skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Languages and abstractions aren't really that different. Every time you define a new function, you're in some sense extending the language. In languages with powerful macro systems, this "language extension" is even more potent.

I agree with you that good abstractions (architectures are just large-scale abstractions) are needed, but that doesn't mean the new abstractions won't come in the form of a new language. In some sense, they always will. In the sense you mean, some abstractions fit better into existing languages than others.
It figures you downvoted me. You will probably downvote this one too.

I was sort of thinking about it, and I realized you were screwing with me. It's sortof humorous and dickish (sorry douchey is more appropriate) at the same time.

I don't hate you, but it's not how I would conduct myself, especially if somebody is obviously ignorant over a certain context of discussion.

> second rather uncouth one

I thought it was appropriate. I could have been more high-brow about it, but why bother? You would have downvoted me anyway and would not have been any more sympathetic. It certainly made me feel better.

Also using lmgtfy, classy! (I had another comment but decided I didn't want to get downvoted twice by you, so I merged it).
Have you ever considered that when a large number of people calls what you do "spam", that it might indeed be just that?
Wireshark: Facetime on Iphone 4: Vanilla unencrypted STUN and SIP
So the ruling party is headed by engineers? So I assume the taxi cabs are driven by the blind, all the jockeys are tall, and the businesses are run by physicists. Not matching skilled workers with their work is a disadvantage.?

Huh?
20% of all Forbes 500 CEO's are engineers same number as that of Management grads.

The Chinese government (or any government) can't sit down and order up long term technological advancement. What government program did Gates or Jobs take part in

huh? What did Gates and Jobs do? Did they invent transistors? You dont haven an iota of knowledge about technology. nor science.

you seem to be an idiot.
If you can't see a distinction between a race and the members of the race, I would contend you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. I recognize this isn't the politically correct solution and I don't care.

"Your solution"

Wrong. I have not advocated a solution, only the proper questions.

I don't question the arguments. I question their temporal relevancy. So let me try asking you a question that nobody else seems to be able to answer: When are we done? What concrete criterion do we use to figure out when to shut off the counter-racism?
"If he still has some emotional attachment to the city..."

Judging from what he has wrote about cities in the past, I'm pretty sure he does not.
What I'd want to know is what percentage of users faced with a choice of iPhone and Android (on the same carrier) would pick one or the other. As it is right now a lot of people are buying Android phones because the iPhone is not available to them without switching carriers. If that exclusivity expires it could plausibly adjust the trajectories of each of these platforms.
One Bold Move Apple Has Not Yet Made (domestic manufacturing)
No doubt, I always feel like I am being feed an agenda with how many times this subject comes up. It surreal, almost like some paid think tank is spitting out studies to make the masses think that they don't need to be paid gobs of money for skills that most people don't have. I will take the high pay and job satisfaction please, because the two are not mutuality exclusive.
Here's a much needed additional data set:

"The average Android user is spending just . . . $0.50 among all applications."

"iPhone users are spending an estimated . . . $5.00 among all applications."

Those data sets are measured monthly - http://fadellc.com/press_1.html

So does this mean that Android needs 10x traction to create the same opportunity for your general app maker?
Fring sucks. It shows a lot of promise but its buggy as hell and it killed my battery.

I hope it's not representative of other background VOIP apps.

Next question: where is the official Skype iOS4 app?
I don't disagree that there are ways of doing it.

I just think the prevailing attitude of (founder level) engineers and coders is that you're not really building anything. It's the typical dismissal that non-tech people get from tech people.

FWIW, I'm definitely a tech person, and even though I'm aware of this bias, I still suffer from it.

Further, there's the problem of assignment of responsibility/credit to the sales person that's brought up in other threads.

In my company, the single most useful non-tech, non-sales/marketing person would be a company mom. Laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning. Every hour I spend doing that (which I hate) prevents me from working on company stuff.
What the fuck? You're reading this on a screen right now. You and everyone else reading this thread likely read text from LCD screens for at least half of your waking hours!

What about a tablet formfactor suddenly makes backlit LCD screens completely unbearable?
Ok, neat, thanks for the correction!
Android users spending $0.50/month on apps, iPhone users $5/month
Looks like we have a time setup for Wednesday @ 7:30pm - check http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news for more details...
Having only seen two movies on this list (Avatar 'Real' and Alice in Wonderland 'Fake') my observation is hardly exhaustive, but there was a definite difference in the 3D experience.

With Avatar, the third dimension seem to come out at you from the screen - I even had a cliched duck for cover at one point. With Alice the third dimension seemed to be depth in the screen - many shots felt like you were figuratively looking down a rabbit hole, rather than being immersed within one.

And for what it's worth, I don't mind paying a few bucks extra for the 3D version, real or fake.
Ask HN: Advice for developing a new machine-learning web app
Hello HN!

