skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a chip on my shoulder? I'm speaking as a customer. You're giving me excuses as to why I should compromise my own convenience and security to make your job easier. Why on earth would I care about making your job easier?

Facebook provides value and poor, lazy anti-security undermines that value and puts me in the inconvenient position of thinking of a move [1]. And for what value? So developers don't have to write a switch statement? Seriously?

[1] It's not as simple as "just take your business elsewhere". The only purpose of facebook for me is connecting with friends and family. So going while they all stay is rather pointless. Getting other people, who have a different circle of friends/family, to move with me would be practically impossible.
Home - Hacking is a Trick
Arsenal vs Leeds United – FA Cup Preview – 19th January 2011
Facebook's relationship with the public has always been quite interesting. It presents a quandary: Facebook's main (only?) source of revenue comes from advertising, but if they make too much too public too soon, they'll lose their entire user base. So, they've been making changes over the last few years that greatly facilitate advertising, while minimizing the rate of increase of user dissatisfaction.

It bothers me enormously that users have complacently allowed Facebook to operate in this way. What's more fascinating is the level of innovation we see from a company that employs over 2,000 people: it's not too incredibly impressive. I'm sure most of their work is in maintaining their 60,000 servers, but even still, for the amount of salaried engineers they have, wouldn't we expect something more impressive than a product that has remained relatively unchanged for the last few years?
IBM becomes the first company to be granted 5000 US patents in a single year
"Why yes, I'll give you offline access to all my Facebook info"

Isn't that said by millions of (real, non-geek) people every day?
Try beta.
The chips in the iPod came from PortalPlayer, but Steve Jobs had a huge role in creating the UI, he spent a lot of time tweaking it. I don't think any of the above persons have the same ability to tweak a (hardware) product into something very usable and useful.

(If usability is making a product easy to use, 'useful-ability' should be making the product fulfilling customers wants/needs.)
OpenSUSE Board Forced to Terminate Membership
>This is one of the many reasons why downloading something without the copyright holder's OK is not the same thing as theft.

This is pure nonsense. It's true that no inventory is lost when a product is downloaded and in some cases no sale as well. But you'll never convince me (and it's impossible to prove) that every single person who ever downloaded any software wouldn't have purchased it had they not had the option of stealing it.

The issue is that software has huge up front costs. If people were to follow your "morals" there would be no reasonable way to recoup those up front costs, since it would just be ok to take what you want.

I do tend to think that the fact that the creator continues to get full price long after they've past production costs and made a healthy profit could use some scrutiny (i.e. is there a better way to do this), but software is hardly the only industry where this is the case.
Programmers and Micromanaging
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Social VPN Project: Free & Open-source P2P Social Virtual Private Network
We should really worry about Facebook entering the retail market, taking from Amazon a considerable number of consumers. I fear that one day, Facebook will have its own version of Amazon, where products are suggested based on the buying habits of the people you know.

"Hey X, did you know that Y's birthday is in three days? You should consider buying Product A for her! Buy it now and we'll take off 20% AND throw in free shipping!!!"

It's coming.
For me, a 'rockstar' programmer is a kind of hacker that I look up too (or other programmers look up to).

It's just like how maniac teens (or just any 'metal-heads') patronize or look at some favorite rockstar as their icon / model (or something close to this).

To demonstrate my point, I'd say people like Linus Torvalds, Richard M. Stallman, Donald Knuth, Ray Kurzweil,... are RockStars! Even Jeff Atwood could pass for one to some extent :-)
But (part of) the point is, building a human brain in a non-biological substrate is not a miracle. It would be a miracle in the same way that transistors and penicillin are, not in the way that Jesus' resurrection is. I.e., a fantastic, happy, unlikely but possible event that will change the world for the better.

After all, we know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of skulls. The question is then not to push the theoretical boundaries of computational capability beyond some theoretical level - but merely to achieve it again artificially.

We've managed to copy birds, fish, we've sent people to the moon, we've sent probes outside the solar system, we've beaten countless diseases, we've extended our own lifespans by decades, we've created monuments of human culture... why assume that we won't achieve this too?
Presumably there are some also-smart analysts who are predicting X - $2 billion, then?

All I'm saying is that we should also be prepared for the possibility that the earnings report is less, rather than more, than expected. If it were not so, then they wouldn't be very sensible expectations.
Halogy: New Open Source CMS Built on PHP Framework CodeIgniter
i'm constantly floored by the scale and quality of infrastructure in japan, and not just tokyo even out woop woop they have rail, road, water and telco infrastructure that makes our efforts look feeble.

amazing shit you can do when you run public debt at close to 100% of GDP :)
How can I scale redis Pub/Sub system when I need more messages/second?
>I would get a lot more books, while contributing just as much to the publishers' fixed costs.

