skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But what being open wins you is support of the community, and in particular, "developers, developers, developers"."

I think the Android argument can play out the other way, and I say that as someone who is onto his 3rd Android phone, never owned an iPhone yet was an Objective C programmer in a former life and total mac-head.

Android may be open, and Apple App Store has it's problems but monetization opportunities are much bigger on iOS platform because everything is geared towards paying for apps. No one I know pays for apps on Android.

Plus, app dev for iPhone is cheaper because it's (sort of) one platform rather than Android's disparate handsets due to it's very openness.

Another case in point: Facebook FBML Platform vs Open Social. Developers way preferred the close Facebook Platform over the open standard Open Social (again, I was part of that so I say it with some disappointment).
The big problem with the N1 is the terrible touch screen. Quite often it won't register a touch on one or both axes and the "multi-touch" is a lie.
Amblyopia is the condition where one of your eyes is ignored. Strabismus is a condition where your eye "turns", which can cause amblyopia if not treated. I had surgery a year ago for my strabismus, but the image from my weaker eye is still being ignored.
Validation is Overrated
I see where you M/D/Y people are coming from, but can you at least agree that "June 28, 2010" -> "[Month 6] 28, 2010" -> "6/28/2010" is at least founded in some kind of logic?
Not true. Here in Australia, our Prime Minister just got the boot, in part because he backed down over an emissions trading scheme and lost popular support. So it's not entirely random, although there's also internal power-broking and lobbying from third parties like the mining sector to blame.
"Facebook effectively provides limited, specialized web hosting supported by ads. There's no reason companies can't offer exactly the same thing via open protocols."

If a few companies offer the hosting of nodes, rather than true "open"/"federated" where each user is in personal control of his node than really you have little change than the current system.

Rather than a monopoly on the social graph, you will have a biopoly/etc with control still spread between a small group of actors who will just bound together for mutual benefit.

The idea of true federation and disparate systems where each user is in personal control of his node is really the utopia. But sadly it's never going to happen.
Thanks. I get/got them confused.

In case you read this, what do you think of SwankoLab?
It seems to push the envelope for creativity because it gives normal users the tools to programatically alter their photos. Very clever how they did that, too.

http://swankolab.com
Could you explain more please? Bonus points if you do it without using the phrase 'provide liquidity'.
I don't think vp8 makes any claims about being patent-free (that's theora). I believe the libvpx license does shield you from patent claims (meaning google will take responsibility in case of any infringement). Note that this applies to libvpx only; independent implementations such as ffmpeg's are not covered.

Great job Ronald, David and Jason!
If I'm not mistaken, I believe the idea is to set up some automated trading bots that just simply make money for you on a continual basis. This constant revenue stream allows you to forget about making money and allowing you to use those resources to either fund a life of ease and luxury or other pursuits such as "making the world a better place".
Who are you and what do you bring to the table?
Regarding there only being a few famous female scientists: the currently-accepted ev-psych. explanation is that men have a greater standard deviation in levels of achievement-seeking behavior. In any (objectively quantifiable) meritocratic field, you'll see women mostly in the middle, with men at the top and at the bottom. This means that the "stand-outs" will always be male-dominated (as will the "drop-outs", mind), unless the field has some sort of selection effect favoring women.
I sometimes wonder whether it is better to ask for/elicit feedback from a near-complete stranger (first impression) or someone who already knows you (biased impression). From seeing video of myself at social gatherings, I unpleasantly know I give every impression of poor body language (slouch) but I'm not sure if I care enough to force my habits to alter.

Honest feedback is gold. To see yourself as someone else sees you seems to be a huge market covering everything from paid focus groups for new products to Alexander technique training to personal coaching to dating coaching where you practice approaching a female until she says you're getting good at it.

Perhaps that could be a way to monetize ChatRoulette. Pair people up to evaluate their first impressions with peer ratings evaluating how good someone is at evaluating a random stranger.
My recommendation is to go the start-up route for the following reasons:

1) You will be able to solve interesting problems more so than a large company which at least early on will have you doing small iterations on what they already have

2) You will be exposed to the opportunity to get business experience of a type much more valuable than what you can get out of an MBA. Get an MBA for the network, not for the academics, and not if you want to solve interesting problems in the CS space

3) you will develop the type of valuable experience that all those job applications you are looking at want. Even if a start-up fails, you will be able to point to an interesting thing that you helped develop that will help with the job search in the future

Take this advice with a big grain of salt. Do what YOU want to do, like solve interesting problems that you have passion for without worrying about where it will lead you. If the problems are interesting, and the solutions are awesome, you will end up in a great place. If you go build something cool that you can show to start-ups, they will be much more interested in talking to you than if you are just a cover letter + resume combination.

