skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure you can appreciate that I have to respect the confidentiality with which I've been entrusted as a Google employee. This includes not only commenting on internal matters I do know about but also matters which it may appear I have knowledge of. It's not in my interest or Google's for me to unwittingly start a rumour because of something I carelessly say.

Wave predates me joining Google. My thoughts on it predate Google (I think I wrote a blog post about it some time last year).

So, just to be clear, any views expressed here are strictly my own. I'm sure you understand.
The devices look cool from a technical perspective. It could use a few more sensors (GPS, gyro/movement, temp, etc.) but I'm sure that will come.

The only problem, I think, is that they're not very stylish. A bit too large/clunky looking. I'm not sure how to fix that while keeping the display a useful size. But that what geniuses like you guys are for!
Capital Factory was (and still is) a great accelerator for our company. I highly recommend it - we checked the boxes on everything that we wanted to accomplish and then some.
- Built new product/website
- Refined business model and pricing model
- Pivoted into a larger market
- Raised Series A round
- Hired employees

The advisors/investors are very accessible and also a lot of fun to be around. Summer of 2010 was the most productive summer of my career.
The author is Peter Siebel, a fairly well-known lisp hacker and author of Practical Common Lisp. While he's not a C++ programmer (and doesn't claim to be), you can't say he's not a real hacker.

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Hyperbole, yes, but there's truth to it. Apple simply is in a position to make these demands right now; the test will be whether they scale back their demands once the market has matured to the point where they no longer have that leverage.
> Oh, and the subscriptions offered within iOS apps must be the same price or less as the company's other offerings

No. If Apple isn't forced into a climbdown, those vendors not making a >30% margin on digital subscriptions will either be forced to raise prices across the board or dump the iPhone app.
Watching Watson's avatar gave a little insight about what the software may have been doing. The results, based upon that avatar. The % is its confidence in its #1 response.

Category Clue Watson#1Resp % rsult otcm
----------- ------------ ------------ -- ----- ----
Alt Meaning belief view 70 right Brad
Alt Meaning horse foot shoe 68 right won
Lit Chars split person Hyde 71 right won
Beatles guy pain Jude 98 right won
Olympic Odd 2008 perfect Michael Phelp 93 right won
Name Decade Disneyland 1950s 87 right Ken
Final Front black hole Event horizon 97 right won
Lit Chars Beowolf Grendel 97 right won
Final Front Michelango Last Judgemnt 97 right won
Beatles title gal Lady Madonna 90 right won
Olympic Odd 1908 city London 69 right won
Name Decade Emp St Bldg 1930s 50 right Brad
Beatles Silver Hammr Maxwell 98 right won
Lit Chars his victims Harry Potter 37 wrong Brad
Alt Meaning piece wood stick 96 right won
Final Front Latin ending finis 97 wrong lost
Beatles John mother Julia 97 right Ken
Lit Chars Les Miz Jean Valjean 76 right won
Olympic Odd 1976 epee Pentathelon 85 right won
Name Decade Klaus Barbie 2002 11 wrong Ken
Olympic Odd George Eyser leg 61 wrong lost
Alt Meaning bent arm Knee 40 wrong Ken
Name Decade Oreos 1920s 57 wrong lost
Final Front paper limit Envelope 61 right Brad
Alt Meaning students chic 82 wrong lost
Final Front summit peak 65 wrong Brad
Name Decade Kitty Hawk 1900s 17 right Brad
Olympic Odd sole member Olympic Games 20 wrong Ken
Beatles died church Eleanor Rigby 98 right won
Lit Chars evilness Sauron 74 right won
> Apple just gave up the content app space to Android.

* There is no android tablet (or android for tablet, for that matter

* The android market does not support subscriptions

> Do you think the Economist, the Financial Times, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Rdio and others are really going to hand over 30% of their subscriber revenue?

