skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I'm confused. I can see that people clicking through AdWords allows you to gauge interest. But having failed to find what they were actually looking for, people actually stick around and fill surveys about it? Really? There must be a giant selection effect in who decides to actually go through with it. I can imagine it ending up being quite misleading.
> Apple iOS and the platform is at least 5 years ahead of all competitors.

I disagree. The technology in iOS is pretty much at par with the competition -- a little better in some areas and a little worse in others. A few years ago, they were clearly on top but Android is decisively closing the gap.

But I understand you're just not speaking of their technology: they've got a very clear market lead in handheld devices and that's a gap which is much harder to bridge. But the competition is closing in fast here as well -- by Christmas there will be lots of Android (and perhaps other platform) tablets. Most will be cheaper yet just as capable. Android is already outselling the iPhone.

Also, it is clearly a phone-only market. The reason the iPhone exists at all is because Apple saw the writing on the wall: the iPod was going to be irrelevant when phones contained all the same capability. Mobile devices that aren't connected (in some way) to a mobile network are going to irrelevant soon.

Apple isn't making a play for all entertainment devices. They make one model of phone, one model of PDA, and one tablet. They purposely (and profitably) think small. Their goal isn't and has never been world domination.

It's funny you bring up Apple II's in schools because I'm almost certain we're going to get a great lesson in history repeating itself. Except this time it won't be Microsoft with the dominant platform, it will be Google.
Ask HN: What's the deal with "Cash for Gold"?
I am sure you have seen these infomercials on TV lately. They claim that if you send them your gold jewelry, they will send you cash.

Now, because these are TV commercials I am going to assume it's not an outright scam -- that they actually do send you cash for some value times the weight of the gold you submitted.

But what's their business model? Are they simply sending you less than the actual worth of the gold by weight? Are they somehow betting against/for the gold market? I am curious to hear your thoughts.
And if you like operating inside of matching pairs, just think how much you'll like manipulating the pairs themselves! http://github.com/tpope/vim-surround
That's not climate.

Climate is what's happening in the same place on the same hour of the same day with similar stochastic conditions year over year. What's your fourth of july weekend going to be like in Boston next year? In 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 years?
I'm not disagreeing with you. At the end of the day I'm probably not even disagreeing with the message the author wants to convey. I'm just disagreeing with his rhetoric, and I find that philosophically and psychologically vital.

--

I've meditated before. I've done it for many hours a week for several weeks in a row. Then I realized I totally agree with davidw's comment here that exercise often does just as good a job without being fucking boring.

Backpacking. You. Just. Walk. (Through beautiful terrible landscapes that you might actively enjoy for a while but will later become a part of literally and spiritually.)

Backpacking. It. Fucking. Hurts. A lot. All day long. All night long. You mentally scream at yourself for deciding to pack each and every single piece of extraneoitivity you're carrying on your back. Each ounce. You curse the world for every stair step up the mountain. Then it all fades into the back of your mind like raining white noise. It's cathartic terrible screaming total peace.

And next thing you enjoy it.

I'm not saying you, generalized, should meditate or backpack. I'm not saying they're the cure for what ails you, let alone what ails the human condition at large. I'm pretty convinced that if you don't feel like you'd enjoy either one of them then practicing one will transform you positively, but I'd never say that exclusively.

But yeah, please do keep telling people to try meditation. I will too. My only beef is when you try to help them decide by pumping them full of psychological sympathy triggers.
Facebook Games May Lead Payment Startups to $3.6 Billion Market
I get the same feeling reading your response as I do reading comments by libertarians objecting to "paternalism" and the "nanny state", in which the issue in question becomes wholly subordinate to the libertarian's sense that they are being insulted.

This is just one guy's take on what meditation has allowed him to perceive about the world, and naturally he has chosen to emphasize those things. You can disagree with him as oversimplifying and misrepresenting the world, and that's fine. I just don't get why you're so worked up about it, and assigning base/crass motivations to him to boot. Assuming your interpretation isn't merely uncharitable, maybe he's just wrong. Hanlon's razor and all that.
> The computer program relies on a few basic assumptions in order to make intuitive guesses about the language's structure. Most importantly, the lost language has to be closely related to a known, deciphered language, which in the case of Ugaritic is Hebrew. Second, the alphabets of the two languages need to share some consistent correlations between the individual letters or symbols. There should also be recognizable cognates of words between the two languages, and words that have prefixes or suffixes in one language (like verbs that end in "-ing" or "-ed" in English) should show the same features in the other language.

So... it's a statistical decoder ring? Impressively effective, and a distinct possibility for accelerating the decoding of newly discovered languages, but that doesn't sound like much more than a Markov chain attached to a diff tool.

Also:

> The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours.