Gain for you, no gain for them.

>it's unlikely that they'll run out of things to sell me.

I find this hard to believe. Currently it sounds like you spend up to your max periodically. If every buying cycle you were able to completely empty your list, it's hard to imagine that there would never be a time that that list wouldn't be less then your max budgeted about, as it is now.

>What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money.

No they're not. You've already explained that you're already spending all that you're comfortable spending. There is virtually no chance that you'd spend more. As I explained, it's much more likely you'd spend less.

>But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.

What do you want to do that you can't? It will sync to at least 3 devices (I only have 3 applicable devices, so I don't know if I could push it to more). You can't loan it to people, that's true. You also can't copy it around as a file, but I don't see how that's a meaningful restriction.
Crackers aren't your customers. Don't waste time/money on them.
I suggest you consider games into your model of the app world. Even if you are not a gamer it seems to be a strong component.
Flag, don’t comment.
No, often the code is slightly different and doesn't run correctly in MATLAB. The last time I tried was December for probabilistic signals and random signals. I'm the student so the problem wasn't me, it was the TA's who ran the code and gave you a perfect score if it ran and produced exactly the same results or a zero if it didn't produce the same results.

Personally, I use sci/numpy for all of my statistics/numerical analysis needs.
Article Summary: attack the very premise of achieving general intelligence by attacking narrow AI techniques such as machine learning and their obvious inadequacies, and then acknowledging that they have not in fact, accomplished general intelligence.
> Will people still be interested in lolcats ten years from now? Almost certainly not

I disagree. The fundamental reason why lolcats are interesting is that people find cats cute. Cats are a superstimulus that hooks into the human instinct to look after our young. Since human psychology isn't going to change in the next 10 years, lolcats will still be popular.
+ thousands more lines of JavaScript in the form of libraries.

And let's not forget the millions of lines for the browser and the underlying operating system!
Bertrand Serlet was already at NeXT. He designed Workspace Manager, so he must have been there since around 1988.

I think that makes Serlet one of Jobs's most long-term colleagues. His deep experience of software evolution processes may be one of Apple's most underestimated assets.

The NeXT platform has gone through seven different CPU architectures (by my count) and an enormous API merger with the Mac OS, yet shows no signs of getting bogged down. Most other companies can't seem to manage an operating system for even a decade before it loses its momentum under feature bloat and internal fighting over direction (c.f. Windows Vista, Symbian).

(edit -- I initially wrote that Serlet designed Interface Builder for NeXT, but that was another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Hullot.)
Pub/Sub is receiver-intensive, not publish-intensive, so basically if you have many subscribers the best thing you can do is to setup a few slaves.

PUBLISH commands are propagated on slaves. So you can attach your subscribers in a random slave.

Another approach is, if you don't have any pattern matching subscriber, to shard based on the hash of the key.
Iphone spy software
It took IBM 50 years to get its first 5,000 patents and that milestone was hit 40 years ago back in 1961.

<pedantic>
That was 50 years ago, not 40.
</pedantic>
I only see spams from most of the msg. I think you are doing a right thing trying to capitalize while the hype is there. Based on alexa, it is dying out already.
Git over http(s)
Whether or not we reach "nanobots" doesn't matter much te me, I just want my flying cars! Is that too much to ask?
That doesn't make sense to me. Either something is equal, or it is different. Not to say one is better than the other, but the mere fact that there is a difference defeats the notion that there is equality.
fwiw, Phil Schiller was responsible for the scroll wheel on the iPod

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/1...

The idea for the scroll wheel was suggested by Apple's head of marketing, Phil Schiller, who in an early meeting said quite definitively, "The wheel is the right user interface for this product."
Schiller also suggested that menus should scroll faster the longer the wheel is turned, a stroke of genius that distinguishes the iPod from the agony of competing players.
> Will people still be interested in lolcats ten years from now?

It's a fair point. Another questionable investment: Those guys with the Apple II. Who is going to be interested in having an Apple II ten years hence? The guys peddling DOS are some scam artists, too.

If only smart people could shift their business from one success into another, leveraging their talent, assets and experience in the process...

(And before the pedants jump in: of course ICHC isn't anywhere close to the same level of impact.)
ASK HN : How much damage would be caused if Google Went Down?
Imagine if Google, the giant that it is, did go down; no services accessible / available, for even an hour, or worse a day or more. What do you think would be the impact on us all? Or at least on other technologies?