Where are you located? If you are in the SF Bay Area I'd be willing to talk to you about opportunities around here.
2010: Australia’s Android odyssey
I have a Droid on Verizon. Do not let the keyboard influence you too much, because it sucks. I almost always use the onscreen keyboard instead of bothering to open it. The only situation where I ever use the keyboard is for games that benefit from having physical buttons, Tetris clones in particular. Everyone seems to think that a keyboard is a make-or-break issue for them, and I felt exactly the same way until I actually had one.
FWIW, I have essentially 0 stability problems with my Droid. (Can't speak to superk's other points because I haven't played with a Nexus One.)
Google's mismanagement of the Android Market
There are two (more than two, but let's stick with two) basic views of how we define concepts. One is that we define concepts by definition. A cofounder is someone who helps to found a company, therefore (by logical definition) an already-founded company cannot acquire more cofounders. The other is that we define concepts by comparison to bundles of referents. For instance, we know that Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, Paul Graham, and Gordon Moore are all called "cofounders", and that they worked their asses off for equity. If your startup is looking to hire someone who works and gets paid just like a cofounder except without actually cofounding the company, it's looking to hire someone who resembles our "cofounder" referents even if it doesn't fit the technical definition.

Hence, this controversy just comes down to different ways in which people define and use concepts. Personally, I find it useful to be able to think in both modes.
There's no real correlation between what the populace believes, and what its elected representatives believe.

Maybe, maybe not. But there is a very real correlation between what the populace believes and what laws legislators can vote for without ruining their chances for reelection. Legislators who vote for things that the majority of their constituents find to be completely absurd tend not to be reelected.
I'm onto my 3rd Android, an HTC EVO. The screen is amazing - yes it is big and makes the phone big but I don't really find that a problem in my pocket.

My Sprint plan is $60/month for unlimited data, texts, calls to mobiles, calls at weekends... the only metered calling is landlines during the working day, which I have 500 mins/month on. That for me is = unlimited all the way through.

The 4G is amazing, although not available yet in SF.

Reported battery problems are solved if you install custom ROMS (which you'll want to do anyway to get root, wifi tethering at no extra cost, etc)
From what I understand, Sprint's service is not really 4G, it's WiMax that has been rebranded.

http://community.sprint.com/baw/message/141144
I think that I am fine with that because I'm not sure it matters. The truth is the truth and it has a nasty habit of winning out even if it takes hundreds of years. Theories and ideas go into and out of favor over time. The battle between rationalism and empiricism has raged basically nonstop since Aristotle and continues today with each side gaining and losing ground with each generation of thinkers.

I'm amazed by the continuing influence of Marx and other socialist philosophers even though we have theories rooted in Platonic arguments and empirical observation that are fairly one sided in their analysis of the subject. It disturbs me greatly that schools teach Keynesian economics and that Paul Krugman has more distribution than what a blog would provide him. I'm disturbed by the success of the Neocons and their apparent love for war.

All that being said I move on with my life. I realize that the best I can is argue my case and if I fail then that's fine. Ideas aren't as important as life and the people in it.
the problem with openid is that there are too many providers and too little consumers. I see it as a failed project which tried to solve an important problem. OAuth Seems a better option which just works, I have implemented it in a couple of projects and it looks promising, 'sign in with twitter' is a good example of an intelligent OAuth use.
Are you doing your masters at georgia tech, doing your internship at Yahoo! and an indian from IIT?
Of all the misconceptions on that page that I had been exposed to, I was exposed to them in public school. I wonder if they're still teaching kids this stuff.
Now this is exactly the sort of thing we should be taking issue with (from the comments):

> A true noob should probably install java, download clojure and clojure-contrib, run the repl, and stay there for couple 2-3 weeks. No IDE, no web app dev, just functional and concurrent programming with clojure in a REPL. They'll be much better off in the long run because they'll either give up (and save time) or learn something truly outside their comfort zone (and understand the benefit of getting setup for real development).

When teaching someone a programming language, your first goal should always be to get them to the point where they've made something real in a domain they understand. Then, they can bootstrap that domain knowledge, and its application within the new language, and use it to "grow into" the rest of the language.

The best thing for Clojure would be something that lets you write web-apps (or games, or visualizations like Processing...) in it two minutes after clicking "Download"—because those users would be able to say they've done something in Clojure, be able to say they're sure of their knowledge (because if they weren't, the program wouldn't have worked, would it?) and be able to proceed to learn more with confidence. The worst thing would be to download Clojure and be stuck at a REPL invoking (defproto) to overload String methods with no goal in sight—because that kind of knowledge doesn't stick, and won't get you anywhere.
Well, not quite. Lindows certainly wasn't around before MS. According to Wikipedia the company was founded in 2001.
Edit: On further reading, Microsoft didn't manage to force them to change over in court - they just paid $20 million and Lindows changed over. Hardly "destroyed" them.