Long time lurker, first time poster. In any case, I am hoping to create a new webapp that helps people pick where they want to go for vacation. That is, not the hotel, but the location itself. In some sense, this is a more narrowly focused hunch for travel. For instance, if you are single 20-something female looking for a beach vacation, where is the best place? Croatia or Goa? I am a web developer by trade, but have little idea where to start looking for resources on machine learning (or whatever I need to accomplish this goal). So I come to you all for suggestions. Where should I look/what should I read to get started with this project, and do you think it can be successful?

Thanks!
You don't, really.

Want to move PB of data? Rent a van.
It sounds like "The Social Network" might be getting a sequel. :)
The US is, by and large, successful because we have the largest market in the world (forgetting for a moment the effects of WWII). We continue to be a success because we have a huge population of affluent people who can spend enormous amounts of money on consumer goods. The Chinese middle class is already larger than the entirety of the US population* and will continue to rise as the country increasingly becomes a first-world country.

There are of course issues with managing such a large population, but the chance of any sort of collapse is the figment, and hope, of our pride and does not reflect the realities of the situation.

* - Income of middle class in the US is higher, but cost of living is also substantially less in China.
Chinese bioscience: The sequence factory
Same here.

"Ooh is that the new iPhone? Do you have antenna problems?"

I say that while I do notice the affect, i've dropped no calls in my apartment with the new model, vs 70% dropped rate on my 3G.
Whats the BEST Free AntiVirus?
I just reformatted my computer because i got infected hardcore, though i didnt have any antivirus either because i wasnt sure which one would be effective.. just seeking some opinions.
I'm a real narcissist. I follow just myself: http://twitter.com/binaryage

poor article, IHMO it is up to each user how will he/she use the service
They seem to be tying innovation and market share which makes no sense to me.

Further, the number of Windows users is significantly higher than Linux or Mac users, yet I'm still going to stick with Linux and the Mac regardless. As long as there are enough users to keep a platform viable and profitable for the vendors, I doubt users care about the percentages.
I uploaded the complaint (only) on Scribd, which includes the contract as an exhibit. It's hard to read (as a poor quality photocopy) but seems superficially credible - that is, there are signatures supposed to be Zuckerberg's on the contract and a receipt for cashed check, which could be checked for authenticity.

As to whether the contract is enforceable or even valid, I have no opinion. I'm having considerable difficulty just reading it and don't know enough about contract law to evaluate it. Even if it is, I imagine Facebook would respond that the suit is equitably estopped by laches (unreasonable delay in enforcement of a claim).

Edit: they do - 2nd link, 2nd last paragraph.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34239119/Ceglia-v-Zuckerberg-compl...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34240120/Ceglia-v-Facebook-Motion-...
What particular aspect of that bothers you?
well my thesis was based upon the premise that those who would need a UI for hadoop scale queries wouldn't be those doing the data collection. i.e. the marketers or research scientists who want to run queries against existing data sets, or data sets in use by others in their companies.

imagine someone in say the sports division at aol wanting to know patterns for users across aol who have viewed auto related info or something.

the idea is not having to bother the sophisticated db admins, and let end users figure out the data themselves.
well, if those people are SEOs who are on jihad against me, no, I don't listen to them.

I mean, every comment i make is voted down instantly on HN. It doesn't matter what I say or do. I could stop the BP oil spill and it would get voted down!
Why is your gripe with Android and not Skype or Fring?
News flash: 85% of everything is crap.

The solution is to make the good stuff rise to the top, not to suppress the crap. Luckily since Android apps can be distributed on the web, we can fall back to tried-and-true search techniques when the built-in Market app isn't cutting it.
As promised:

This includes the best available numbers on the people imprisoned and executed for counter-revolutionary (political, kulaks, etc.) crimes from 1921 to 1954 in the entire Soviet Union (includes republics annexed in 1939) from a report ordered by Khruschev (ie - the real numbers, not speculation), as well as an analysis of the commonly published speculative numbers:

http://www.thewalls.ru/truth/repress.htm (Russian)

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h... (Google English translation)

642,980 executed, 2,369,220 imprisoned, 765,180 internally exiled over a 30-year period. That is 21,433 people receiving capital punishment each year, and 78,974 imprisoned per year. To put it in perspective, 89,000 people were sentenced (up to a maximum term of 5 years) for cannabis possession in the UK in 1998.

If you include the number of excess deaths from the Ukrainian and Kazakh famines of 1932, the direct and excess deaths from the civil war and the civil war famines, there's still no comparison to the Third Reich.
I've been to a lot of movies and I think this list is very accurate, every movie not originally intended for 3d was obvious on the big screen and the glasses just ended up being extra weight on your nose, wish I had this list earlier
That seems to already have happened.

http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/07/mobile-developer-ec...
Admitting you need help is the first step. The second step is planning forward what help you will need / want when.