Depends on one thing and one thing only: do they believe they can reach (at least 70% of) those clients an other way. If they don't, then you bet your ass they will.
Love notes maherna » Ayo Mengenali Perkembangan Anak
i don't find it sexist at all. The illustration is of the founder and her cat and it could be part of a powerful branding concept ("we are just as personal and friendly as your own staff"), especially since they are name dropping 37 signals and the fact that the founder has worked there.

The design is not that corporate or web application-y and I like it as a contrast to all these bland conversion centric / landing page SEO designs.

However, I have to say that I am skeptical about outsourcing support. I consider it too core to outsource and, ideally, pretty much every person in your small startup - their ideal customer [1] - should be involved in it. Kinda funny how they reference Zappos, a company famous for their outstanding in-house support.

[1] http://cosupport.us/about
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. "

Measuring aircraft progress by weight is actually viable because it is already known what the final weight will be.
Comparing a bad deal to a worse deal doesn't make it good.

I don't speak for the NYT but I've been following that chatter from news organizations for awhile. The thinking (right or wrong) goes like this:

* Publishers don't want to use Apples payment system as it locks them into Apple

* Publishers don't want to use iTunes for managing subscriptions

* Publishers don't want to have to pay 30% of the costs to pay for a service they don't want to use

There is a great and strong argument that its good for users and I agree with that. Users don't have to enter billing info etc across multiple apps. Thats a win, and a big one too.

However the reality is that when people grumble about paying for news content in the first place, and newspapers turn to the internet as publishing market shrinks, and the whole business model of news is in flux, along comes Apple and says we're going to take 30% for adding a service that you (the publisher) don't want and we're going to great a barrier between you and your customer so you're dependent on us.

This could be a huge debate, and I honestly can't go into one. Too tired. Too much to do today. So let me just say that you should always do what the consumer wants and in this case Apple is providing that.

But by a 30% cut they're going to make it difficult for news organizations to budget and pay for in-depth news coverage as they become increasingly dependent on online revenue sources.
I got "Sell actual androids to motorola." . And as a milestone owner I approve this plan.
12 tips for business success - Business - Success in Hard Times - msnbc.com
Have you considered a cron job running mysqldump plus an incremental tar command on the WP directory?
We've even got a sample Android project to get you started. Download the SDK and example apps: http://www.getinpulse.com/images/pulse_sdk100.zip
Sexist because it has a woman wearing a skirt? I really can't see how that's sexist at all. Should she be wearing slacks instead? Or maybe it should be a picture of a man? Maybe a few minorities to add diversity too.
Continents move but Sweden is pretty far from the edges, making the whole installment pretty set, tectonic plate wise.

Still not permanent with your definition though, as we all eventually will stop existing.
I understand what you're saying, and I'm not going to adapt the analogy to suit my view of the situation because that invariably becomes kind of silly.

I think that as long as Apple allows publishers to make content viewable inside the app store purchasable outside the app store only, this policy is fair and as you've described it.

If Apple requires publishers to make content viewable in the app store purchasable in the app store, the publisher is forced to choose between losing 30% of revenue on a chunk of their transactions or having a vastly inferior product for entirely artificial reasons. Apple would essentially be holding the publisher's product quality ransom.

I'm also not a fan of this because I think that people who have costs forced on them for a specific subset of their transactions should be able to transparently pass on those costs to the customers who make those transactions, rather than spreading it out across all customers. I think that publishers should be able to charge 43% more for purchases and state in the app that it costs more because Apple is taking a 30% cut. I think that retailers should be able to charge 1-2% more to customers who use Visa and MasterCard than to those who use cash, and a couple percent more for Discover or AmEx. Instead, the cost is concealed and the users who don't have CCs with excellent rewards programs are paying for the rewards programs of those who do. With this policy, non-iDevice-users will pay a premium to allow iDevice users to buy the content more easily, and that doesn't strike me as particularly fair.
Well said. This also shows we yet do not understand our brain.
That works for a hugely small subset of apps. Each (well written) app creates a lot of value for iOs, most of those won't get anything at all from Apple.

