason is that all Android phones still have the same software basis. They have the same virtual machine and so on (except for the OS versions, but there won't be hundreds that soon). So the issue of having different bugs on every phone should be greatly reduced.

Another thing I hope is that it will be easier to do refunds, so I would worry less about pissing off customers when my app doesn't work on their phone. (I don't actually know how refunds work for Androids, but there must be a way?).

With the most common payment channel for J2ME apps, premium SMS, it was very difficult to do refunds. Typically you would only learn what phone the customer has after he sent the SMS, by which point it would have been to late to tell him that the app won't actually work for him.

Anyway, I just decide to be optimistic about Android for now.
Martin Gardner has died
I went and auction-bought a pile of Scientific Americans going back as far as I could, back to about 1968 or so, just to read his columns and the Amateur Scientist articles.

Free e-book from the 'gathering for gardner' here:

http://www.g4g4.com/contentsmmpp1.html
Do you seriously think most GMail accounts are never used on a computer which has spyware installed? You must be joking...
If only the daily grind of programming would require interesting algorithms more often. Certainly not the case for web development :-(
The halting problem seems kind of important. Also, at least two of Hilbert's problems -- the continuum hypothesis and solving general Diophantine equations -- turned out to be undecidable (the latter because it reduces to the halting problem.)

Edit: Er, actually, the Diophantine equation question would be uncomputable (like the halting problem), not undecidable. The ideas are closely related, though.
I concur that Aussie cops and immigration officers are the most civil of the 30+ countries I have been to.

I know the government can be pressured by "allies" to act int nefarious ways, but I will always defer to good judgment and kind heart of Aussies to do the right thing.

It's an unassuming, proletariat country, where even the usual government goons are suspicious of bureaucracy. I felt the first whiff of their professionalism when computer ate my online electronic visa application, and the consulate in D.C. gave me a hand-signed "Pass" into Australia few hours before my flight. Second time was when I was renewing my visa, the clerk found out I had 3 days left, of which 2 were weekend days; she escorted me out of the line into an express booth and everything was sorted out. Can't wait to return here in 2 months and for my immigration papers to get approved. I am eager to call it home, what not with an aussie mrs.

FWIW, fellow yanks should google Australian "COPS" type shows, where they show police arresting criminals, etc. It's a laughable joke! I have seen drunks and thieves abuse, spit and attack police officers. In the U.S. that would mean a one way ticket to the operating room, and if you're lucky to make it out alive, a prison cell.
I love Google Voice. I use it all over the place, gmail, my portfolio site, everywhere. And if people bother me, click, blocked. Simple and effective.
Numbers of all the hot girls I could never get in high school :-( where was Facebook back then!
Seems like rooting is still possible: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=544654
> Hackety Hack makes programming accessible to beginners, regardless of age or background. The current 0.9 version is nearly complete and in this project we’re going to push to a 1.0 release. That includes an editor, lessons, and a web application to share code with friends. The final project will be released on Github and publicized through the RailsBridge outreach group.

Glad to hear it.
Most users don't know what OS version they are running or care. Those that do can "hack" it (feels wrong to call installing an OS hacking).
Yeah. If you've killed two million children, or something, you might want to just take the contempt sentence. Though there is probably other evidence of your guilt...
Including source code would solve none of the problems with software patents. You are stating as fact that patents encourage innovation, but that's far from clear to me. Patents restrict knowledge from being used in further progress of knowledge and the risk of litigation acts as a damper on innovation.

Just look at copyright law, where everything is automatically copyrighted and infringement can cause huge penalties. There are certainly signs that this stifles creation for things like documentaries or other synthetic works.

I still find it funny that so many that claim to like the "free market" then finds the need to ask for anticompetitive measures...
Just add a '+' to the end of any bit.ly link and it will tell you where the link goes and how many people have clicked it. http://bit.ly/aCDBwh+
When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this, I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try for about a month and a half.
> Obscure data structures are generally obscure for a reason; they're more an intellectual curiosity than anything else ^-^.

I don't think that's necessarily true, the problem is that there are so many of them.

Consider woodworking. A good woodworker has an absolutely enormous array of tools, and all a woodworker does, if you think about it with the mindset of a non-woodworker is remove bits of wood from other bits of wood and put them back together again.

Algorithms are the tools in the toolbox of the programmer, all we do is transform series of bits in to other series of bits. But the number of algorithms is huge compared to the number of tools a woodworker uses, and it is impossible to remember all of them, to pick the one that is 'most appropriate' for the problem at hand.

So we may end up using a sub-optimal solution quite a few times when one of the 'obscure' algorithms would have been more appropriate, just because computers are for the most part fast enough to cover for the inefficiencies.
Even though she was engaged to be married to an Aussie, a Melbourne immigration official kicked my sister out of the country for a year because he was having a bad day, so YMMV.
If you get the chance also read this HN article, "Richard Feynman: Do We Live in A Cargo Cult Society?" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369781 and this one, "The War of Art: An Interview with Steven Pressfield" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370128 Each have a degree of overlap. The first goes into detail why being truthful to experimental process should be mandatory. The second why we personally screw up.
That's exactly what I guessed (worse, really) based on his track record. I wonder who it could possibly be who kicked up a media storm about this? The guy who took the passport for 15 minutes? Reporters in the room at the time? Hmm, that's a hard one.

It's very disappointing. We badly need something like Wikileaks, but it can't work in the long run unless it's done in a principled and scrupulous way. Exactly the opposite of these ego games.

Edit: something's odd about this, though. Assange's no dummy. But you'd have to be an idiot to think you could spin a triviality like this into an international incident.
Yeah, but then your legal counsel shows up, asks "is my client free to go", and then you leave.