For example: if you're bootstrapping it makes sense to use a second-hand photocopier yourself; at some future point, all things going to plan, your business will need a more reliable machine being operated by your secretary. Most business owners make that decision reactively - they wait until the old copier dies or they're too stressed out and need admin support.

Great business owners put in a little bit of time to capacity planning, so they have the milestones (eg, when I hit $X revenue per month for 3 consecutive months) for adding resource to maintain profitability and sustainable growth. As a spreadsheet-literate business geek, helping them do that planning is one of the more fun elements of my career.

Of course, my career would be more profitable is more business owners read Jesse's blog, and made that first step.
I do think that's a fundamental difference though. Skype claims there was a ToS violation, and they had been trying to resolve the issue with Fring. If that's the case, hypocritical or not, it's unfair of Fring to announce that they were blocked, implicitly with no warning. Admittedly, there's two sides to every story, and it's pretty hard to see the facts through either side, here.
> The Roman Empire did, so did the Soviet Union, partly.

The Roman Empire didn't "calm down" for hundreds of years. Even the USSR took a couple of decades. And in both cases, they ran into opposition.

If you're going to argue that a legacy-obsessed Hitler would have calmed down within a year or so despite encountering no significant opposition, you need something more than "it could happen".
"They could then easily and justifiably charge a premium for American-made iPods or iPhones or products we haven’t even seen yet"

I really don't see this working out. Maybe I'm underestimating the purchasing patriotism of the wheat belt though.
Amazon Hooks College Students With A Free Year Of Amazon Prime
How to read mathematics
They are basing their guess on stats from AdMob. Everyone, say it with me: Ad traffic does not equal web traffic. Web traffic does not equal market share. Market share does not equal revenue.
I tried a free two month trial of this a couple years ago. It was right around this time too. Prime is incredibly useful for ordering textbooks.
I'm not 100% positive on NI. I just recall that claim being made when I interned there and can't find any info suggesting otherwise.

They IPO'd in 1995, btw.
A lot of people have done a lot worse things than Jason. I don't know why people feel the need to piss down his throat on a daily basis.

I do wish he'd put his energies into something better than Mahalo though.
Robertson Davies once discovered that his local library had collected more in fines than he had collected in royalties on one of his books. He started a campaign to pass laws for libraries to pay something back to the authors; I assume it went nowhere.
Could you expand on this point? I don't see the relationship between the parent's assertion and Costco (even after reading the wikipedia article on Costco).
Very few app creators make any significant money.

Google could help with discoverability, or more importantly, make it easy to have subscription models.
The OP received about 5 rems - equivalent to eating about 500 bananas (a BED of 500) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
The cases for these American-made products could be painted to look like an American flag. Think of the possibilities to market that to the wheat belt:)
Every time I read "Designed in California. Made in China." I die a little inside.
Every city wants to be the 'next Silicon Valley' but can never retain the companies. Its not a problem endemic to Pittsburgh. Can you think of a city that's not in the west that can honestly claim this title?

Its not just the capital - there's a sense of entrepreneurial manifest destiny mixed in there that can't be stopped. For a tech company that doesn't have hard assets there's nothing stopping wide-eyed entrepreneurs from picking up & moving west. And lets get honest here - Pittsburgh is great but if you're finally making it to the big time, why would you want to stay in a declining rustbelt city?
This means Google Checkout needs to be available in more countries.
1) they probavly considered multiple manufacturing locations already (and probably reevaluate periodically)

2) customer base is world wide, so there isn't a geographic reason necessarily to base manufacturing in America. Whenever I buy an Apple product (not from their brick & mortar store), it ships directly from Shenzhen to my door here in Manhattan (I couldn't care less if it shipped from Texas)
so far none of the few comments here have mentioned it, so I will. It's by and large a difficult task to neatly label anybody into distinct and non-overlapping categories (this person is 'good', 'bad', 'whatever'), simply because there's so many criteria you can use to, well .. when forming an impression of a person. I don't know everything else that Jason does, but I have sort of read the stories / drama, and I'm not commenting on any of that.

The one thing I think Jason deserves credit for, however small, is for yanking HackADay at the very last minute from the sale because he knew it would get shut down by the to-be-new-owners if was sold.

He could just have sold it and not worry about the life and death of HaD, but he did not.
Interesting, but how could collected data be retrieved? Could a wireless transmitter be built to fit on this 0.1mm card?
I would like to respectfully say that this article is only superficially appealing and therefore not proper for HN. This is just a hypothesis without mathematical basis. All you really need to read is the last few paragraphs to see that there isn't any mathematical rigor to it. This is a whole article about speculation about gravity, and it wastes a lot of time trying to hype up a physicist that won't flush out his math.
Finding the Right Co-Founder for Your Startup
Not sure about this year, but last year they accounted for 11% of ticket sales:

http://www.businessinsider.com/3d-films-helped-boost-the-box...

