skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a difference between a library author thinking his users are too stupid and a library author reserving the right to replace his tree-map-with-cached-most-recently-accessed-element with a hashmap in the next version.
Sounds like the kind of guy I want to work with on a daily basis even if half the time he spent yelling at me for doing something stupid. After a few months I'd be such a better programmer.
In many cases you cannot read the entire article in Flipboard, and must click the Read On The Web button, which takes you to the content in the context intended by the publisher.

Slightly off topic, the Flipbook experience of HN is pretty good except that there is no way to get to the most important part of HN content: the comments page.
I dunno... I think it would be essentially the same for new users (since they have to look up things anyway), and it would certainly feel like PHP...
Not really, Apple, while it is the loud one, does not have the volume shipped Nokia has.

Remember, there are much more folks who want phone than those who want pocket computer or toy.
Why do you believe human experience is not amenable to reason and analysis by other humans, but quantum physics is? Shouldn't it be easier to reason about the familiar than the unfamiliar?

In any case, I could make the same argument about different types of human experience, and you'd still reject it. Do you believe that only devout muslims can rationally opine on honor killings, or that only racists can discuss racism?
at least the bottom levels of regular military hierarchies are usually quite well defined in terms of structure, titles and numbers. which is sort of the whole point: people know what is expected of them.

how much similarity there is between various countries I don't know, but it would surprised me if at least western military hierarchies are very different. (similarity between nations makes cooperation easier, but where there are differences there usually exist mappings. for instance between different systems of rank)
Um, yes. Unless anyone is being arrested for a criminal offense, than yes. They did think they would get away with it - and they have. Neither the words "criminal" nor "jail" were even in that NYT article.

Sad fact is that the entire fiasco was a simple business decision. No one goes to jail, and if they are caught they simply pay a fine.

Personally, I think every signature on their SEC fillings during that period should do jail time. But hey, what do I know.
The interface between a superclass and its subclasses is just another interface (or rather say, a pair of interfaces: sub-calls-super and super-calls-sub). However, many if not most superclass-subclass interfaces are not designed and documented like proper interfaces.
"In C++, friends can touch each other's private parts"
Sorry to disappoint you Compay.
David Warren, Inventor of ‘Black Box,’ Dies at 85
Please Criticize my Fitness Site That Tracks User-Generated Data
Statement by Apple on White iPhone 4
Scott Aaronson on Penrose's argument (why machines can't think)
There are just lots of filters.
For English speaking countries at least, TOEFL scores ultimately determine who's allowed to study abroad (and where) or able to find employment elsewhere, so it could be argued that it's partially selective based on a person's financial background (and their ability to get personal training or get into good high schools).

Those with good conversational skills aren't necessarily those who score well on standardized tests, and vice versa.
Moreover, to get a work visa, those who can speak a foreign language well still usually need to have another marketable skill, particularly in places where the law requires a business to prove they've made effort to hire domestically first - making things difficult for people who've majored in a foreign language or any field where there's lots of competition.

Most people I know hope to either get their TOEFL scores high enough to transfer to a foreign school, or get into a job that will let them transfer out of the country.
The switch to Github Pages
For God's sake, follow your dreams
Johns Hopkins University researchers did a video where they got the RFID code from one of those gasoline auto-passes that you put on your keychain. It was a video where they sit next to someone with the RFID pass in their pocket, scan it with their laptop and then use the code at a gas station. I am at work and the link it blocked, but I do believe this here is the video and information.
http://rfidanalysis.org/
Already discussed here in-depth: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306434

(and about 10 more I don't feel like linking)
Sounds like a business opportunity to me? Build a specialized service that handles those for mom'n'pops, small businesses, etc?
This is my second go at trying to make something useful in my trek on becoming a web developer.

My previous submission:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902571
So submarines with deformable surfaces and glider technology are what--- chopped liver?
Skyhook Is Watching You
Why are flag/negative votes not transparent?
Nope. Good thought though
Aleph Null?
Uncle Sam Kicks Out Legal Immigrants for Down Profits in Recession
Download YouTube Videos In iPhone
It's not that simplistic. It's important to go after a mix of companies (of different sizes, strength) so that you can set precedence, get quick settlements (i.e., funding to help playing chicken with the deep pockets), etc.
A lot of books on "agent technology". All I know about this topic is the popular press gave it a lot of attention a few years ago. Anyone care to give a thumbnail sketch on this topic?

EDIT: this is the best thumbnail I could quickly find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture
In-Depth Book Review: The Computer as Crucible
Ask HN: Can you reccommend a good online card processing service for the UK?
I'm building a site for selling audio downloads. I expect a low volume of sales, initially and therefore prefer to pay per-transaction. I'm planning to use the Active Mercant rubygem.