So again, why isn't the inverse true? If I'm building something that helps sell an iOs device, why shouldn't I get a cut?

Of course I shouldn't, but that's the problem in Apples logic here.
> this is the same Jason Van Zyl that passive-aggressively deleted Kohsuke's edit history

I don't think this was passive at all. It was an aggressive-aggressive action, his response to Kohsuke's inquiries on the subject were passive-aggressive.
For comparison: Texas Instruments sell something called the EZ430 Chronos watch, which has a much lower-res display, a proprietary RF protocol with a USB transceiver, and a bunch more sensors including 3-axis accelerometers, pressure and temperature.

It is based on the MSP430 microprocessor which is much less powerful than this thing, its capped at 16mhz or something IIRC and only has around 8K of program space. It is however about a third of the price.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos
There are (or certainly were when I was in academia) MEng degrees in the UK that are 2 years study, 1 year in industry and another 2 years study.
You can't lose an app you've already downloaded. Well, maybe Apple could theoretically remotely kill it, but they've never done that for the 100s of apps they've pulled from the store.
I think these look much better then putting the Apple Nano on your wrist: http://bit.ly/hnLUkQ To each their own though. =)

As for applications, yeh GPS, Gyro would be great.
I'd prefer if there were a less preachy version of this article. Its certainly scientifically interesting, but the abortion angle is out of place on HN.
Might be able to use something like this as a starting point (though it's vote-based, but seems to support decay over time) http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html
It appears that a few people are submitting every article in their company blog to HN. Not sure how they get the upvotes though.
122,000 seemed absurdly large to me so I just looked up the paper you reference [1]. It looks like there is a calculation error in the paper.

The formula they use is n = 16 σ^2 / Δ^2. σ is the standard deviation, and Δ is the size of the difference. Thus in this problem, Δ = 0.05 and their formula gives n = 16 * (0.05 * (1-0.05)) / 0.05^2 = 304. This is much more in line with what you get from using a 2 sample proportion test (with H_a: p_1 =/= p_2), ~440 in each group [2].

But maybe I misunderstand their formula.

[1] http://exp-platform.com/hippo_long.aspx

[2] http://statpages.org/proppowr.html

edit: fixed Greek letters and added final comment.
yes they created the iPad...and I paid for it! Why should I pay more after that? It's like Ford saying they want 30% of all cab income since they created the "Crown Victoria" taxi car....
Who designs the robots?
Last night I was randomly chatting online with the well-known mathematical physicist John Baez (see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/ for more about him) and he told me about the Azimuth Project. It sounded to me like something that could be of interest to some here, and the code project is what is most likely to be a fit.
Why did he buy MySpace? Maybe he's just behind the curve?

My only point is this kind of reasoning is weak.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for Apple or own any of their stock, just a happy dev in their ecosystem)

I completely agree with this model.

Apple's marketing muscle is HUGE. I'm perfectly OK with splitting one-time or recurring revenue with them if they help bring me customers.
That's definitely Qt/QML running on that tablet. I knew QML was a dog, but that that much of a dog running on current hardware. That's a shame.
A student describes a perfect smartphone in 2006 (starts at 55m 5s)
Thanks for the mention :) I publish an issue daily. It's a passion (and sometimes a headache)... so much neat stuff out there, need a way to share it. Glad to have other HN ppl reading :)
ha ha, no. Considering the difficulty of humans equipped with the most advanced pattern matching hardware ever devised by evolution to discern nuances of meaning in spoken language I would say it's a rehash of the AI promises of the 50's that feel short of any practical implementation. We still got a long way to go before a skynet shows up and fires us.
"Isn't that O(Nk), where k is the average word length and N is the number of words. Given an upper bound on k, this is no worse than a trie."

