skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Devices going obsolete in months and new operating systems released on weekly cycles make it difficult for even Google's best partners to keep pace."

I don't have an Android mobile but I do have a first generation iPhone. The day iPhone OS 4 was announced and I learned most of the features wouldn't be available for my iPhone it was like it lost all its utility and I immediately thought of it as obsolete.

It's stupid because it's a perfectly working device even without the latest updates but it's been really hard to keep those thoughts away. It's like I need a new iPhone (and I don't!).

All this to say I wonder how people with an Android mobile deal with this kind of thinking since there's a new Android OS version twice a year against a new iPhone OS version every two years.

I'm sure most people don't care about OS updates but most of us here do, right?
I don't think the DDG articles are 'fanboy spam', they constitute an indepth look at one of the more promising start-ups and it is happening here on HN as it unfolds.

Just like patio11's stuff is a case study in how it is done, so is this, with one huge difference, I can't see myself ever buying a set of bingo cards but I can definitely see myself using a search engine, if only for comparison purposes.

I could say with just as much justification that I'd not like to ever hear a word about bingo cards again, but I don't think that is right because the bingo cards serve as an illustration on how to run a successful startup.

The other stuff is the fanboy stuff. And that I could do without, hence my preference for DDG articles.

But I promise I will write an article about the guts of a search engine, I built a small one about 5 years ago and maybe there are some interesting bits that warrant dissection.
Insulting someone people love is never a nice thing, and people are going to react emotionally. Let's say person A insults person B's mum (who died after a long struggle with cancer), person A will rightly get really really offended. This from the love and attachment they had for their mother. Many Muslims have a very strong attachment to Muhammed (if you were to study his life, then you would probably understand why), and thus they react very emotionally when people attack him in this manner.
I decided that since I haven't worked on Lamson for a while, and I'm kind of bored with it, that I'd rather have people use it without having to constantly bug me about the GPL.

If you think about it from a marketing perspective, trying to "sell" GPL software to Python is like trying to sell Internet Explorer to a Linux long beard. Not only do they not want it, but they hate it and will look for anyway around it.

I got another project I'm working on that is going to come out AGPL soon and I'll see how that goes.
Just install cyanogenmod to get most features of Android 2.1 in the meantime.
You'll have to wait a few more weeks or months to get Froyo on G1.

I have CyanogenMod5-test5 running on my G1 and could install the official Twitter and Facebook apps and like it.
"[Google] competes with Amazon in a number of areas, particularly web services and big data."

I believe Amazon treats web services and big data seriously, but IIRC they're well under 1% of revenues. These services are of particular interest to the HN crowd of course, but just wanted to point out that it's far from a core offering for them.

Amazon has become the incumbent in this space, which may have some value in the future, but it's entirely possible they're happily losing money on it at the moment.
I am flagging this discussion because this is ridiculous.
>No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese.

That's only partially correct though. Often as not, before Hangul was introduced in Korea, or Latin alphabets were modified for Vietnam, many people wrote their venacular using Chinese logograms, with the meaning known, but the word order and pronunciation adapted for their own language. Korean in particular has a whole class of special characters to capture the particulars of Korean grammar and language when written with Chinese characters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

Most Koreans will likewise pronounce Hanja using Korean words not Chinese ones. Like 'Dae' (대) for 大, 'In' (인) or 'Salam' (사람) for 人, 'Sal' (쌀) or 'Bap' (밥) for 稻.

You are right that, in the old days, because of the nature of the political ties betweem 韓國 and 中國, it was expected that formal government documents were written, read and pronounced in Chinese. But in general, most Koreans today do not know how to read Chinese out loud in a way that a Chinese speaker would understand. Most of the time Hanja is just used to clarify homophones from Koreanized loan words from Chinese.
"Privacy -Your searches are private! I don’t need to say more"

Well ... they are now
Aspect is trivial.
Me too, but Amazon's horrible searching means I search them with Google Shopping set to "amazon". So google still gets to watch me.
Dare I say (purely for emphasis sake), your mum is ridiculous.
What a loss. He made math far more approachable for me, after the conceptual corruption given to me by grade-school teachers.
So? EDT isn't particularly favorable to plaintiffs. That's just a dumb internet myth.

EDT is picked by plaintiffs because (1) there's not much crime in EDT, and (2) because it has handled many patent suits in the past, it has many judges familiar with patent litigation (patent litigation is complex, and if you don't have a judge familiar with it, it will be very painful and slow for all parties involved).