So far, nochex looks like an option that would work. I've looked into Paypal express, but they're not native to the UK, and they charge extra for currency conversion and cross border fees.
Mobile software comparison infographic
Biology is making enormous strides as well. I could see that having an impact on energy and food production.

Of course, that's driven in part by advances in computation, just like a lot of other technology. Plasma physics, for example, which could yet make a big difference for energy.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.

As a father of two wonderful, intelligent and amazing little boys who have never been required to endure anything close to what the author's daughter is faced with, I say:

This is probably the most beautiful thing I have ever read. It not only highlights 3 wonderful yet perfectly "normal" people in a way that sums up what it means to be human, it addresses the study brilliantly, mirroring exactly as I feel.
Chrome extension for submiting articles to HN
I actually tried to read Penrose's book a few years ago. The operative word over here is tried. At one level I wasn't mature enough to understand it, but the things I did understand and could imagine made me feel that he spends more time elevating human thought to a pedestal and pointing towards some unknown unknown than working on the idea. This might be subjective, but I agree with Minsky. Even though I didn't know who Minsky was at the time I felt exactly the same way and left it.

His argument is along these lines;

1.) There are things in Mathematics that are non computable and cannot be expressed in algorithms.
2.) We can understand them. To what degree is left unanswered.
3.) Computers are algorithmic.
4.) Hence they can't think and we can.

Perhaps, what we need is a new way to do things not more mathematical models. I once went to a talk by Rodney Brooks# and he pointed out that we don't make a mathematical model of everything, and neither must we expect a computer to do so to accomplish the same task. He argued that we should turn towards simplicity instead of creating complex structures which fail at the slightest breeze. He showed that complexity can and will arise from simplicity.

A fly can execute complex and beautiful maneuvers and yet it does not have a complex nervous system built into it. Whenever we try to make that fly we tend to put in a lot of math and code to compute the flightpath and other such nitty gritties, but the fly cannot do all of that and yet it for now it outperforms and model we make. How? As Mr. Brooks points out perhaps there is nothing more to it than closely connecting the sensors with the actuators. To prove this he set out to make simple machines which didn't do much computation and yet could perform complex behavior that eluded even the best algorithms.

An excellent example of this is Cog. Cog actually started interacting with researchers in games despite having an extremely simple architecture. In fact seeing the videos of Cog and Kismet in action as a 4-6 year old is the reason why I fell in love with AI in the first place. To me it was and still is magic.(See: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/v...)

This doesn't mean that complex models aren't needed, but instead I think that sooner or later there will be a series Aha! moments that will rephrase this problem. Perhaps, the problem is with us we might not be seeing things in the right way.

I love how Minsky ended things;

>>>No one can tell where that will lead and only one thing's sure right now: there's something wrong with any claim to know, today, of any basic differences between the minds of men and those of possible machines.<<<

#After that, I spent a lot of time reading him up and I highly recommend Flesh and Machines (http://www.amazon.com/Flesh-Machines-Robots-Will-Change/dp/0...) and a few papers (http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/publications.html) that he wrote to anyone who wants to understand AI. If someone as moronic as me could understand it anyone can.

[edit: I had a dyslexic d'oh!]
This is a little weird. It's not 'padding' earnings, since Intel really did pay them the money, and they really did make it. What the SEC is saying is that they didn't tell investors that there was a risk, here. But the risk was "If we think using AMD is worth losing these payments, we'll do it."

That's not terrible. It's like saying "If we think our CEO is incompetent, we may hire someone else, even if we have to pay him more." Yes, that's a hidden risk to earnings.
Oracle DDL occurs as transaction per command.

CREATE TABLE A (b number); -- one transaction;
INSERT INTO a(b) VALUES(1);
CREATE TABLE c (d number); -- another transaction, commits the insert.
Apple wants to use the actual compiler code in XCode and that wouldn't be possible with GPL and their current license. That is also why clang is structured as libraries.
OK, I've got my facts backwards... Good for them on Maemo/MeeGo, I though they'd completely lost it there.

But Symbian 3rd gen (aka. Symbian^3) is indeed different from S60 (which has 4 editions: 1, 2, 3 and 5), with 5th edition becoming Symbian^1. As a matter of fact, Symbian^4 (in which the current UI is replaced by the Nokia Qt SDK) is positioned for a 2011 launch according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_platform

It's the Qt SDK that I counted as a new platform in itself.