That's not "mystifying" to linguists, that's a mildly tough nut to crack. Mystified them for a while, certainly - but so do many small-sample-size languages.

edit: have not read the "original paper", this is all based off the article.

edit2: a brief skim of the original paper implies it finds cognates by statistically-similar use of morphemes. It appears they've got their whole algorithm in there, if anyone cares to investigate more deeply. So I wasn't too far off at least, and the article's writer did a decent job explaining how it worked. Much better than newspapers typically manage :)
This is very interesting to me. I have signed up for the free 10-day Vipassana course (dhamma.org).

Some of you may find this blog entry I wrote to be interesting. It is a review of Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom.

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/05/the-neuroscience-of-buddh...

I am currently reading The Myth of Freedom by Trungpa. He's definitely assaulted my practice of spiritual materialism.

I am confused about one thing. Trugpa asserts that the benefit to meditation is boredom. Csikszentmihalyi, in Flow, asserts that meditation is beneficial because it is the practice of such a well-honed skill (practitioners become skilled at observing the intricacies of their breath and therefore experience a feeling of being "in the zone", which is basically the opposite of boredom).

Trugpa says that observing the breath is just a useful beginner's crutch.

What do you think? Estragon, would you please chime in?
i have a ged in computer science.

//hs dropouts represent!
The greatest thing either of these men have done with their lives is commit to philanthropy. Everything else pales in comparison, and the biggest impact they will have on the world will have been through their philanthropy. They'll be remember for two things: being filthy rich, and what they did with those riches. Little will be remembered about either of the men personally, I dare say.
I'm probably going to make a simple todo list app with it.

I want a todo list that I can edit with emacs, but that I also have available to me everywhere.

Basically, you'd have a Dropbox folder with as many files as you want, each of which would be a list. The files would just be a series of lines (probably prefixed with a * so it looks better as a text file)

I've thought about just doing this and using the Dropbox app on my phone, but I want a slightly prettier interface on my phone and the ability to edit on my phone.
I've noticed it's a common theme, too. I keep hearing the phrase "digital detox". Maybe it's a Boulder thing. I'm not sure I like the phrase, but I like the idea of taking breaks more than I like the idea of fighting the change.

I read books like Rainbows End and articles by Ray Kurzweil and it just doesn't bother me.

http://gapingvoid.com/2006/09/17/the-future-belongs-to-the-g...
All national real estate data with no MLS / IDX restrictions.
Heh, this is now my most popular HN comment to date. Thanks for the upvotes!
Where are you getting that number for Skype from?
In October, 2009, they had 521 million registered users, and 40 million registered users in the preceeding 3 months: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/skype-hits-521-million-user...
That would indicate to me they likely have more than 50 million active users.

Additionally, when someone buys an iPhone, they are not going to use that phone for the rest of their life. People who already have iPhones will buy new models. Others will migrate from iPhone to other phones. So just based on the number of phones sold, you can't tell when it will "catch up".

Furthermore, as Skype runs on the iPhone (over 3G as well now), iPhone users can also be Skype users.
Do the exercises!

I know reading SICP blew your mind, but...do the exercises! Prove you actually know what you think you know - and when you the details make you struggle, work it out. :)
> The surviving Ugaritic texts tell the stories of a Canaanite religion that is similar but not identical to that recorded in the Old Testament, providing Bible scholars a unique opportunity to examine how the Bible and ancient Israelite culture developed in relation to its neighbors.

I missed it the first time through too. No idea what was in the data set however, nothing mentions that.
And why is the rest of the market so fixated on phones?

Because Google cannot sell an Android device on its own. They tried, remember?

Google as an institution knows even less about selling retail products than the average hot dog vendor. Meanwhile, Apple has very deliberately spent a decade building the best direct-to-customer retail operation in the tech industry, perhaps even in any industry.

So Google's customer-facing sales operation consists of mobile phone carriers. That's been effective so far, though I still wonder how much of its success is driven by the existence of iPhone carrier exclusivity -- nothing motivates Verizon to sell, sell, sell those Android devices like the threat of losing a flood of subscribers. But carriers are only interested in selling phones, because phones come with usage fees and contracts.

The lack of direct connection to the customer has all sorts of side effects on Google's business, and one is that they have no obvious way to effectively bring an Android-powered iPod Touch to market. They need to build a retail system from scratch - an even more difficult version of the task at which Gateway, Sony, and Microsoft have already failed - or they need a partner. Which partner? Existing gaming companies, the ones with the brands, all have their own platforms. Microsoft, for the moment, has their own platform. PC vendors have been selling commodity widgets for so long that they've forgotten how to sell something new. Is Google supposed to just buy shelf space at Best Buy and hope? Go back in time to the 1990s and ask the old Apple Computer how well that strategy worked.
with vimperator you can press ctrl+z to enable pass-through mode, therefore allowing you to use the gmail shortcut keys, press escape to go back to normal mode.
Product inventory for all retail stores - it would be really nice to be able to easily figure out where I can buy something locally without a lot of legwork.