Windows is an English word, however that doesn't mean it doesn't enjoy some trademark protection in an arrangement like "Microsoft Windows". The protection is not as significant as it would be on an invented word (like, say, "Microsoft") but it's still there if you come up with something that's judged to be similar enough to cause confusion.

Similarly, try founding an IT company called Apple and see how far you get - that's an English word too.
I'm finding it slow. I'll be rolling back to 3.1.2 Jailbroken with Backgrounder. At least with Backgrounder you could kill Mail, Safari etc easily if the system was running slowly or you needed extra to play a heavy game (eg. Worms)
It's really hard to get perfect email deliverabiliy. God help any of your users who have Yahoo or Hotmail. There are no major flaws assuming you properly timestamp and sign your urls. But between email latency, deliverability, etc, not to mention how alien the experience will be to most people, I'm not sure if I would advise pursuing the system as a primary one.
The JVM requires unexpected tweaks. It's surprising to discover that it doesn't use the time zone files provided by the OS, or that it might not use the available memory on your awesome new server. It's scary to realize that a lot of applications are deployed and certified to run only on a specific JVM version, and that getting security/bugfix updates for that version will get increasingly harder as time goes by. Before long, you have a proliferation of different JVMs that all need to be maintained, along with the host OS itself. These problems are acute with Java, compared to other languages, at least where the n00b is concerned.
You shouldn't underestimate the importance of example code.

A nice, compact hello world example would help. I didn't see any example on the parent (I'll admit I skimmed). A nice example of being able to something fairly complex in a clear, simple fashion would excite me.

The size of the Java hello world program made me nauseous every time I've looked at learning it.

There was a thread a while back about how much patience people doing BS activities. Not only do I have little patience with wasted, I tend to think that intelligence correlates with not wanting one's time wasted.

If you can show me a language which is clear and won't waste my time, I'll love. I love Ruby (though it's just too buggy to use for serious programming still).
Reviews: Christian Louboutin Patent
Just because Backgammon & Chess are thousands of years old and well respected... doesn't mean a new game invented in modern times can't be deeper.

Swarm is deeper because there are more possibilities in the game play. There are 84 squares. Each player has 11 pieces that can move in any direction. Players can move their opponents pieces as well as their own (effectively meaning each player has 22 pieces at their disposal per turn). Each piece can move in any of six directions. There are two ways to win. So, mathematically at least, it's probably deeper.
HI, Thanks for your reply

1: Regarding PhD Programs, Getting in a good PhD Program wouldn't be that much difficult for me (I have a decent GRE score 1380) coupled with demonstrated research interest (via publication and paper).

However I have closely looked at life in the Academia (all my undergrad friends are doing PhD). And the Advisor problem is really terrible, since a lot is determined by your choice of advisor alone.
Finally regarding working in a Lab of Google/MSFT/ or Academia is what I am trying to avoid.

I have this personal theory that I should couple my technical knowledge with Managerial one to obtain a position where I could solve practical problems.
Research, Conference and Publications are fun, but over the years I have been amazed at large amount of publications that are hardly implemented in real life (if at all they are implementable).
The other Post-PhD issue is that my stipend (with 50% saved) wont be enough to completely pay of my loans (my parents have enough money but I somehow dont wish to burden them), Also the current Visa rules do not allow me to start a Startup post PhD so The employment issue remains.
At best I can hope is to get an Associate level jobs or Qunat ones at consulting firms Post-PhD.

Regarding your comment about Quant jobs being dry (conscientiously), sure they are but they are also exciting in a way You can literally see performance of your algorithms in term of monetary value.

Regarding my publication they were in a journal which is considered top in my field and published by an American non profit academic body, with its first issue being published around 100 years ago.
About my programming skill, well I can tell you that I can understand and write code. Its hard to give out any information here without compromising my privacy.

Regarding 29 months figure, if i have a job for say 2 years I would be able to earn enough to pay most of the debt plus would gain enough experience required for a B-School. That how i did my mental calculation though it is likely wrong.

To summarize 6 years into the future I want to work at a position where I could be making significant decisions that would affect products / Services / lives of people.
A perfect example would be Program/Project Mangers at Google or Facebook.
Question: has anyone managed to do this? (eg. do hedge funds do this, or do they combine algorithms with their own ideas and quasi-insider knowledge, plus massive amounts of timely data - inaccessible to an individual).

My old supervisor (ACM fellow) comforted my failure to create AI by saying that lots of other clever people hadn't done it either. I have a feeling that you are attempting something more difficult that AI - ie, algorithmic inference without the data that your competitors have. Because of their better information, they will find a regularity (eg. 0.01% dip on Wednesdays) quicker than you - and trade it away.