And what technologies / businesses would be affected the most?
EMC's Record Breaking Product Launch - Chuck's Blog
Articles like this always remind me of an old blog post by Steve Yegge, or rather a few paragraphs from it about Dan Friedman: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht... (the part I mean starts half-way through the article, search for "Friedman")
Hifi is iPod + AirPort Express. Apple tried to do speakers but found out they didn't have the competence for doing that. Besides, there is not much profit in selling speakers unless you are B&W. Amplifiers are an insignificant detail, somewhat like cables.

Even B&W has realized this: see all their iPod speaker products. As more and more teens become twenty-somethings with a wage, I expect this product line to grow to be a significant part of B&Ws revenue.

Young people (e.g. teens) don't use CD players. A CD player for them is like LP players: a historical artifact of old generations. Most radio channels today don't have good content, and the good stuff is available over the net. So no receiver either. The only source left for many young people is the computer/iPod/iPad/iPhone.

So Apple has the Hifi solved. They're just waiting for the old generation to get that CD players should be put into the trashbin like they did with the VCR player.
Import In-n-Out shipments to Seattle daily?
Here's my question on climate change: it is by now widely accepted that climate change is responsible both for droughts and for flooding rains. That is, climate change can give us more rain at some times and less rain at others.

I'm willing to accept that. But then how do we know that it wasn't acting to give us less rain on this particular occasion? How do we know that climate change didn't save us from an even worse flood?
As a Facebook engineer, I'd say the score is 10 or 11, depending on your interpretation of the tools item.
ACS Lawyer fails to turn up in court
10 things to know about iPad2
"Division by zero" and "illegal instruction" don't sound exactly exotic. And even with a proper error message, a crshy app is perceived as defective. Assuming that the users will google the message is a long shot. I'd assume that most would simply show your binary the trash can / recycle bin / dev/null and move on.

Your second strategy sounds very interesting. Especially because you can A/B test the licensing period and the text that prompt users to register even in people who have been using the trial version for a long time.

However, I don't understand how it helps paying customers.
There is a large discussion to be had and I do believe that I have some novel points to make on the subject, but what I would like to do at this point is note that just because you can't imagine another way that this could be done, it doesn't mean that it can't be done another way. You called this a fact, and that's a strong claim that I urge you to retract.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

To approach this from a different perspective, imagine somebody saying the following at about 1890:

"This ignores the fact that if we ever do make a heavier-than-air flying machine it will either be via (a) reverse-engineering of birds or (b) some kind of evolutionary algorithm."

That would have turned out to be false.
Actually I wonder how you get your 7 day refund for online orders under EU law with the appstore. Anyone any experience with it?
This couldn't be much less funny.
Absolutely right and the software came from a company called Pixo which was founded by an ex-Apple employee (the company was acquired by Apple shortly after the iPod shipped). While the interface was mocked up by a guy named Tim Wasko (who I believe is still at Apple)

Jobs' role is best described like this (from History of the iPod: http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/origin-of-the-ipod.html#0)

Steve Jobs took a very active role in the project, scheduling frequent meetings with the directors from Fadell's group and PortalPlayer. During these meetings he would tell them in detail what issues he had with the device, whether it was the interface, sound quality, or the size of the scroll wheel.

This was rare for an Apple project at the time, and it reassured the leaders in the group that the project would not be axed immediately.

So while Jobs was absolutely involved and an influence he didn't "design the interface"
JDK 7 is Feature Complete
"intelligence is not subject to the Malthusian laws"

Really? Brains need food (carbohydrate ->-> atp). Last I checked, computers need energy.
Indeed. Belief that strong AI is never possible is also religious. If the human mind is simply a chemical computer (and, science currently says it is), it can (eventually) be simulated with sufficiently powerful hardware.
Hifi

Apple did have a shot at this with the iPod Hi-Fi. It was a speaker system with an iPod dock. It didn't do too well and it was canned in 2007, a year and a half after its introduction.
Wow, your comment made mine go from +7 to +1.

Ha. Sorry about that! I usually only downvote things that are materially wrong or offensive but I know lots of people use it as a vote to say they disagree. Your comment also had a sort of "typical American" derogatory feel to it which you can only get away with until someone points it out. Most people reading HN are probably Americans you know. ;-)

As for the price movement, it is relevant only in that it is exactly the sort of knee-jerk reaction that Apple was avoiding by announcing on a holiday weekend. The movement we see when the market opens will be different given that people have had time to absorb the news, even without the earnings announcement.
The smartphone market is exploding (esp. in the rest of the world), so even if Apple's market share stay the same, they will sell a lot more iPhones.

