skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything becomes more convenient and cheaper with time (barring cataclysm). And just because something is a "large object" does not mean there is a huge amount of precision work involved.

I'll give another example. A telescope is big. But good luck grinding the mirror. You can do this by hand, by the way. To within a tenth of a micron. The really good guys actually do the final "grinding" with their bare thumb.

At one point, being an amateur astronomer required building your own telescope, entirely by hand. I have books that go through everything from grinding your own 6" mirror to making an equatorial mount. Then in the mid 1950s, companies started making decent small astronomy scopes. Oddly enough, a 6" scope today has the same price as a 6" scope in 1955 ($450), but that inflates to $3600 today.

Not too long ago I picked up a shoddy 4" scope for $10 at a yard sale. This would have been the worlds largest telescope, if you went back in time to 1800. How is that for progress?

The paraphernalia required to do professional work is always getting cheaper and easier to operate. Bio seems to be in a similar state as astronomy in 1930. The pros are using their huge 100" scopes on mountaintops. The amateurs are using homebrew 6" scopes. You've used the real deal, but that does not mean there isn't a lot of virgin territory within the reach of an amateur.
So I am wondering why you would particularly care, unless you are just an observer.

If you are a developer, you want to ask 1) is it programmable 2) is there a market for something that I create.

It seems that the answer is yes for both of these.

Bullet points are for bystanders.
Did you just call Emacs primitive? You judge the only piece of programmer productivity tool worth using because someone whose job is to push development tools dismissed it from a podium, 8 years ago? Gosling might have discovered Emacs, but 8 years ago, he was on a payroll to push the One Platform. At the time, Sun and its staff had plans for world domination and had no trouble desecrating what anyone held dear, in order to create a one universal platform, with programmers interchangeable and replaceable as spark plugs; a heavily customized development environment would pose a threat to this.

The benefits of mastering your tools are economical and felt in your pocket and productivity. Every minute you spend waiting for an IDE to move its fat hind around to get something done, is a minute lost from your working day. If your aim is to be productive, and not just "replaceable", then there is no need to shackle yourself with a lowest common denominator environment.

You don't spend 100% of your time writing code in one language or tech stack, in an IDE; there are hours spent researching and taking notes, writing documentation, coding in a myriad of different languages, etc. The point of using a powerful editor like Emacs and Vim is to streamline your work, all of it. It's a generic, customizable UI to automate everything that buzzes and moves in your machine. Writing code; interacting with various interpreters, compilers and debuggers; taking notes and TODO lists; etc.
Wow - I'm really surprised at the polarization of the comments here. Seemingly, there are only Drexlerians with replicator futurism or old guard skeptics. This truth certainly lies somewhere in between.

For instance, is cloud-based synth/analytics really that far fetched / impractical? For example, have you seen the automation we're seeing with microfluidics?

http://microfluidics.ee.duke.edu/

Are you saying that hackers can't order biological systems the way we order custom circuit boards today? The means of production are comparatively high - yet it's very cheap to make them.

Techno skeptics love to say "why would". Futurists like to say "what if". The correct response is probably "how can".
Does this comment add anything to the topic under discussion, or is it just a general "I hate taxes and love Ronald Reagan" political jab? Do we really want DailyKos-quality political discussion here?
Many of those uses already have specialized apps, which do search within their context-relevant data, in context-relevant ways. iPads in medical environments are a perfect example. Why, if you're searching for symptom X, would you want to find emails with X, text messages with X, and that image which just happens to contain X in its filename?

Essentially every laptop / tablet / whatever-PC in use in the medical field works similarly - they use one application which handles all relevant data, and it doesn't search outside that. And this is on a PC, which is essentially wide open to application interoperability (if not as easy to do). Developers and users have already apparently decided that it's not as important / desirable as many would like to believe.

Granted, there are cases where this is useful, but it's a fundamental iOS / Android(/Unix) design choice. Android favors interoperation through APIs, iOS favors using one application for the job at hand.
There is nothing sadder than remembering two years later how much you paid for that 'hotrod' under your desk that is now slower than entry level systems...

When I add up what I paid for computer hardware over the year it's scary, good thing it made me more than I spent on it, I think of them as tools. But if it were for consumption only then I'd spend considerably less.

If you're a software developer you can justify such a rig as a tool and book it to expenses, for ordinary people, even the most avid of gamers it would most likely be overkill.

On another note, you tend to write much better software on a system several years old, and then to run it on modern hardware for production.

Slow machines tend to make programmers perform better :)
It's a creative studio, which basically translates into: We only think in Flash.

I also love that studios are the only place where management either equals or outnumbers production staff.
Copyright laws exist to incentiveize creation of works and help creators make money from their works.