It would be awesome if you could do it though - forget the philosopher's stone aspect of gold-for-nothing, this would be a very cool intellectual achievement.

Idea: focus on small markets/exchanges (unpopular metals, unpopular countries, even non-financial markets, like eBay) that don't attract the attention of big players. Easier to find arbitrage there; you can make some actual money, and then move onto a bigger market with your learnings, earnings, and confidence. Sort of a niche strategy.

Personal Note: My AI research depressed me, and I (wisely) decided to shelve it. It's been incredibly more satisfying to work with others, to achieve doable goals, that benefit others. Fortunately, AI comes up in everything; and my current approach (of not doing AI directly) may well be the most effective way to approach the goal. It might be the same with you - both markets and inference are universal.

EDIT So, Tantalus = low-hanging fruit + moving-goalposts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus#Story_of_Tantalus
Very nice...btw, the example entitled "Line graph with multiple lines and a watermark" is just showing the grid and labels in Opera 10.54 on Windows.
No. I am from India, though not from IIT.
Yet my undergrad school was very specialized and as good as IIT [in that subject alone though].
So you need a typeface
A good example of where a product's market is limited by it's branding. I can look his points and see that they're a CMS's features, but in my head I'm thinking "WYSIWYG blog entry, adding pages to a blog, blog, blog, blog".
Are your charts all images, or can you generate SVG/VML charts?
Well, I know with Scala, the claim is "improved syntax" but the actual code I've seen is an abominable concatenation of colons and stuff to make the horrible Java stuff less horrible - but only relative to Java. If Clojure can stand on its own, it could be nicer. But if its a push-me/pull-you language that's a half-breed of another, horrible language, it is just not appealing.
The lack of IE support is what kills it for us. We need to do some charting stuff, and we'll probably end up extending gRaphael or Grafico or something and copying several of the Protovis charts.

That said, how have you found the performance to be? Some of their demos are kind of slow, e.g. http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/candlestick.html.
"Well, now when this all is over, I want to tell you that thisarticle definitely was a joke. ... But why people did not take this article as a joke? Because one has to know Forth to understand this joke. Given that most people do not know Forth, distribution of such articles is anti-education."

The article was satire?
On the other hand, I don't see Google sitting around while the MPEG-LA derails their gravy train. Google stands to lose a lot if they have to use a format other than VP8 or H.264 (in bandwidth costs), or if they have to pay the H.264 licensing fee for every YouTube video, Android handset, and Chrome download.

Sadly, I think Google has more to lose than MPEG-LA, because they are the company that is actually doing something useful. Patents encouraging innovation indeed...
Xbox has started to make a profit, year over year, but they have still not made up for the millions they plowed into the overall project.
Yep. And there's really no point for WP to try to get away from blogs into CMS territory. There will be blogs for a long time to come, and WP should just shoot to own that.
no I am in Greater New York City area.

Yeah Startup is interesting prospects. Also my poster was mentioned by a VC in UK in one of his blog posts (After I pointed him out that i had similar published ideas with working code)

However startup as alien student is really difficult, I had talked with professor who teaches entrepreneurship at my school.
Are any HN users using forth in your personal life at work? I haven't seen it mentioned here much.
What colour is your hat? (SEO)
Out of curiosity, do you have a bathtub or just a shower?
>Retail investors are taught to 'invest for the long-term', and 'not try to time the market' meanwhile hedge-funds and high-frequency traders play a different game with different rules.

Exactly....that the financial services industry constantly advises the retail investor to "invest for the long term", when they do the exact opposite (while generally using the funds provided by these exact same retail investors), to me is a pretty strong indicator that the markets are something entirely different than how they are sold to people.

The markets were created to provide funding for companies in need of capital, and a branch of the financial services industry was legitimately required to facilitate this process between companies and individual investors, but now almost everywhere I look people are focused on finding new ways to skim money out of the system, under the guise of "providing liquidity", as if there was some problem with liquidity 10, 20, 30 years ago.
Sorry for second reply:
When I say Analyst I do not mean I.T. Analyst or Technology Analyst.
It is along the line of Management Consultant Analyst.
Or Business Analyst.
who are you and what do you bring to the table?
SoundsGood 09: Eminem’s ‘Recovery’
See Seven Copies of Windows 7 Per Second: Fast! But How Fast? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1466549 for a fun way to put the numbers in perspective.

(links to http://technologizer.com/2010/06/27/seven-copies-of-windows-...)
Wow. I couldn't stop paying attention to it in fear that I might miss something he says.

Any other of his talks or interviews that you might recommend?