Long story short: Focus. Nokia can't have two promising and incompatible smartphone platforms.
I don't know what qualifies as a "qualitatively different levels of abstraction", but for all practical purposes, you're never done. Given a formal system for building numbers, you have a sequence B(n) of largest numbers created with n symbols in that formal system. You can always step outside that formal system and make a construction that leaves someone stuck in the formal system in the dust. For example, take B(B(n)). You could then formalize this process of stepping outside of formal systems, only to find yourself in a new formal system. The only limits on how fast you can "go meta" are limits of your mind.
Good recommendations. I have read about 20 books on his lists and have them in my library. The difference for me is that some of these were very difficult for me to work through!

Off topic, but: I am reading "Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce" right now and can strongly recommend it: it characterizes different types of problems that can be solved with map reduce, possible solutions, and tradeoffs for different approaches. Really a useful little book.
White iPhone 4 delayed until later this year
Did you see where he admits he's wrong? "these are logical possibilities". IE, Penrose made a logical argument, and he didn't cover all the cases. Maybe this one is clearer: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/27/nnp/17540.html
Read before setting a price:

http://chrisashworth.org/blog/2010/06/09/my-2-bucks-on-prici...
Flagging is not negative karma, it is marking something as spam. You don't see a flag link because you don't have enough karma.

As to your post, a new version of PostGres is interesting to many people. Release of open source P2P project - not so much. However, your post is actually a blog post that has some interesting info in, so I'd suggest with a better title your post would have appeared much less spammy and encouraged more clicks (e.g. "As of today, JXTA 2.6 is a mature library for P2P in Java". But not that. Just like that. Not that.)

As to transparency, no-one sees how many flags a post has (except pg I guess and some automated algorithm.) People must simply make an honest assessment themselves if they think a post is off-topic/spam. By not showing the number of flags pile-on effects are avoided. Multiple flags are required to kill a post, so it would have to be a large, shady conspiracy to bury your P2P software - perhaps the flags came from riaa1 through riaa10!
Yeah I don't understand this either. Is there any way to sell a closed-source piece of software which integrates with Wordpress? What's the difference from software like www.copilot.com which uses GPL software (TightVNC) at its core?
Also available for Firefox, etc. Feedback much appreciated!
Adaptive payments just started accepting credit card transactions:

https://www.x.com/people/BaldGeek/blog/2010/06/25/its-offici...
Alright, I'm sold. I never really considered any if those circumstances. I'm still feeling my way around.
This is what happens when a field matures; companies transition to "managing assets" and source commoditized products and services rather than retaining detailed control and knowlegde themselves. This promotes cost efficiency and is a valid business practice.

At least as long as the field they operate in is stable.

The problem is that it makes businesses vulnerable to disruptive change, and when disruptive change does occur companies usually struggle to re-evolve talents that they shedded when their business matured. The trick is to realize the necessity of restructuring what they do and how and to do so before loss of revenue makes it hard or impossible. The first reaction, though, is often to cut cost. Which is a great way to start the downward spiral.

It is almost like drowning: all your natural reflexes conspire against your survival.

I can't remember what this cycle is called, but I read about it in some textbook used at business schools, so it is probably part of a typical MBA curriculum. (The rest of the book was too dull for me to actually remember its title).

When Apple raised the standard for handsets and brought handset software significantly closer to state of the art of software in general, handset manufacturers were caught napping. Then they panicked. And now they are taking on water.
The tolerances they are trying to achieve with the white really is the cause of the delay

Can someone please explain the pedantry?
I appreciate the motives behind colour branding and so on but how specific can white be?

Plus, how can they justify the time spent perfecting the colour against the potential sales if they were to just release it now with a white colour that is relatively similar to the ideal?
Thou Shalt Use TLS?
Study Links More Time Spent Sitting to Higher Risk of Death
Shocked he did not use this title:

"Private" Keyword Considered Harmful
I couldn't agree more. As someone who deals with implementing and customising 3rd party libraries a lot, it's highly frustrating when things are private just for the sake of it. Things should be made private when there's a specific way of accessing/altering that variable, not because you don't think anyone will need it.
Give More, Get Superpowers
Both of those arguments in no way counter the notion that the brain, as a physical device, can be simulated mechanically- they merely suggest that a simulation would have to be more fine-grained than neuroscience currently accepts. This is much like arguing that since Go has a massively larger game tree than Chess, writing a program to play Go as well as a human is impossible. Intractable? Maybe. Impossible? Clearly not.

It's also worth quoting the second-to-last sentence of the second article you posted:

"The book's thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics."
There's a WWDC session on Xcode 4 - free on iTunes U for registered developers. It might be worth a watch, as they will probably outline the most significant changes, as well as indoctrinate you with the belief that these changes are major improvements over the old way of doing things.
Is MS only 2 years behind on this? Usually they're around 4 aren't they? I imagine we'll see some mock ups anytime soon. Take that iPad/iPhone.
TechCast Live: Toward a Universal VM, Episode 11
I think you've found an interesting problem to solve.