The lack of crime in EDT is important because criminal cases get priority. If you try a patent suit (or any kind of civil suit) in a district that is flooded with criminal cases, your case drags on forever waiting for court time.
This is why we all love you, you asshole.
You seem to have deleted your other comment further down the thread (or maybe an admin did), so I can't respond to it, but I'll respond here instead.

Coercion is when you do something that you ordinarily wouldn't (or don't do something you ordinarily would) because you feel threatened. For instance, I am coerced by society into wearing clothes on a hot summer day; I might choose to strip naked, walk down to the river, and take a swim, but because I'm afraid of being arrested, I don't do such a thing.

Coercion can happen even when there isn't a direct threat of violence, however. You might make someone believe that they have no choice but to take the job you're offering at a strip club; even if in reality, there are other choices they could make that they might be happier with, if you convince them that it's your way or the highway, you've managed to coerce them.

This is a bad thing; it's a kind of fraud, something where you convince someone to do something on the basis of a lie, making them do things that they might not out of fear. Not everyone is a perfect, rational, utility-maximizing agent; everyone has fears, poor judgement about certain things, and the like. Manipulating that for your own ends is evil and wrong; and yes, there are sometimes small, mundane manipulations and coercions that you're never going to eliminate or are too small to be worth worrying about, but that doesn't excuse them, nor does it excuse more egregious coercion and fraud.
the founders knew what they were doing.
The only problem is they have to actually do the catching up.

I'm not sure they can.

This market is much more complex, with a faster-moving platform, more hardware innovation, and competition (Apple, Nokia, RIM and Google) that can't be bullied or out-spent.
A day in Santa Monica, the #startup hub for LA
F-Secure Stopped Facebook Worm With A Phone Call
He would also have to make it open source with no strings attached then pray the community will adopt it.
I'm pretty sure that Steve Jobs is quite happy making more profit from less revenue.
> Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.

Correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orthography_for_the_Korean_...

North Korea in particular has gone to great lengths to de-Sino (and de-foreign) their version of Korean. So much so that they've introduced many, often cumbersome description words to replace more elegant Chinese (Korean pronounced) or other loan words like 전자 계산기 (Mechanical Calculating Device) instead of 컴퓨터 (Computer).

Most south Koreans can likewise tell you immediately if a word is of Chinese origin (usually because they know the Hanja for it) vs. of purely Korean origin. Like 공룡 (Dinosaur) which is pronounced almost the same as 恐龍 vs. 피 (Blood) instead of 血.
You can't get "thrown in jail" (in America) without probable cause and usually a warrant, and if they already have probable cause or a warrant on you, you're not talking yourself out of being thrown in jail. If they have nothing on you and you refuse to talk to them, they're not going to "go after you" because you're not a promising lead. It's talking to them that makes you a promising lead.

Cops by and large already know all this stuff. They might act all pissy when you refuse to talk to them, but that's gamesmanship. They understand. If you're polite and confident about it, they'll get it--even without you having to memorize a three paragraph speech they're going to interrupt you in the middle of anyway.
even if my mum was alive, not sure why she would be hacker news.
The Insanity Virus: Novel Approach to Treating Schizophrenia
There is a place left for MS. Complete windows domain / exchange / current-telephony-OCS-or-whatever-it's-called-today integration. Automatic profiles, policies, security, calendar and contacts migration. There are loads of companies which would be happy with "locked to the domain" company smartphones, because they already have the backend ready (AD and Exchange).

Blackberry can provide a lot of those features, but not all.
They can fabricate a charge. There are enough catch-all charges : "interfering with official business", "obstruction of justice", "looking suspicious" (my friend got a ticket for "suspicious behavior" in one of the mid-Western states!).

Your tires could seem to be too bold, your windshield could have a crack, your turn light might not work properly. Then the cop start "smelling drugs" that are not there (police camera don't have smell detectors!). He might decide you need to a DUI test. You might be to close to a drug or prostitution area -- so just that lets them arrest you. He thinks your license if fake, so he detains you to take you to the station to establish your identity.

If he detains or arrests you, your car is towed. You don't show up for work, your family is worried about you. Basically, you cannot win. You can only lose after you encounter a cop.

I guess what I am saying is that I am disappointed at the legal system and the disproportional power the police can project. But aside from calling my congressman, I don't know if I'd want to try to be a "constitutional martyr" and get a cop angry at me...
And sometimes the radical can give you hints at pronunciation because often the words will rhyme.
They might be 1% of revenues, but more interesting to my mind is what % of profits they are. One of the core motivations, as I understand it, was to utilize the excess capacity Amazon had built for peak seasonal activity. These sunk costs don't necessarily count against the EC2, S3 etc. revenue.
If you're new to Javascript/Actionscript/ECMAScript you might think there is a difference between objects (maps) and arrays, but there isn't. An array is simply a map (object) with the properties 0, 1, 2 etc. set to specific values.

