skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it was merely zealotry, then I'd be okay with it. As you point out, there are zealots on both sides of any divide. No, the problem I'm talking about is ignorance. On the Unix side, people have at least heard of other frameworks. If you're a Django dev, you've probably at least heard of Rails, Plone, etc. If you're on the Microsoft/ASP.Net side of things, however, it's routine to encounter developers who haven't even heard of Django or Rails.

It's that which is mystifying, not the zealotry.
Seems like it. The two biggest gripes I've seen is they wanted a bigger screen and redesign. The bigger screen would have been nice, but is it really bothering so many people that it looks the same?

I'm moving on from a 3GS so I plan on getting the 4S.
I'm wondering if I got my point across without dissing the folks who are suffering.

every time i write a piece about taking control of your destiny I get flammed by folks who can't/haven't/etc.

i try to soften and craft it to pull these folks in.... but sometimes i feel like i fail at it.
This essentially exists already with Google voice search. It isn't exactly game changing.
Well, thanks for justifying my presumption :)
The iphone and the ipod before it..
This is nice stuff. I built a TV-Typewriter using Don Lancaster's cheap video cookbook. He pioneered this technique of 'co-processing' with the 6502. However, if you were going to do this today, you would be better off just building a 6502 into an FPGA [1] or buying an existing design [2] and modifying it. Jan Gray did a nice RISC cpu [3] that clearly got some inspiration from the the 6502 and it was very small in terms of gates (although that isn't such a big deal these days).

It is well worth your time to get an FPGA evaluation kit (my all time favorite is the Altera DE-2) and learn for yourself how straight forward it is to build your own CPU which is has instructions that do things you need vs what the manufacturer thought you might need.

[1] http://opencores.com/project,lattice6502

[2] http://edablog.com/2010/05/06/mos-6502-cpu/

[3] http://fpgacpu.org/xsoc/cc.html

Don's book: http://www.abebooks.com/9780672215247/Cheap-Video-Cookbook-L...
Have you been out in public lately? I don't think anybody is embarrassed by anything anymore.

With a phone, voice control is a real improvement over thumbing a wee li'l keyboard.

And exposing your personal affairs to everyone within earshot is now just another way to demonstrate your importance.
> Quit expecting us to spend hours digging through arcane documentation, followed by further hours troubleshooting things that you left half-finished

I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough.

That complaint applies equally to commercial software.

CEO arrives in a foreign airport, calls us up because his Blackberry now shows email headers instead of email, including email in his inbox which previously had all the content. The carrier tells me everything is setup fine for roaming and he needs to reset his Blackberry by taking the battery and SIM out, and then booting it with no SIM, then putting it back together properly. And if that doesn't work, he needs a new phone. And we couldn't talk him through it because that's his phone, and we couldn't email instructions, and anyway it was evening in an airport and he was in no mood for it.

This is a commercial device, praised for its business email handling, dealing with a well established, decades old protocol, from a large international carrier. Talk about a problem which just shouldn't happen, with a nonsensical solution.

And it's just one anecdotal example of every day workaround-finding. Wobbly software Jenga towers everywhere, and reboot-into-a-known-state is rule number 1.
Yes, absolutely. (from my experience and those of my relatives)
Jason - this is fire - some of the best stuff I've read in the newsletter yet!
Is it done in the cloud? Why would it require an iPhone 4S then?
Would you really? If so, I think you're more interested in social status, and in relative wealth than in absolute wealth.

