skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no problem with that. This a great demonstration of what Apple does best - optimizing products to fit the needs of most users. Google already has the voice tech in place, but often fails to follow through on the usability front. A perennially annoying example for me is when I'm on the road somewhere, bring up Maps, and ask for directions from wherever-I-am to 'home'; it doesn't know where 'home' is. This is even more annoying, because there is a 'home' tag in Maps, but it doesn't get searched on. Likewise, there's no easy way to tell it that one person is my wife, another person is my business partner, a third person is my nemesis and so on.

Apple are leveraging a culture of paying attention to detail to overcome technical handicaps, but it's hard to quantify or A/B test that, and most firms aren't comfortable with a budget line item called 'magic.'
I think that graph is relative to highest commits in 1 week over last 52 weeks. But overall I think there is stable number of commits from core group in 2.0

And number of commits prove nothing.
Apple.com is down
This is a segway feature -- amazing technology, incredibly embarrassing to use in public.
Report reveals doubts over wisdom of Solyndra loan
Apple website is Down
What these guys never seem to get is that there are different sources of inequality. Larry & Sergey did not get rich in the same way a dictator's cousin does. So analyzing what's correlated with inequality in general doesn't tell you much.

Talking about what's correlated with inequality in general is like talking about what's correlated with leaving high school before age 17. Your sample will be a mix of kids who dropped out and kids who went to college early. Most will be kids who dropped out. You'll then discover that leaving high school before 17 is correlated with all sorts of bad things. But your conclusions will be worse than useless as a source of advice for kids considering going to college early.
I'm an amateur photog, and I'm excited about the camera:

- backlit sensor = better low-light pictures, with dramatically less noise

- faster lens, hopefully with better clarity (less haziness that's characteristic of phone cameras)... but we'll see how well it actually works out

- and most importantly, fast. I know I hate using my phone's camera since by the time I pull it out and the phone lets me take my first picture, the moment's already passed. The whole "1 second to first picture, 0.5s between shots" I think is going to be HUGE. It's going to get people using their cell phones as cameras a lot more than than they are now.
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization
Do you think atheists will go to hell?
Apple IPhone 4S
We won't know this for a little while but there might have been changes made to the software that Apple felt required the extra processing power of the A5. Of course, we won't know for sure until someone jailbrakes and tried it on older hardware.
Apple Launches iPhone 4S, iOS 5 & iCloud
Also, Google drops 2%, Amazon drops 4%, and LinkedIn drops 5%. Obviously, Apple's real intention of introducing 4S is to kill every tech company stock along with BoA.
Yeah but there is a monetary reason why this shouldn't work, and that is reason enough for most companies.
See the comment above by Joe. There is a certain 'weirdness' about giving voice commands to a device in public, it feels so strange that people don't do it, and being forced to radically alter their speech tempo/patterns makes it even more uncomfortable for them.

That being said, one 'fix' here is to call your virtual assistant and talk to them on the phone. We do that now with these irritating voice mail type menu trees but at least you are talking to 'someone.' When we get to 'Ironman' level of interactivity it gets more compelling.
Stop Protesting Wall Street and Build a Startup
Any word on when the real iphone5 will arrive?

The 4S seems like a rather pitiful flagship by apple standards.
Naah. You still need to type in public places and don't want everyone to know what you are doing with your phone.
I'd say Amazon's the exception, not Apple. HTC, Nokia, Samsung, etc. aren't making money on content.
Crazy day for apple, huh...
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the speed bump. I believe everyone is underestimating just how fast the A5 is going to make this phone.
Not so sure about the elevator part. Depends on the elevator. The elevator in my building in NY has functional open and close buttons.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2010/12/the-great-el...
I think they've found a way to stop all leaks from apple.com.