Full Google search query logs - This would be a godsend for entrepreneurs. Imagine being able to figure out what things people are looking to buy that don't exist yet.
That's really a pretty outrageous claim. Microsoft has been pretty stuck since it was found to have violated anti-trust law. Just because he rode one company up to become the world's richest man, doesn't mean that he could have done something to make Microsoft a better company today.
PageRank calculation with MPI on a gigabit pc cluster
I believe that if Gates stayed Microsoft's CEO -- Microsoft would be more successful company and delivered more to the society.

interesting opinion about microsoft possibly delivering more to society. would you care to speculate on what possible ways they could better benefit society if billg were still in charge? i can't think of how a new version of SQL Server or MS Excel could do more direct benefits than malaria vaccines, etc. but perhaps msft could put more money into basic research, using computational methods to solve the world's problems, etc.?
Focusing on your breath can be a good way to recover after sitting for several minutes and (without realizing it) getting caught up in worrying about whatever crap has been dragging you down. It's a fundamental body function. At the same time, there's nothing inherently sacred about your breath - it's just oxygen keeping you from dying.

Saying, "oh, I lost focus, I'm going to take a deep breath and try to stay here" seems to help most people, that's all.
Are they simply sending you less than the actual worth of the gold by weight?

Yes. Often dramatically less -- I've seen reports of people being offered under half of the gold value of jewelry.

These companies prey on the stupid, that's all.
Using video on the mobile seems awkward to me. I'll be interested in seeing some stats about how much this feature is actually used.
love this. what amazing images. he mentions that he had some problems originally with condensation on the lens, I wish he would say how he solved this and generally said more about the process....
Ask HN: Review Cash Curve, our free webapp.
I am working at Brighten Labs, a startup founded by a couple of my college friends.

We first built CashCurve in February 2009 to be our own cash flow management tool. To me, it seems simple and effective, but we would like feedback. Thanks!
FWIW, here's the author of that book on the Colbert Report a few days ago: http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/wed-june-30-2010-...

(Yes, I just watched that video, and then posted about it on HN, instead of doing more productive things.)
You can Google "cash for gold scam" to hear the horror stories, but basically here's how it works:

You go to their website or call and request a prepaid envelope.

Once you receive the envelope, you package your gold and send it off to them. Let's assume that your gold is really worth $200.

They receive it and appraise it, sending you a check for an amount they deem fair. Sometimes as low as 10% of the fair market value. In your case, $20.

You have a set amount of time (I believe 5-7 business days) to either accept this amount by cashing the check or returning it and requesting that they return your jewelry. Some people claim that this time starts from the date of issuance of the check, not the date you received it. Others report that their jewelry cannot be located, so they have no choice to accept the small payment.

Those who insist that they will not accept the small payment get a call from a "senior gold appraiser" who, upon further review, offers them a higher amount, sometimes double the original payment (the $20 magically becomes $40). People claiming to be former employees claim that they get a commission based on how little they can offer you to get you to agree.
36 hours to port Lemmings to iPhone
Email Infrastructure in the Amazon Cloud
Oh, I'm in no way saying that exercise isn't beneficial. I'm a cycling geek. Shit, look at my name. (I also love weight training, and I did Aikido for years, but biking is my thing.) Your body wants you to exercise, just like it wants you to eat well. I'm not here to nag people to brush their teeth, though. C'mon.

Meditation is a different approach. Sometimes being so boring is an asset - It's not all about testing your body.

"Psychological sympathy triggers"?
The headline is technically correct, but quite misleading. The language in question, Ugaritic, was deciphered in 1932. As it was discovered in 1929, it can hardly be said that the decipherment was an arduous process. The significance of the computer program is along the lines of:

> The key strength of our model lies in its ability to incorporate a range of linguistic intuitions in a statistical framework.

As someone working in NLP, this is quite remarkable, and I don't mean to detract from it; but it should be noted that the model (like the linguists) relied on the fact that Ugaritic is closely related to Hebrew. It would be impossible to use such a model to decipher Linear A, which is probably not related to any known language. (But the model could perhaps be used to check if linguists had overlooked any connection between Linear A and another known language.)
Any reason why it hasn't? What parts of the language are the biggest obstacles?
To get critical mass, a new project has to present a plug-n'-play install. First impressions are everything. That is not the case here. I've read the docs and an initial install looks to need several different languages/compilers to get going. And then some.