Let's just consider health care. One reason health care is so much more expensive now compared to the 1950's is the roughly 60 years of technical innovation that has happened since then. In 1950, there were still outbreaks of polio. Cancer was a far more certain death sentence. MRI's didn't exist. The birth control pill was not yet available. There was no dialysis. There was no laser surgery. Heart surgery was very primitive: there was no bypass surgery, no replacement of heart valves, and no pacemaker. By and large, people died of diseases that could be treated today, and many of those treatments are available today even to the poor and uninsured. (In a move unthinkable in 1950, my state even subsidizes access to birth control for low-income single women.)
Must watch video about subcultures, why they persist, how they grow, and why they all eventually die: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ (Merchants of Cool)
I would agree with you if three other things were comparably inexpensive:

1) quality education (including post-secondary, which would otherwise need to be saved-for)
2) portable, quality basic health care
3) inexpensive, safe, spartan-but-quality housing

No amount of TVs, computers, mobile phones, or iPods will make up for the fact that these three necessities are often pretty expensive in the U.S.
I imagine that at least some of the disappointment is due to a lack of surprises. We've pretty much known for months that at a minimum the new iPhone (whatever model number it ended up having) would have incremental improvements over the iPhone 4. That is, we expected to see the A5 processor, and a better camera, slightly better battery life, etc. But we were simulatenously hoping that Apple would throw us a curve ball too, something that no one had predicted, whether that was a new form factor or, you know, ... something else. There was no "one more thing".
"The Galaxy S II though is pretty close to this. In terms of the raw HW I think I might call it a draw now."

I'm pretty sure the SGX543MP2 blows everything else out of water currently:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-intern...

The offscreen numbers are resolution independent and as far as I can tell the 4GS should be near identical with the ipad.

Basically no one is going to surpass the 4GS hardware until Q2 2012 when 28/32 nm phones are shipping and the iphone 5's chip will already be on display in the ipad 3.

A lot of people expected the 4GS/5's A5 to have one GPU disabled but I guess they can just turn it off dynamically for battery and somehow handle the heat when it's needed.
> "That being said, one 'fix' here is to call your virtual assistant and talk to them on the phone. "

I'm sure you can hold the iPhone to your ear and pretend that you've dialed up Siri and are talking to them "on the phone".
AT&T has consistently let it's best customers upgrade to new iPhone releases without enforcing the contract -- charging subsidized prices to upgrade to newer iPhone models. Will Sprint and Verizon done the same, or is switching to Sprint now will commit one to sit out next iPhone?
This takes less CPU power but is also far less accurate,
as the voice sample must be very low quality to have a
quick response time from Google's server.

Has there been a comparison of the accuracy of the two services? This claim seems unsupported.
Yep, the name change alone to iPhone 5 would have satisfied them. 4S sounds like a slight upgrade, a bit of extra speed (we know it's more, but that's the perception from those I've spoken to). Anyway, the future will tell us how well it does.

I sitll think they missed a trick on the iPad 3. They should have done that instead of the ipod touch.
Martin Rees just commented on that:
"I think, however, that this is one of the increasingly frequent instances when the Nobel Committee is damagingly constrained by its tradition that a prize can't be shared between more than three individuals. The key papers recognised by this award were authored by two groups, each containing a dozen or so scientists. It would have been fairer, and would send a less distorted message about how this kind of science is actually done, if the award had been made collectively to all members of the two groups."

More here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/oct/04/nobel-pri...
It might be that the Siri functionality is tied to the A5 chip. The A5 design is a lot larger than other dual core ARM A9 designs (even after accounting for the larger GPU) and thus has lots of spare silicon to use for specialized circuits. It is possible that Apple added a custom DSP to aid speech recognition.
What evidence is there that supports the existence of a supernatural being?

No, I think the TSA and religion are quite similar.
Seeing noise about this on Twitter from folks in the local area (Virginia Beach, VA) but as far away as Philly.
Apple failed to manage expectations - rumors ran rampant about a new design, larger screen, iPhone 4S and an iPhone 5, LTE/WiMAX...

In the face of all the rumors of possible updates, an S version of what we already had is underwhelming. In the past Apple has done a great job of strategically leaking info to the press when rumors were getting out of hand (iPad 2 Retina Display is a recent example) - that did not happen this time.
Some folks do still take dictation. Medical and legal secretaries in particular -- secretaries for classes of professional who are very busy, make a lot of money, send quite a lot of letters, and don't tend to spend a lot of their time sitting in front of a computer.