Meanwhile for your apple fix:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/04/iphone-5-la...
Oh, I wasn't trying to imply that it will fail. Just relating my experience that social norms and robopsychology are bigger hurdles than the technology, imo.
Would be nice if the difference between IE and the other browsers was handled in $.ajax(). Maybe one day I'll submit a patch..
Ask PG: Applying to YC Winter 2012 as college freshmen
Hi PG/HN Community,

We're a team of 3 freshmen college students who:
- have an exciting idea that we think is going to disrupt the e-commerce space
- are in the bay area and willing to dedicate a huge chunk of our time on the idea even if rejected from YC
- have already started building on product, two of us are programmers (with great UI sense)

We are eager to apply for YC, but were wondering how being in college affects the YC application process. For example, what were some successful YC applicants (I know Sam Altman of Loopt was one) who applied while still in college and what they did about their college career?
How does it impact battery life? To be honest I find the existing generation fast enough (and while I do enjoy gaming on my ipod touch 4g, I find 3d graphics completely overkill) but really the battery life is what's abysmal...
thought it was just me! You can still access their iPhone site though http://www.apple.com/iphone/#4s
Epic Games ports Unreal 3 to Flash
Seems like apple.com is down hard:

Access Denied

You don't have permission to access "http://www.apple.com/ on this server.
Reference #18.cc896783.1317755134.6ee996bd

Edit: That only lasted a minute... it is back up.
this is exactly the same as voice search + "instant actions." there's no line between the two.
It seems the enterprisey .NET shops interviewed already hired all the crappy .NET developers who are willing to work for that kind of money and now they would have to move to more expensive ones than the ones they had before. Their reluctance is easy to explain.

Programmers are interesting animals - the good ones work for fun. As long as their bills are getting paid and work is interesting, they stay. Give them a brain-dead job, like anything Sharepoint-related, and they leave.
I was hoping for an iPhone 5 with a new design, but I'm still very excited about this. The extra processing power combined with the low level speed improvements in iOS 5 are going to be HUGE for app developers.

The only letdown for me is seeing Apple do things that compete with their app developers: the new Cards app, Reminders, etc.
That would be the missing link that would make touchscreen devices productive tools. That, or the society becoming less textual.
-5% now...
Amen. I got lucky- I'm a .NET developer now working for a small startup in NYC, but spent a long time in .NET shop hell.

That said, we're starting to look for another developer, and it's a nightmare. So many resumes of people that (without wanting to sound rude) belong in a .NET shop- I interviewed one guy that didn't even know SQL, because all he'd ever done was use prebuild factory methods for database access. He had a Masters.
Stubbing HTTP requests in Objective-C with ease
The A5, camera, and increased storage are worth the upgrade. I do wonder if the camera API will change based on the keynote.
apple releases their iphones every year, but sales them with a 2year contract. Hmm, it seems like they are forcing you to use outdated hardware.
I downvoted you for presuming he prefers "ship them all back to latin america". That sort of douchebaggery does not belong on Hacker News.

(I agree with most of the rest of what you say in this post.)
Apple just revealed iphone 4S but forgot to fix its website! screenshot:
http://i.hmp.me/m/54b101d7ac86310e5c35861de7f46f03.png
It's not bias, it's just a realistic observation of the market forces at work. People are willing to put up with bureaucracy and dull projects for more pay. There is no shortage of talent, there is merely an abundance of employers who are not realistic about market rates.
This is all true, and it's important to distinguish between "The Industry" and the good indie labels. Bella Union is one I have first-hand knowledge of and they are incredibly fair, and involved in the artists' tours and PR to a large degree.

If you know that's the kind of label you're looking at signing with, great! But the idea that labels are gatekeepers to distribution and royalties is a thing of the past.

Labels work best now when they act more like YC and less like RCA.
I disagree that this is a "bad sign". This is one of the great things about open source software -- the creator of a library isn't, nor does he/she have to be for the library to be useful, the sole "expert" in that library. Your post proves that.
Fusion experiment by B.C. firm raises concerns
seems like apple.com is down
Absolutely. You got your compensation already when you learned about music from everyone else. And even if not, it's just morally wrong and nigh impossible to contain ideas.