If you don't like DRM, fine, neither do I when it keeps me from watching movies I've paid for or time- and media- shifting content that I've bought. Go join the EFF then, not The Pirate Bay. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Without copyright, how creators make money on content? By locking it in DRM boxes. TPB is on the wrong side in this fight.
As a freelance developer who sells software and services on the side, I can say this would hurt. Badly.

First, the clerical and administrative requirements. It's tough enough to set up e-commerce as it is without also having to track purchases by whatever state's perverse and Byzantine tax infrastructure. My God. But let's assume the payment gateways handled this at their end. Fine.

Next: the $$$. I don't know about you, but I'm not a good enough marketer (or developer) to overcome yet another 10% vig on my productivity. I already get to keep less than 50% of what I earn. If margins are razor thin at the equilibrium price point without taxes, then the addition of taxes simply causes business to fail. Not everybody's margins are this thin, but small businesses often are. And that's who this bill would ultimately hurt.

Not to mention geolocation issues. We already can't say with any certainty where a particular IP address hails from. Oh we can get it 80% of the time. But proxies, dynamic IPs, mobile connections, cloud the issue. What happens if you're actually in California, but your cellphone is talking to a relay in Nevada, and you live in Texas, but you're buying a product from a company based in Florida, but of course the actual product's not in Florida, it's at the warehouse in Missouri. The last person in the world I trust to make sense out of this is a politician, or a politician's trained IT monkey.

Ranting aside though, I don't see any way to change this. The government will have its due, and there's a notion of "implicit collusion" among corporations: which is that incrementally and over time, competition can be squashed by raising the barriers to entry through taxation and regulation.

The Internet threw a screwdriver into the gearworks, but rest assured, they'll get you my pretty. And your little dog, too.
heh, I'm exactly the opposite. I was a physics engineering major with an emphasis on electrical and materials engineering before I switched to more computer-sciency stuff for graduate school.

Having seen both sides, I don't think either discipline prepares you more for problem solving more than the other. It's all about your mindset.

What I will say though is that engineering problems are rooted in practical issues. e.g "This suspect is approaching security, do we have a machine that can spot them far enough away to interrogate them safely?" Science problems by contrast are more concerned with the phenomena, e.g "Does the suspect reflect enough light for our detector to pick them up at extended ranges given atmospheric turbulence?"

tl;dr If you want to be a good engineer, seek out everyday problems and solve them practically with a given budget and timeline. If you want to be a good scientist, learn to ask better questions.
Principles of engineering is machine building. Then, it takes off as your interest. The funda of Machine building in Computer engineering is called Automata Theory. So, you can start with Formal Language and Automata. That along with mathematics forms the principle of any form of engineering.
Market share is not the same as technical quality. By that logic MS Windows is also years ahead of it's competitors.
Ottawa company brings Rubik's Cube to your cellphone
An advertisement just doesn't come out accidentally looking like it's an invoice from the Yellow Pages

Of course not. They sent out almost 20 million pieces of email over the years, so what were they doing?

Testing all the f*cking time!
Sure,
I really don't believe in diversification. Here are my thoughts, maybe someone else will come along and cut me down or whatever, but that's ok.

Diversification to me is like shooting a shotgun. Most stocks are profitable(they'd be delisted otherwise) so the scattershot(shotgun shot) is a nice way to handle that, and that is diversification.

I kind of like the sniper rifle, where you invest in one stock which when you boil it down to what you're buying is a share in the company. If you are into stocks. They are pretty liquid, and you aren't managing a physical asset.

So after typing all of that, there are other avenues of investment aside from stocks. How about tax-free muni bonds?, vacation rentals? buying land and lobbying to get it re-zoned(from agricultural to residential(house density per acre)) etc.
Typosquatting is neither blackmail (threat to disclose secret) nor extortion (threat to commit an act that is unconditionally a crime). It is not even trademark infringement, as long as the domain names are not used to defraud customers by pretending to be the trademark holder.

The typosquatting laws are the digital equivalent of being allowed to burn down somebody's shop and take over the land because your marketing people forgot to get premises at a good location. It is a form of legal theft similar to the adverse possession laws for real estate.
I just wish Apple would fix this: http://jnjnjn.com/161/ipad-volume-indicator/
Mister Grove doesn't speak to the mistakes our leaders have been making that have led to our macro-economic mess.

They've been borrowing massive amounts of money and keeping interest rates much lower than normal. They've strived to keep the consumer consuming, rather than keep the producers producing.

When you borrow money, you are really borrowing the labor of others. And when everybody in the richest nation in human history is borrowing, we are borrowing a lot of labor from other countries.

Imports of goods and immigration of workers skyrocketed because of our borrowing. And many jobs moved elsewhere.

But we did get good at building houses. And buying and selling them to each other. But that was unsustainable.

One day, we'll stop borrowing so much and begin paying the money back. We'll pay more for imports and our own labor will cost the world less.