Secretaries to doctors and lawyers make a lot more than minimum wage, though.
It's like Ask Jeeves, but for my phone in the cloud!!!!
Ah, okay. I moved away from .Net just after ASP.Net MVC was released, so I didn't get a chance to see what impact it would have on the community.

The reception to ASP.Net MVC, though, confirmed my original point about the .Net community. I heard lots of talk treating the MVC pattern as revolutionary, when, in fact it was something that was rather common outside of the .Net community.
To add to the frustration, Google knows where "home" is for me, even without me telling - Latitude inferred it. Can't ask Google Mobile Maps for directions to home, though.
I cannot reproduce your findings, I see a lot more information in the results for the whois queries, for example a list of "domain servers" for amazon.com:

PDNS1.ULTRADNS.NET

PDNS2.ULTRADNS.NET

PDNS3.ULTRADNS.ORG

... and so on ...

Or "domain servers" for paypal.com:

ns3.isc-sns.info

ns2.isc-sns.com

ns1.isc-sns.net

So maybe the answer to your question is yes, a whois query can return results with subdomains of other domains having the query domain as a prefix, if this subdomain is listed as a "domain server". But the result you have posted above really looks quite different from what I see, there seems to be (or have been) a problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalator#Loss_of_trademark_rig...
Why would it be less accurate? I've worked with voice quite a bit at my last job and the codecs and bitrates for voice don't need to be this heavy-duty CD-quality stuff. Your big limitation is going to be those cheesy mics and background noise, wind, etc.

Voice compresses nicely. Turns out we humans aren't capable of making such varied sound that it can't compress. Our mouth holes are ancient technology.

In practice, I'm in love with Google's voice capabilities. It seems to understand context. Its crazy how accurate it is. I often tease my iphone friends with it. I'm also highly skeptical that an application on a phone can outdo google's massive libraries and server infrastructure. If anything, I'd expect the Apple voice to be worse. Regardless, I can't wait to see this stuff in action. A war for the best voice recognition would be great right now as its been a patent blocked and ignored field for the most part.
As an Android user and admitted Google fanboy, there's a secret part of me that always hopes the new iPhone will be so much and so unequivocably better that I'll want to switch.

I really like the iPhone 4/4s ID, but I am a bit disappointed that there's not a shiny new chassis with something to blow me away.

No doubt the camera (now even more so) is better than anything on any Android device, probably by a lot. The pixel density, contrast, and surface proximity of the screen is fantastic. Hardware-wise, the only thing I can ask for is LTE (hell on the battery, I know) and a bigger screen (impossible to maintain pixel density, I know, but I love the 4.3" screen on my Droid X, I don't think I could go back).

Software-wise, with the new notification system, I think the only major feature I want now is something like Locale or Tasker, background apps that allow me change phone settings according to different criteria, e.g. when I'm at home, my ringer and wifi turns on, when I leave home they turn off.
> It's a matter of signaling/conspicuous consumption... it's already been in the market for, what, 16 months?

Counterpoint: Movado Museum Watch[1]. Latest fashion goes out of style. Great design becomes timeless[2] because it's not "simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value."[3]

1. http://www.amazon.com/Movado-606085-Museum-Black-Leather/dp/...

2. http://garry.posterous.com/dieter-rams-his-first-braun-desig...