The CDMA iPhone will expand the market even more: think China.
you can't tell us all that and not show us the game!

what is it?? and how is it not earning a livable wage with 2 million users?
As I said in a previous conversation with tptacek, I support OpenID-only mostly because I think some developers strain their intelligence making toast. These examples don't exactly disillusion me. The only case where I can see that security would be a legitimately difficult thing to add on would be some of the banks (which may have to interface with ancient authentication systems which can't support a secure password).
The New York Times Fails To Deliver Stuxnet’s Creators
How to convert videos to Xbox 360 video format
Read the step-by-step guide to learn how to convert videos to Xbox 360 video format for playback with Xbox 360.
I think it would be religion to not believe that it is theoretically possible to build a device which emulates the human brain - sort of like the belief that it was impossible to make 'organic' compounds out of compounds from 'inorganic' origin because they lack the vital force.

Whether it will ever be possible to do it on a physically possible Turing machine in real time is perhaps slightly more debatable.
As a Canadian citizen who has worked hard to get a US visa to be able to work in SF/Silicon Valley, but has the 'easier' option of being based north of the border, I'm not really clear why a startup would want to be based out of Canada.

I'm not against the idea of a startup visa for Canada but the site startupvisa.ca might want to sell some of the benefits of being based in Canada because I'm not seeing them.
The brain game
The current Apple TV contains the same cpu and graphics chip, and amount of memory as the iPad[1]

Given that the iPad has decent games performance at 1024x768, I could see the Apple TV handling most iPad games at 720p, or running them at a lower resolution and upscaling (as the consoles do with many games, for example Halo 3/ODST[2] and GTA IV[3]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV#Technical_specificatio...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_3#Graphics

[3] http://www.ripten.com/2008/04/29/confirmed-gta-iv-ps3-is-not...
Lisp isn't good enough; both the structures and the functions are to be statically typed, that's the point. If we didn't care about static typing, this whole debate would be moot, and one could write the compiler in C with tag-discriminated unions if you like (which is in fact the AST format for the Delphi compiler).
Bringing computer vision to Windows
I think prophecies (or predictions) are a long standing cultural hack. I remain extremely unimpressed by Kurzweil's predictions. Just because most people are uninterested in making predictions doesn't make them especially hard. Just about everything he's claimed as 'correct' was being researched in some form at the time he made the predictions, and was certainly in science fiction long before that.

So considering that, mostly he put dates on a random set of things coming to pass. Then he uses extremely generous criteria to define when something he predicted has occurred and essentially throws out the actual timeframe when doing so. And that was the only bit he really predicted in the first place.

Somehow it works on people though. Just go ahead and anoint him your High Priest, save yourself the confusion.
The Universe in High Definition
Any good PHP/MYSQL QA systems?
Fruit Flies Help Solve Computer Problem
FWIW, I just turned down an internship at a Chicago HFT company to work for Google this summer. I found the interview process and working conditions to be pretty similar to the tech industry, actually. The clincher for me was that I think it's easier to go tech -> finance than the other way around.
It's an email address and a personal website. How expensive should it be to have a quality version of both?
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I love your country
What is the best way to test an Internet startup idea
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People were saying the same things before the iPod came out. And then before the Iphone came out. And then before the iPad came out. I don't see where they might take it next, but I'm not going to bet against them.

At some point they'll fall into irrelevance like all big companies do, but I don't think that will be this year. With or without Jobs.
The amount of energy needed by brains is fixed. The amount needed by computers can be decreased.

Also, the upper bound on how much energy is available to us should we really need, from the nearest power source, is some 6-9 orders of magnitude greater than the amount we currently take from it as a whole planet (most of it being wasted). Food growth, on the other hand, is much more limited by many other factors such as ecosystem impact, limited land area, failing crops, speed of production of seeds, and all sorts of pesky logistical issues...
"Kurzweil has a solid history of predictions going back at least 21 years"

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/01/kurzw...

Confirmation bias. You're not looking hard enough at the stuff he says that didn't come true.

Even so, "past performance is no indicator of future success. You could have said the same thing about the goldilocks economy in 2001 but the notion that the economy could continue exponentially forever was pretty dumb. All I have to say about believing in exponential things, is, please, please consider the bacterial growth curve.

http://faculty.irsc.edu/FACULTY/TFischer/images/bacterial%20...

(that's a log graph) See, if you were an intelligent e coli during growth phase, you might notice that everything was exponential and hunky dory, and there was no end in sight.
How is facebook making money from ad revenue? It was touted before that ads on social networks didn't work well, because users didn't go to facebook to look for anything, so users didn't click on ads.

But now, they seem to be making money hand over fist. How are the fb ads different now?
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