We'll be working hard for much less, perhaps doing it well into old age. We may have no choice.
Check out the first couple bullet points on the "About the API" page:

> Simple HTTP+JSON method of accessing a user's information in a user approved sandbox on the user's desktop. List, upload, delete, move, copy, and get files as well as many other features... A full event callback API allowing you to get simple asynchronous events to your web site or service whenever the user changes their sandbox.
Considering that there are already lots of apps that support Dropbox, I believe that Apple couldn't have done the company a bigger favor. Wonder how many percent of downloads go to mobile devices…
Don't use words like "irrevocably". They kind of tag your post as FUD. (Along as statements like "being a long time Apple loyalist... it saddens me...".) And, why do you really think something like this should be irrevocably? How can it be?

Then, when I read the title, I just thought 'wtf'? Behind? So I read your post because I was curious about what you mean. Again, I even more wonder what you mean by irrevocably. And how those few missing APIs should be the reason that iOS is behind Android.
Most of the JS pros I know just use vim/emacs + FireBug.
I'm a bit older (was in third grade in '69-70, right after watching Apollo 11 in real time) and the climate science consensus in the '70s and I think before was that we were headed for very bad global cooling, a new Ice Age that would put a mile of ice on top of much of the continental US. Read rather a lot of topical science fiction based on this "science".

Of course it was all man's fault (ignore that we're due for another Ice Age anytime now, see e.g. Fallen Angels: http://www.baen.com/library/ -> The Authors -> Larry Niven) due to sulfur dioxide increasing the reflectivity of clouds.
Sounds cool!

(sorry... had to be done.)

I wonder if this means they could be made smaller? It seems like the compressor motor and such take up a fair bit of space in current refrigerators. Maybe smaller cooling machinery could mean smaller appliances with equal storage volume. And, perhaps ironically, maybe they'd be quieter, too.
I think the important thing is that Apple doesn't include features for the purpose of having them. It's frivolous to have a feature that doesn't work properly or can't effectively be leveraged by developers. Apple patiently fleshes out everything before it's publicly released. So while Android's OS might technically be more advanced than iOS, in practicality and implementation iOS is the best mobile platform. For example, look at the front facing camera. iPhone 4 wasn't the first to have a front facing camera, but it was the first to have one that simply works — and that's what consumers want.

So, to answer your question, no: iOS hasn't irrevocably fallen behind. Has it fallen behind, technically? Yeah, probably. Irrevocably so? No.
It doesn't matter - iOS and Android both have features that will require at least 5 years for the mass of consumers to catch onto. Most people still want to make calls, check their email, surf the web and play a game on their phone.

So, as long as phones can do that, anything extra is developer wankery.
so shifting the workload from developers to users. no wonder ruby community seems to love gems.
As of now, if I remember correctly, China has over 2 Trillion greenbacks. It's _impossible_ to win a trade war. We're talking about something _very_ much like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis#Financial_pressure

It is easy to be protectionist. But a major selloff of the USD by China would create the mother of all confidence crises, and, while _everyone_ would lose, the world's reserve currency, the USD, would be forever damaged.

This is not a war you can realistically fight to win. I really expected more from someone of Grove's intellect. Much much more.
Okay, that's certainly a good scenario for something like that. Apparently I'm either too friend-less or have trained friends and co-workers well enough…
"The first paragraph of that Wikipedia article even says this"

BZZZT. One thing you won't find on Wikipedia is honest coverage of climate science. "I was there" (back in the '70s) and it was taken seriously by many opinion makers and the like.
Yeah, Bernie Madoff was respected "in the community" as well. Usually the interface between the dark side and the shiny respectable businesses are folks just like these two. They want the respect and have the charisma and flexible ethics it takes to pull off the double life.

If I were Obie, I would cut the cord with these clowns and work on salvaging hashrocket, even if it means shutting it down and starting again free of financial entanglements with these two.
Most people consider Apple's products to be superior technically than Microsoft's respective products.
Hospitals provide (or produce) services, and patients consume them. That's entirely apropos. That's a perfect example of "consumer" used in its correct economic context.
Yeah I find this kind of hard to use as well. I initially thought it was some kind of live feed, but it seems it's just based on mouse movement, not news updates, so it's confusing why things are rearranging themselves and why. It probably doesn't help that I have a somewhat bad home internet connection, so sometimes stuff will expand a second or two after my mouse has already moved on somewhere else.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=446&filen...
The reason for selling businesses that are passive income is threefold from my point of view:

1. Without maintaining the website/business you run the risk of being overtaken by a newcomer and lose your passive income.

2. Even passive businesses take some amount of work. For example you need to file your paperwork / sales tax / taxes / everything else related to the boring side of things. Even if you have people to do those things you still need to talk to them to make sure it is getting done.