3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8555503/Dieter-R...
Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
That is a bit too convenient.
I don't want to simply reply to a comment, there's a theme flowing through this thread, that capitalism makes everyone better off in a society, that our choices lead to where we are. I think you're ignoring a fundamental truth. There aren't unlimited opportunities for every person who works hard...just opportunities for those who work harder, on the margin, than others. Capitalism isn't about working hard and getting rewards, its about being better on the margins and getting rewards.
The per-minute rates are generally high (on the order of $0.30/min) and the prepaid time generally expires (in 10-30 days for low-dollar loadings). If you are actively searching for work, you need to have enough time loaded to handle a telephone interview and to be put on hold from time to time. Once that's covered, you need to top up the time at regular intervals in order to avoid losing what you've already paid for -- and that leads to a non-refundable "savings account" with your provider. Prepaid is not significantly cheaper than a low-end contract, and can be more expensive.
A Quick Look Into The Math Of Animations With JavaScript
There are two big problems with this study.

First, their data selection is skewed and relies heavily on countries with longstanding cultural problems (besides inequality) affecting their economic growth. Just look at the list of countries constituting the data for the third chart. About half of the countries are from Latin or South America too, so they haven't controlled for geographic similarities either.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/09/Berg.htm

Second, their perspective throughout the study is "top down" and makes the bold claim that data showing weak correlation is grounds for supposing strong causation. The editorialized headline from motherjones.com also makes the same mistake.

I'm not too familiar with regular IMF publications so I have no idea if politicization is common in them, but this certainly seems like a classic case of choosing the data that confirms what you already believe.

EDIT: If you want to see a more complete dataset go here and sort descending by the "UN Gini as a percentage" column (the same metric used by this study):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...

The top of the list (which the authors of the study draw from liberally) mostly consists of countries with severe economic and cultural problems in many areas. The rest of the list doesn't have a clear one dimensional trend. Some countries (e.g. Greece) with severe problems have a greater level of equality than the US, while other more stable and consistent economies (i.e. Scandinavian ones) also have greater equality.

As an example, if the authors of the study wanted to apply their methods to measure the effect of melanin on a country's growth they could just as easily conclude that a population with dark skin results in less growth. While the absurdity of the correlation=>causation fallacy are apparent in that case, it is less so when you cater to widely held beliefs that are easier to support without looking at the data thoroughly.
HDSPA, so Apple gets points for not buying into the 4G marketing bullshit while still of erring next gen mobile bandwidth
Apple.com: Access Denied
The libraries I was thinking of sharing are all ones that are tightly coupled to the specific pages they would be on and all related to UI.

Things like form validation, user input normalization, navigation options. There are ton of small data manipulation functions that you either have to maintain in both javascript and your server side language and cause some weird bugs when one version doesn't behave exactly the same as the other or else you need to make a bunch of unnecessary ajax calls just to avoid reimplementing things in js.

There is much deeper integration you could do but I think we're on the same page as to why that's a bad idea.
Looked to me more like the developer was telling the guy who posted the fix "you can't" to the statement " I'll see about getting them merged back into the official version."

So, no story here.
In some browsers, notably Firefox, you can place a "blur layer" over anything using an SVG background featuring an SVG blur filter.
Me: I have a mobile phone??

For many people, mobile phones have replaced land lines, and are often cheaper with pay-as-you-go plans. This isn't 1998 anymore, mobile phones are not a luxury. Also, if you can't get a call form work that your shift has been changed, and you miss a shift, you lose your job. And with most people having mobile phones, having a land line and not getting a chance to check your answering machine is not likely much of an excuse.

Game: Landlord wants pet rent for the dog.

Dogs have been a part of humanity for much of our modern evolution. If someone gets laid off, or hits hard times, asking them to give up their dog to save some money is like asking them to hand over a family member. So yes, while dogs are an expense, they have a lot of psychological and emotional benefits for evolutionary reasons.

Me: I have a CAR???

Yes, because you couldn't find work nearby, and the only place that was hiring wasn't bike-able. So you bought a beater that's barely street legal, but you had to finance it through some shady car dealership. Unemployment had run out, and you had a job offer, and you knew it was risky, but what other option did you have?
>No, I think the TSA and religion are quite similar.

that's absolutely right. There is though a difference between a God and Organized Religion. For all we know Q is as God as any other and i do hope what he exists and enjoys the TNG on Netflix as much as i do :)
Wow, that was quick. I installed it this AM.
So at Google they stuffed people 4 to a cube. Lots of people have open floor plans. Most people turn off their speakers (and miss meetings because of it) because the noise is distracting. Imagine them all saying 'computer, start the debugger on that core file.'