Even Tokyo Cabinet/TT are more aligned and straightforward than this project. It will be interesting to see what happens here, But please oh please you Scaliens, give some more realistic and complete benchmarks to whet one's appetite.
If Bastiat was alive today, he would run circles around politicians and economists like Krugman, while at the same time being ridiculed as one of those crazed nut-case libertarian. He will also generally being unpopular. And he was unpopular and unknown in his time. I mean, this man had braved the French Revolution and risked getting his head chopped off.

What he did for us is to write pretty good fables and stories teaching us a thing or two about economic fallacies. That's the whole reason why we still read him today. That what have earned him legion of fans.

But, in this era and age, some of the things he said would still be seen as heresy.

Breaking windows(or digging holes and filling up again) is still seen as smart by some crazy economists.

The other day, I stubbornly argued against wars as stimulus on the basis that it's a broken window fallacy on hacker news. I got lot of karma points alright, but my opponent was pretty damn persistent about wars being a smart idea.
Lisp for Cocoa would have been a better title.

Clojure is quite a different Lisp, and to say that this is "Clojure for Cocoa" implies it has something in common with Clojure other than also being a member of the Lisp family, which it really doesn't.

Clojure is very functional, Nu is not. Clojure's language is designed to make it safe and simple to write multithreaded code. Nu is just an imperative Lisp with smalltalk syntax so that it can interface with Cocoa/Objective-C. Clojure takes a departure from all Lisps by treating lists as just any other datastructre, and therefore has literal syntax for arrays, hashtables, and sets, Nu has no such thing. Clojure places a huge emphasis on "data abstractions" like Seqs and builds its core functions around that. Clojure is compiled, Nu is interpreted, etc...

Don't get me wrong, I think Nu is really cool, but I can't think of a single thing that Nu shares with Clojure that is exclusive to Clojure and not Lisp.
I'm not sure I'd want to work for someone who didn't understand the difference between computer science and programming.

It really is like the difference between a degree in physics and being a car mechanic. You can be a great car mechanic without a degree in physics, but the intent of the physics degree isn't to create great car mechanics.

I was probably a better C programmer at age 15 than most professional programmers I've run across in my career. With that said I didn't know about the Halting problem nor the Chomsky Hierarchy nor even things like amortized cost nor really any asymptotic complexity analysis. Do any of those things help me at my day job... maybe a little, but not much. Certainly I'd be better served reading the .NET Fx docs or Java docs or some JQuery books. But that's not why I got a degree in CS.
Yeah, it's entirely possible I don't understand what they were doing but that first example (the "Sunday" program), just seems like a lot of `if` statements.
But can you think of her with a description? Or is she inherently indescribable, aside from being female?
> I've realized that there aren't too many secrets to a beautiful life; it's just choosing the path that's too damn hard.

Okay, if you look at "the path", it's going to be tough. 90% of the time you want to be looking at one of two things. Either:

1. What you want as your end outcome, or,

2. What the next step is

That's it. Thinking "Oh man I'm going to have to go exercise for six months to get my weight and energy where I want..." - too much, that's too much for anyone. So think instead: What's my end goal? I want to be fit, long lived, with lots of energy. Okay. What's the next step? Go out for a 15 minute walk while listening to something pleasant. Then celebrate that.

Don't focus on "the path" - the stuff that needs to be done. It's too much. Focus on what you want, and then ask what's the next action? It's taking a 15 minute walk. You can take a 15 minute walk. No problem.

> You know what scares me the most? That I might not be smart enough/hard-working enough to actually make it work.

Yeah, that's classical deterministic thinking right there. The ability to "actually make it work" doesn't come from being "smart enough/hard-working enough" - making it work isn't an inborn inability, it comes from regular, incremental training. Definitely check out Waitzkin's Art of Learning. It'll do wonders for you. It's a light, easy, pleasant read too.

> I actually know that in all probability I don't have a future. Unlike, almost all of my peers I really can't have a linear life, and that is shit scary.

Do your best to catch yourself saying stuff like that, and then cut down on how much you say it. There's nothing magical about having a functional life. You figure out what you want in the long term (this takes some thinking on, and it's time well spent - it's actually pretty enjoyable to think about). Then you ask, "What's the next action?" 15 minute walk, go to the grocery store and buy oatmeal/tuna/rice/fruit, clean all your clothes and throw out the junk in your room, just reduce your email inbox a little bit from 700 down to 600 by deleting a few useless things (recently I got my inbox from 700 emails down to 3 emails over the course of two weeks, just one step at a time on it...). It's always, "What's the end goal? Okay. What's the next small step?"

There's no probability here, you're not rolling dice. If you think about what you want and take gradual steps to get there, you're almost certain to get there. If you introduce good foods to your diet while gradually quitting bad foods, your energy levels will improve. That's almost a certainty. That's how life works. You can do it. Celebrate the small wins, a successful life is a series of stringing small wins together, which eventually compound into bigger wins. In the end, it's not rocket surgery, and should be possible to anyone. You can do it.