Also, watch Avatar in 3D. It made me a believer.
I don't think americans (being one myself), care as much as the author thinks about stuff being made in america. Maybe in 1986 we did, not in 2010.
I'm an ex-Navy nuke (submarine officer), and this is very likely. A colleague of mine worked on a carrier. Because he was in the (nuclear) engineering department, he had to wear dosimetry no matter where he stood watch.

One month he stood watch in the engineroom in close proximity to the reactors (and shielding). The next month he stood watch on/around the bridge, far away from the reactor but in the sun.

His exposure from just being outside was noticeably higher than when he stood watch next to the reactor.
Apple's done an extraordinary job managing their operating expenses, and I don't think a move to domestic manufacturing would generate the needed premium sales volume to justify the expense. It'd hurt their bottom line.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/12/how-apple-maintains-e...
It figures you downvoted me. You will probably downvote this one too.

So that's what concerned you. The points don't matter. Seriously, they don't mean anything and certainly shouldn't change the way you interact with people. Particularly as you don't know who is doling out the points.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505323
This is pretty awesome, but note this (from the FAQ):

"When you sign up for Amazon Student, you'll receive e-mail alerts for discounts and promotions. If you don't want any more Amazon Student e-mails, you may cancel your Amazon Student membership. If you do this, your Amazon Prime benefits will also end when the membership is canceled."
I think the split between asia making the hardware and america the software is working very well for both sides. The world is round after all. Of course it's cheaper for us this way, but there's also quite a bit of know-how accumulation in asia, that we might find hard to emulate. Like pumping out millions of high DPI Displays in just a few month - don't underestimate that.

I would be really more concerned that asia starts making it's own software and are some-what surprised that they are struggling so much to come up with anything useful.
I think different 3D technologies could account for the in-ness and out-ness. Where you at the same cinema both times?
Jobs already did this with NeXT. It would be interesting to see Apple do this as well.

They have plenty of cash with which to do so though such a project is perhaps not the best diversion of resources for shareholders...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/...
I use my cellphone for phone calls far too much to consider an iPhone.

I like streaming music on my way to work and continue to listen to it at my desk and that would be impossible to do with the iPhone given the lack of AT&T signal at my desk.
I mean, every comment i make is voted down instantly on HN. It doesn't matter what I say or do. I could stop the BP oil spill and it would get voted down!

Perhaps people would like you again if you cut out the painful hypocrisy for once.

I think you're a smart person. You're well aware of the name of your game.
Do you think you can evade the google ban for longer if you maintain your constant, vocal denial?

Or what's the reason for your, frankly, absurd statements that predictably get you nothing but downvotes and critique?

"Vertical Q&A site" is just off the scale on the bullshit meter, and you know that.
Yeah, but his actual claim is that he hired Zuckerberg to develop it. He paid $1,000 up front on the understanding that once it was done on time, they'd have a 50/50 ownership interest, or more in proportion to how long overdue the project went.

According to this guy, it got done, but late, and as a result he owns 84% and Zuckerberg 16%, and Z. then went on and transformed the business several times into today's Facebook Inc., as if he owned it 100%. But he never asserted his claim until now, so unless he's been in a coma or something, his failure to act was an implicit waiver of rights. It's more like a trademark than a copyright situation; undefended trademark infringements are construed as abandonment after a while.
Microsoft's telescope gets a better view of Mars
I would have sworn that the fancy new unibody cases were manufactured domestically.
I agree with you but let's face it, the number of Android devices being sold is increasing each month at a huge rate. Just like Windows outsold Mac, the same will happen with Android. That doesn't mean iPhone will go away though.
This is similar, except that I change razors more often.. Maybe if I had a good technique to clean the blades they'd last longer, though.
Software architects
"but getting a 50% stake in the product. The contract stipulated that Mr. Ceglia would get an additional 1% interest in the business for every day after Jan. 1, 2004, until it was completed."

Wouldn't you structure it so he would lose 1% for every day late after Jan 1,2004?
I hate Amazon Prime. It made me buy tons of awesome books resulting in an awesome credit card bill.
Property values are significantly lower in Pittsburgh, which makes property ownership easier. And the top-quality colleges in the city continue to graduate excellent candidates for tech company employment.

Although a graduate can ship out west, the lower costs in Pittsburgh make the path to ownership shorter. I'll be interested to see if the economic downturn will give graduates pause when thinking about shipping themselves three timezones away into an expensive location, when the cheaper prices in Pittsburgh could offer a lifestyle with less debt.
One of the fun things I learned in this interview is that Sam paid for school with this: http://DinarProfits.com/