Let's make an even stronger assumption that every word in your set has length k. You then need to store (k^2 + k)/2 characters per distinct word with the sorted set implementation (plus any additional data-structure overhead). In a worst-case scenario, you have N of these k-length words, distinct at the first character (this might seem paranoid for something like ASCII, but think about Unicode here...or just change the problem to N distinct strings at character >=2), resulting in a worst-case memory bound of O(N * ((k^2 + k) / 2)).

That said, the possible range of N will be much larger than k for any non-trivial k, so I suppose it's fair to say that real-world memory use is something more like O(N) with a very high constant that's quadratically related to your average word length. But that's still substantially worse than a well-implemented trie (where your constant is small and unrelated to k), and with large data sets every byte counts.

"Although the top 1000 recently searched items might not share as much structure, that is a trivial amount of data, even for O(N^2)....the storage overhead on a trie is high, especially as many bigrams don't occur in English, so array-based tries necessarily waste space."

If your set size is only 1,000, then yeah, this conversation is academic. I'm talking about big suggestion sets -- for a website, it's not too difficult to get into a situation where your suggestion set is in the hundreds of thousands or millions of strings or more. Remember that web text is nothing like /usr/share/dict. Proper nouns, acronyms, non-words, new words, foreign words, etc. all conspire to make real-world language much larger and more diverse than the system dictionary. The size of real-world vocabularies is one of those counter-intuitive things that I wouldn't have guessed before working on websites.

Finally, while you definitely have to be careful when implementing a trie, there are improved trie algorithms (like burst tries), that greatly improve upon average- and worst-case memory usage. A totally naïve trie implementation has a ton of overhead...but then, a naïve set implementation has a ton of overhead, too. So it's important to not be naïve. ;-)

(related: looks like the redis guys have been oddly resistant to adding tries, despite several requests: https://code.google.com/p/redis/issues/detail?id=110)
What is wrong with Livestrong.com? Isn't that for bike races and raising money for cancer?
Wow! I've always been looking for something of this sort but I've never found one. Thanks for the link!
Well, you're dumping waste heat either way, and at too low a difference to ambient to be efficient to extract, but while I'm not an expert in the energy usage of 3D printers, I find it very hard to believe that reducing an item to granules and then recreating it from the same granules can be particularly energy efficient from the perspective of information theory.

The other side which I should have considered before is that if the purpose of this is cleaning (as was originally suggested), reducing the item to parts to reassemble without first cleaning it will result in contaminated build components and a lower quality physical product, but with the contamination spread liberally through the item rather than being on the surface where it can be more easily cleaned away.
If they really take off, I'm sure the design could become much smaller and more elegant over time.

I ordered one to hack about with. If it becomes part of my daily routine I'll probably have my jeweler in Detroit hook up a more attractive case and band for it.

Agree on the sensors, it would be nice to at the very least have a dead-simple accelerometer, but I also know what goes into bringing a piece of hardware like this to market. The $150 price point probably doesn't leave a ton of margin, and it's just on the cusp of not having to be a "considered purchase" for people. Adding more stuff would drive up the manufacturing cost and price into something that starts to become a $399 product and the number of experimenters who will buy one on a whim drops dramatically.
Awesome thanks!

I just checked the specs, "4 days depending on display/Bluetooth use"

Even if its two days of full time use, thats great.
(pre)Maturely Optimize Your JavaScript
Although I can understand that this is a very interesting thing to watch, but I still think this is piracy and should not be advertised on HN.
How will the future human machine interface technologies be?
Numerous applications are being developed around human touch based technologies(applications on iphone, ipad, etc.). I keep wondering how the devices that provide the human interface in the above cases will evolve in future . The five sensory receptors of humans(eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin/sense) - have at different points in time given the opportunity to create different types of human interface devices(barring nose and tongue, not sure if I will see any HMI device using these organs in future).

Would skin/human touch based sensing interface devices manifest from time to time in different, improved packagings or would some company completley surprise us with a new concept(something like a human mind reader).