However, it seems like the opposite approach would work better. Users would signal that planning an activity, and their friends would be notified (somehow) and could click a simple 'yes' or 'no'.

I think something more like a real-time evite would make more sense (at least to me).

I'm 31 though - so perhaps out of the target market.
Purely out of interest anyone know what in the production process could be causing this?
Actually, they proposed to make a $10 laptop, and the device in the article appears to be the result of that effort. Here's an article from four years ago covering the proposal:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2019126.cms
The argument that computers can't think derives from the idea that there are noncomputational processes at work in the brain. Essentially, we don't know how certain thoughts arrive in our mind. We can't create an algorithm to mimic our chain-of-thought generator.

But that doesn't mean we can't create a computer that can have similar noncomputational "thoughts".

People must choose, when a computer need not choose. What I mean is, a computer can shut down. A human mind cannot -- and continue to live. When a computer "observes" -- so to speak -- stimuli it cannot handle or are beyond its capacity, it does not make random choices about what to do now. We do not trust randomness. Sometimes, however, humans have no option but randomness. This is why in a crowd of 100 each one will react differently to the same stimulus. If it suddenly gets very cold, some will shiver, some will leave, some will get up and jump around.

In most cases, Computer systems aren't even allowed to accept input that isn't known to be valid. Minds have to all the time.

When you begin to predict the future and that's largely what the human mind is -- a future prediction machine, then it becomes even more complex. It requires memory. Concoctions from memory or assumptions. We don't let computers assume.

In many ways, we are holding computers back. Because we are afraid. We are afraid of what they will decide for us. We are afraid of random. We need control. We haven't subjected computers to survival of the fittest.

If we did, then by the law of large numbers, eventually, like I suppose is true with many humans, one will survive that we can't explain how. We won't know how that computer made all the right decisions the whole time.

We don't know how to program computers to accept any input. White is the maximum color. Black is the darkest. But computers could see much darker than black and much brighter than white. How can we control something like that? We can't. We won't be able to. It will see and know thinks we can't imagine.

It's silly to think computers can't.
Nobody thinks it will suddenly happen now. They think that Moore's Law will continue for another fifty or seventy years, and that somewhere in there, computers or computer-human hybrids will start to be smarter than unenhanced humans. What happens after that, we're not smart enough right now to predict.
I have to admit Sibal has been doing good things with his education portfolio such as Eliminating 10th Standard board exams and allowing students to pick optional subjects regardless of stream. Fingers crossed for this and other ambitious projects succeeding.
They are in the sense that they need to be picky about the cars they drive.

I've been using a manual transmission ever since I took my driver's license 10 years ago. At first I also drove a shitty car ... gears wouldn't shift unless you knew how to touch the gearstick :)

Now I can drive just about anything, with no accommodations necessary. Changing gears is also in my reflex and it doesn't bother me ... I just don't think about it. I can also eat a sandwich or talk to the phone with no hands-free while driving, although that's considered a bad practice that's also illegal :)
Ok, I get your suggestion about title. You say my post has interesting info.

Problem is, I still don't know whether people considered it a spam or whether there has been a glitch last week (I mean, why hasn't it been displayed on the main page?).

I have no problem if some people found it a spam, but I think I have a right to know then. Isn't it a legitimate request? There must be a possibility to display that info to the poster only?

P.S.: I am adding my link here again so people can judge whether it is spam:

http://adamman71.blogspot.com/2010/07/jxtajxse-26-is-out_433...

I'd love to have people's opinion. Thanks !!!
Hypocrite has nothing to do with it. He's free, as a developer, to create derived works from GPL code, and nobody else is free to claim ownership of his work but him. He can use the stuff he created all he wants.

What he's not free to do is distribute those works without complying with the GPL or otherwise coming to an agreement with the copyright holders to allow him to do so.
No way. This is accounting fraud, plain and simple. It was a massive cash kick-back from a supplier that was disguised as regular earnings or revenue to keep Wall St. expectations and Dell's stock price up.

Who knows how much Dell and other managers in the know profited from this by cashing out stock or options for years while the rest of the investing public held the bag? They should probably be in jail.
This is extremely off topic but I really need to say this.

>>>When I lived in such communities<<<

I am happy for you. I know you must have gone through a lot of pain, but it makes me happy that you survived and thrived.

Take care.
I should have clarified it better, my apologies. But yes, OpenTable is a very good example. Restaurants pay to use the software, but do receive any value from using OpenTable unless they market it to their customers that the restaurant uses OpenTable and allows patrons to make reservations online.
It's padding because if you read closely, toward the end of the article, Dell was clearly fine-tuning the rebate amount at the end of each quarter so it would match whatever target they had.

Intel played along and knew why Dell was asking for specific rebate amounts.