3. If you want to turn that 200k income stream into some other business with more potential you can get 200k * X where X is the multiplier that you get for selling now. you can then take the 200k * X and invest that into some new thing.
IPhone 4's supposed signal woes aren’t unique, and may not be serious
the AFS Trinity website only mentions their car with ultracapacitors. Know of a link where they're working with flywheels?

And I feel I should point out that the accident of the Dymaxion was in a prototype with a canvas roof. The death of the driver is probably the main reason it was abandoned at the time, that's pretty bad PR-mojo.
What platform are you talking about? The App Store is one of the (by the numbers) worst places to actually try to make real money as a developer. Average app price, by the numbers: around $1.90. Average sales $ per annum: around 3K. Half of all devs will earn less than $700 per year.

The App Store is in a bubble and that bubble will burst, not because the App Store is evil, but because it's in the nature of bubbles to burst.

You'd literally have gotten better traction developing ActiveX controls for IE5, back in the day.
Not once they realize how hard it actually is to make any money on the platform.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/full-an...
"5 years ahead of all competitors."

I like your future guessing skills :-). I don't think I have clue what's going to happen next month.
"When most people search their phone they're looking for information in either mail, contacts, or SMS messages."

Why even bother with a smartphone and an app store then?
Force Dynamics 401 - the ultimate car simulator
Then show her the AMOLED screen of Nexus One that has a similar (though slightly lower) resolution.
That explains Apple's share of the computer market perfectly.
Rules for Radicals
I don't understand- this is about the launch of a new air route? Why was there even a launch event?
Not meant to be sarcastic at all. I just appreciate the insight in the essay.

I'd rather someone be an example of the results of their ideology, than have them try to sell me on it. I think it speaks volumes.
"online retailers should be forced to collect the same taxes that brick-and-mortar retailers do."

Pretty sure all retailers are exempt from tax on out-of-state sales. But don't let that stop the money grab.

I'm personally more concerned with closing tax loopholes for the largest businesses and allocating funds from wasteful programs (DHS).
Unix has developers but no consumers. Android is the same. The iPhone was a huge success before it got any developers. The Wii had very few games on launch compared to competing platforms. And the recent resurgence of the Mac seems to have been led by consumers. There were not that many Mac apps in 1998 when the iMac came out.

History seems to suggest that developers (especially those who want to get paid) go where the consumers are.

The only exception is, perhaps, DOS/Windows? I'm not sure I remember the history right though. It could be that consumers switched to Windows because of the cheaper hardware, and developers followed.
There is absolutely no comparison. The nexus one can't even render all colours properly.
I come to HN to read about people whining about why they come to HN. So my strategy is working.
"Can't forget their dollar/yuan "managed" exchange rate"

A currency tied to the dollar is not a subsidy, any more than a common currency between New York and New Jersey is a subsidy for New Jersey exports.

Borrowing creates trade deficits. The US has been borrowing massive amounts to simulate prosperity.

When you borrow for the sake of consumption, you import a lot and export a lot less.

It doesn't matter what other countries do. What matters are the choices we make for ourselves. And massive government borrowing and super low rates are bad choices with bad consequences.
Yeah, the main problem with them is that if anything happens the "stored energy" is already kinetic energy and the flywheel can do some pretty serious damage.

The other problem is that they act like gyroscopes. Which means that depending on how you mount them, will either constantly exert a precessional force on your vehical, or really protest you making sharp turns at high speeds.
Yes, sorry, perhaps I should have specified.

The event was the launch of a new Air Route, Virgin America's first in Toronto.

It makes sense to try and generate buzz, this is their first 'entry' to Canada.
Forgive me if I take a debunking of GPU performance advantages written up by Intel with a fist sized grain of salt.
That explains Apple's share of the iPod and iPod Touch markets perfectly.

Snark aside, most consumers don't know software and hardware well enough to understand who has a superior product. They know that they click on the blue E to get to the internet. That's it.
The .mobi files work fine (.azw is a rename/tweak of mobi). That's what http://feedbooks.com (recommended, btw) gives out under the 'Kindle' download button.

PDFs work; I believe I tested a scanned bitmap on the DX (as chrisbolt said, full letter/A4 page PDFs not recommended on the 6inch screen).

Only did a cursory wikipedia HTML test, but the pic seemed to grayscale OK. (No Djvu, didn't try PS, not listed ...)
How long would it take a company, even of Google's size, to create a handheld android device that competes with game handhelds? How long would it take to create a tablet that is as successful as the iPad? How long would it take to create a platform and store and get all the deals with the music industry, movie industry, book publishers, attract video game developers and more that could beat Wal-mart? All that isn't happening in a month...

I think 5 years is actually pretty generous considering it took Apple about 10 years (while they control both the hardware and software side making it much easier) and everyone else can see the path that worked.
Have an upvote. I just clicked this thread to say the same thing.

You are a Citizen, not a Consumer!