It would be great to hear from you guys how do you think the technology evolution in the HMI space is going to map out? Would it just be re-packaging and improvement of the touch sensing interfaces devices or would we witness a more fundamental change in human machine interface devices?
Has anyone considered building an open source Watson?
I don't know about the connection with Java coders being suspect - I would have suspicions of anyone who's never stepped off a VM into an actual machine.

I don't care for IDEs either: the farthest I get is my emacs textual expansion.
(I'm gonna get reamed for this, but...) Visual Studio is great and with the proper setup can do all of that and more. Obviously it's Windows only, so that may be a problem.

Frankly, I think much of people's hatred against C++ is the relative lack of good tools on non-Windows platforms.
Yup, but we've got Bluetooth, a fantastic OLED screen, and example Python, Android, Blackberry code!

Also, we're right here on HN to answer your questions!
I, for one, got fed up with C++ long before I ever heard of Python or Ruby. I pretty much quit programming because I got frustrated with the amount of boilerplate code I had to write/the bending over I'd have to do in order to get the simplest ideas fleshed out "idiomatically".

A language is a means of communication, and C++ fails miserably at that.
Mmm you should have a different notion of easy, as it would need a network packet sniffer running in your mobile, testing it with an android emulator in your computer or being able to run software in your AP.
HBGary's booth at RSA conference
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These are comparisons of various Haskell webservers, running the same micro benchmark, and the given number for Warp is provided. There are links to older benchmarks against servers in other languages.

Look for the big graph with different columns for different webservers.
I still wonder at what may be lost if/when we have the ability to eliminate genetic or birth defects.

Just like emerging through the "trough of sorrow" doesn't seem essential to a strong business yet still seems to do something like what my dad called "building character", I wonder if these ever-present difficulties contribute, somehow, to making people stronger. And even, perhaps, more caring of each other.

"But there's enough troubles already..." yes, yes, I know. But first, it's not a response to the argument. Second, though: what about when those troubles, and then the ones left after that, are eliminated? I've long liked "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/ in part because it shows what might be wrong with just such a world.

Would Abraham Lincoln still have been who he was if he didn't have Marfan syndrome? Or what if he was never born because of prenatal screening? If we could eliminate manic depression, would we ever have another Emily Dickinson? Would Van Gogh still have show us the world in new ways if he didn't have epilepsy?

Eugenics has promise. It also holds terror beyond simply how it has been practiced in the past. We're already seeing the dangers of monoculture in agribusiness. Could a similar molecular 'cleanup' of the human genome pose similar dangers?
I am keeping my eye on Clay http://tachyon.in/clay/
Precise, repeatable welding of carefully prepared, identical structures, in a hygienic, controlled environment. Get a Robot.

Upside-down, lying in mud, your arms up in a noble-gas manifold, welding titanium. Get a Man.
Hmm. Although this seems like a good idea at first, sometimes I'm searching for something obscure and I actually do find the answer on one of those annoying websites.

I can't help thinking it's probably more useful to see all the results even if I have to wade through the junk, just in case the answer is hidden in there somewhere.

(PS. did you know you can see the answers on experts-exchange.com if you scroll down far enough?)
You'd think, but it's actually a Demand Media content farm. Livestrong.org is what you're probably thinking of (Lance's foundation website).

http://www.demandstudios.com/health-writing-jobs.html
Just based on that one line argument in the subject, I can't say I disagree.
Haha, I'm half asian. As a result, I grow really crappy facial hair.
I think this analogy only holds true if Ford is asking for a take of a seamless dispatch service built into all Crown Vics sold to taxi fleets.
It looks like everything here are platform features and not language features. The author likes the features of NSObject and NSAutoreleasePool and the fact that the Cocoa libraries make use of autorelease pools.

I have a similar fondness for the Cocoa platform. I was recently asked to port some work to another platform, and considered keeping Objective-C as the language... but my love for the language runs thin once Apple's libraries are gone. The dynamic typing and categories(adding methods to arbitrary classes) are still nice though.
Ask and ye shall receive: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/12/chase-britton-boy-without-...