This will list the properties of the map (0, 1, 2):

var a = ['a', 'b', 'c'];

for( i in a )
{
console.log( i );
}

This will list the values of those properties:

var a = ['a', 'b', 'c'];

for( i in a )
{
console.log( a[i] );
}
Great statistics, thanks! That's much higher than I would have guessed. While I agree that very few people change the default number of results, I would have also guessed that few click through to a second page.

Personally, I don't like the AJAX update approach. I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays. If I could set Google to return 1000 results, it would feel about right.
Can American police actually take you to the police station against your will if you're not under arrest? They can ask, of course, but no matter how forcefully they ask they're still just asking.
This image is for T-Mobile phones only.

The error you get when trying to apply update.zip:

assert failed: file_getprop("/system/build.prop", "ro.build.fingerprint") == "google/passion/passion/mahimahi:2.1-update1/ERE27//24178:user/release-keys" ||
file_getprop("/system/build.prop", "ro.build.fingerprint") == "google/passion/passion/mahimahi:2.2/FRF50/38042:user/release-keys"

Looks like the version installed on the AT&T N1s isn't what the update script is looking for and it aborts. Wondering if modifying the update scripts would brick my phone.
Rogers (in Canada) installed an update on my phone that makes it non-rootable and forced to use 1.5. So Cyanogenmod is not an option.
My introduction to Martin Gardner was his book "The Annotated Alice," from which I learned about Lewis Carroll, Alice, enantiomorphs, Oxford, logic, how to read closely, and much more that I can't recall off the top of my head. He was a fascinating writer and man.
Hmm, I will have to go back and review what I said to see if I misspoke. The basic issue is that open source licenses are copyright licenses, and so their enforceability is tied to the scope of copyright. The scope of copyright as applied to software is not at all clear, despite what anyone will tell you. And, probably not surprisingly, a lot of the ambiguity around the scope of copyright comes from the use of interfaces, APIs, and methods of linking. Python, like any dynamic language, is fuzzy around the boundaries here.

There are so many square pegs and round holes that anytime someone says something is "clearly" a derivative work, that person is almost certainly incorrect. The concepts of copyright were never meant to apply directly to software, and the law doesn't work the way people frequently intuitively think it does.

The problem is that applying copyright (and patent, but thats another story) restrictions to software has broad implications for what you can do with the software. This isn't just a practical issue; it is a freedom issue in the Free Software sense. I see so many bogus claims each day about IP that I have become very wary of its scope.

For example, a couple years ago Blizzard was able to get an injunction against another company because the other company sold a program that scripted Blizzard's software. No modification, just GUI automation. I was horrified, and disagreed, but they were able to put together a winning argument.

I unabashedly advocate boundaries on copyright. I think authors should say where they consider their code to end, and other code to begin. I think those boundaries should be reasonable within the scope of the law. I think this principle applies even (or especially) when it is free or open source software.
Five years ago many handsets were obsolete they day you bought them. I'll take fragmentation over slow progress any day. And I did for a year and a half.

In October 2008 I got a Google G1 the day it came out, replacing a tired Blackberry. This phone is the poster child for Android fragmentation, running a now-ancient version of the OS. But I could run most apps, and despite its relatively slow speed and limited non-SD memory, I believe it was the best alternative to an iPhone at the time.

Thanks to Google my new phone is an HTC Evo 4G. Same apps, same basic OS experience, only with the performance and phone features that make a G1 look like a toy. This is the platform I want: innovation as fast as possible on hardware and software at the same time. HTC is keeping up just fine and I'm betting developers will too.
Just mellow and know that it's coming soon. Honestly the way people are spazing to get it installed is a bit ridiculous.

I'll just wait until I get an update notice (on my GSM ["AT&T"] phone here in Canada)
Be very, very careful. In several states, like my home state Illinois, two-party consent statutes allow you to be charged with a felony for recording on-duty officers; in others, recording on-duty officers is an overt and specific felony.

Some journalism student just got pegged with a felony charge, and failed in his attempt to get the charged dismissed, because he surruptitiously recorded an on-duty cop here. Not worth it.
Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier.

"Instead of "teach[ing] children to respect the diversity of ideas that is fundamental to the American system," and "that our Constitution is a living reality, not parchment preserved under glass," the Court today "teach[es] youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson, but not the one the Court teaches them today." --Justice William J. Brennan, in dissent on said case
He can claim that his computer check shows that you canceled your car insurance. You are not allowed to drive your car, you are not allowed to park it here so they tow to the impound lot. This happened to me, when someone else checked the next day it seems he mis-read his in car computer -- there is nothing wrong with my insurance and I am free to get my car after paying for towing and storage fee.
A cop might act like refusing to say anything, refusing searches, and asking if you can go is "treating them badly", but that's gamesmanship. That's their job. If you want to appeal to their human side, just be polite about it.