Like you I have seen a lot of Star Trek, it took a world class UX designer to point out to me that every time someone gave voice commands to the computer everyone else in the area had to be silent. There was even a little cultural thing going on, the captain says "Computer" in a loud voice, every one shuts up, and then he gives it some command. I did not pick up that insight on my own, it was pointed out to me and now when I see it in action I chuckle.
Not to mention that in Norway gas is pretty much double what it is in the US probably $6/7 a gallon right now.
Um there are working buttons in the elevators I describe, just on a timer. Most of the time its on a timer if active even.
On your website http://tonychen.me/ you mention that
http://www.looks.gd had "1.8 million pageviews, 560,000 unique visitors and growing". Yet the compete.com data
shows trivial traffic (now) and it hasn't been updated
since eoy 2010. What happened with that? As you have found with that site you can't run something and be dedicated to school at the same time. Stay in school.
For purposes of keeping the discussion on topic, can we just assume dlikhten's comment is specifically about people whose belief in God is based on Pascal's wager, and not about believers in general?
Apple Siri Voice Interface: The “Intelligent Assistant” [images]
> It's also another way that Apple drives upgrades in the high end: by making the old model look old and dated.

I also object to that remark attributed to Apple, the computer or smartphone company with the longest model design life cycles.

The vigorous aftermarket for Apple's supposedly "old and dated" models would also suggest demand for Apple's products isn't based on design obsolescence or design cues.

There will be people who upgrade as a signal, but I attribute that to those buyers, not to Apple, whose design innovations seem largely in pursuit of more usable, durable, or lasting product.
The ipod is refreshed in the fall, the ipad in the spring. Each model lasts at least a year. Its like clockwork.
What writing on the wall is this? The demise of Microsoft? That's a narrative being pushed by the tech reporting industry. Also, I assume you've never used and of the developments tools or languages created by the company. Both Visual Studio and C# are very well done, and other tools like F# and the ASP.NET MVC are getting similiar treatment.
The problem has little to do with either Microsoft or the .NET development ecosystem, it has more to do with the nature of corporations and startups.
Is this a problem only for smart poor kids in regions with no magnet/exam schools?

My parents moved to one of the wealthier (per-household) cities in America (not the wealthiest neighborhood; they had a professional services small business on the high end of work-for-a-living income from paying customers, and a few assistants in their employ) and my seemingly ordinary high school was one of the best neighborhood schools in the country in terms of student performance, non-crime, etc.

One could certainly raise a family in that school zone on an engineer and teacher's salary if one would forgo a big house and new car lifestyle.
You've got it backwards. Modern speech recognizers have a vocabulary of a million words and multi-gigabyte models. It's generally much more accurate to do speech recognition in the cloud, since you have more processing power and more RAM to hold large statistical models.

The rumor is that Apple is sending the audio to Nuance servers, i.e., they're doing cloud-based speech recognition.
No, new iPhone models have been introduced at $199 on contract for lowest disk capacity since the 3G.
"Programmers are interesting animals - the good ones work for fun. As long as their bills are getting paid and work is interesting, they stay."

LOL. Only the idiots. The others find places where they get to do stuff they love and where they get paid well.
This is a hoax
Gilt Tech: Restoring Page State with Session Storage
That's a fair point.

But I wasn't making a value judgment. I think it's a perfectly legitimate way to drive desire/demand.

I also think that long model design life cycles are carefully calculated to create desire as well as create a great product.
Because Apple did nothing to quash rumors of the iPhone 5. This makes me think that the decision not to launch it was made very late. Usually Apple is better about managing expectations.