The fact is, cops already know all the legitimate reasons you have for not talking to them, so there's no real misunderstanding to resolve.
Not so! There's one thing you can do with skip lists that I don't know of any easy way to do with other data structures. Suppose you want a priority queue, and you have a bunch of cores, and these cores want to insert into the queue and remove the minimum element concurrently. How do you implement this to allow fast concurrent access from a lot of threads?

First, there's the approach everybody remembers from Intro to Algorithms: use a binary min-heap. It's guaranteed to be balanced, so you get O(lg n) time insertions and delete-the-minimum operations, with low constant factors. Nice! But how do you make it concurrent? You can put a lock on the whole thing and only let one thread use it at once, but that's slow. You could use fancy fine-grained locking, but there will still be inter-thread memory conflicts arising from the heapify operations you need to maintain the heap invariant. There has been some work on this, and they've come up with some decent ideas, but it still has scaling problems.

Now look at skip lists. It's a randomized sorted list data structure, and it claims to be, as you put it, probably pretty balanced. Various threads can insert concurrently without breaking that "probably pretty balanced" property. The memory read- and write-sets are very local, and it's possible to do all this with lock-free synchronization. The end result is a priority queue data structure that scales to hundreds of cores. And the code doesn't fry your brain, which is a plus. There's a pretty neat paper about it here:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~itayl/ipdps.pdf

By the way, if you happen to be using a processor with hardware transactional memory support (you aren't, yet), then this code becomes even easier to write, as you don't have to worry about how to do lock-free synchronization. I almost felt cheated by how simple it was.
Yeah, I'll bide my time and be patient. The new features and speed increases will be worth it.
So update.zip is from the Google site. Why is Google not promoting this or why did they release this?
This man is incredible, his projects page is teeming with greatness: http://www.tomscott.com/projects/. Also, maybe it's just me but the background image on Tweet Trumps is kind of trippy when reading the text on the page.
I can imagine an organism that eats oil and poops something enviro-neutral would come in quite handy right now.
One of my favorite people and the reason I got into math in the first place. This is a bit of a shock, and one of the few "celebrity" deaths which have made me feel actual sadness. I just looked at his latest book in the basement of the Strand in Manhattan. I assumed he would live forever. He will be missed.
Do phone books have cell phone numbers now? (I haven't picked one up in ages) I suspect the majority of FB users are posting their cell numbers.
yeah, I don't normally talk about nutrition because I don't want to get into a huge debate over edge cases that everyone seems to love (oh look it happened in this thread too). in an absence of empirical data we have to use deduction or induction to arrive at a reasonable hypothesis that we then test.

I recommend good calories, bad calories.
At one point, Python tried to move to something similar for their standard list data structure:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3128/

The BList is similar to a B+Tree. It was meant to act like an array for small lists, but to make operations like append, concatenation, and slicing faster. It was a pretty cool combination of arrays (for memory compactness and good cache performance and small constant factors) with trees, for the asymptotic improvements they can bring.

Sadly, it didn't take off, as it would have broken backward compatibility with extension modules.
> brief description
> Forget the pictures, enjoy the food!

I really like the trend of TL;DR version appearing at the top of "normal" posts. It really helps in searching / filtering articles. I'd like one-line informal abstracts to become a norm.
it's hard to qualify 'lesser known', I'm not sure if red-black trees qualify, but they're certainly cool:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-black_tree
Over 300 Battle At Disrupt Hackathon
What is really funny is that we never really hit the year of Linux on the desktop. I mean, this has been speculation for years... Will this be the year that Linux really starts to make in roads in the Desktop market? For the most part, the answer has always been no. Redhat and Novell/Suse have all but left the desktop (commercially, not counting Fedora). Ubuntu has all but taken over the desktop Linux market. Overall, Linux Desktop experience has increased substantially since 2000, but it has never really caught up with Windows (now 7) and the Mac. (I actually think that the Mac has hurt Linux adoption on the Desktop more than Windows.

So, I too find it quite humorous that Linux is poised to be a, if not the major player in the next generation of computing - the portable/dedicated devices. But what I find more amusing is that it hasn't been the success of Linux on the desktop that has made this possible, it has been the decline in the importance of the desktop.

So, 2010 may finally be the year of Linux, but it still won't be the year of Linux on the desktop. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
He would also have to include a Webkit browser by default.