How do you think the ultra-mega-corp is going to get unreasonably huge without monopoly control of creation or distribution though? And with tiny profit margins because their competitors can just copy them.

I also don't think you should get government help in keeping secret the method you use to do anything. It's possible to look at you and see what you're doing - if you do it where people can see you they'll just naturally be able to copy you. We'd have to lobotomize them or set up some ridiculous bureau of ideas to check everything for originality. Both nonsensical. A society can't afford to handicap its creators.
Java is a little more difficult to practically use because it lacks most of that. Writing clean, maintainable code in Java is a lot harder (for me, at least) than the same in C# (or even in Scala, and Scala seems to lend itself naturally to writing a mess).

Also, let's be honest: the Java ecosystem is a mess in a lot of ways. One of the biggest pluses to the .NET world is that things tend to Just Work a lot more than in the Java world. Not that this is a huge deal (I work in Java, and handle it fine), but considerably more knowledge of the entire Java stack is often necessary than on .NET.
> 21% were looking for .NET developers with 8-10 years experience.

They could be looking for developers with 8-10 years of experience as developers but who also know .NET.
> it lets people get their regular work done faster at the cost of long-term scalability.

More like it lets them get their work done at the cost of having to use processes or co-routines calling non-GIL code instead of threads.
Are Top Students Getting Short Shrift?
I am just wondering what the fuck has happened to Microsoft.Seems like apple picked kinect and ran with it.
Gates must be very restless today.
Any word on whether Nitro javascript acceleration will be allowed in local webkit-based apps?
IRC with image links would have been easier to consume.
This whole thread/process/event queue non-sense is really ruining my appetite. Mmm fried bacon sausage wrap on a stick…

Guess what. When the packets come in from the network, they sit in an event queue. When Apache takes a request event, it takes it from a queue and hand off to a process. If you are proxying, the webapp server in the back takes the request events from a queue and hands off to a thread. When you make a DB call, the SQL goes to an event queue and the DB processes them 1 by 1. Real world web apps will always, is always and have always been done in a combination of event queues/threads and processes.

Nothing to see here. Moving on… oh look! Takoyaki!
http://teddziuba.com/2011/02/the-case-against-queues.html
Maybe I'll give it a shot.

[Edit: I just tried it on my lunch break. Felt very awkward. Different strokes, I guess.]
Anybody else getting "Access Denied"?

You don't have permission to access "http://www.apple.com/ on this server.
Reference #18.770d50c0.1317755591.9fc5eb4
IPhone Adds “Find My Friends” App for Location Sharing
Read the article, he's thought of that. There is a trick with two registers in there that allows you to pivot from one bank to another.

More explanation in the appendix on the instruction set. The opcodes are 13, 23, eb and fb:

http://www.laughtonelectronics.com/arcana/BrideOfSon%20KK%20...

Bottom of the list.
Some more details from the various Twitter streams -

DTrace for Oracle Enterprise Linux "only a beta" - to be on github today or tomorrow.

Licensed under the CDDL, not GPL. Only the kernel probes (i.e. no USDT), Oracle not committed to port it fully but "will improve it" (whatever that means.)

Which doesn't mean a whole lot - There was already a beta port by Paul Fox. May be Paul can pick up the OEL Dtrace bits and make them available for more than just OEL.
Yes it can, but its not needed directly. Maybe for Ruby 2.0 this could get shoehorned in.

JRuby and (sharpish) Rubinius can already do GILless ruby execution. But that doesn't mean everything "just works", it only exposes the problems both languages have when two concurrent contexts try to update the same object, like adding hash elements at the same time. In JRuby it throws an exception, at least allowing you to retry, Rubinius is copying that behavior as well. But technically, there is no standard for what happens.

My knowledge of non CPython interpereters isn't enough to talk about their GIL or lack thereof implementations.
If you give an html template a .cfm extension, it'll be processed by ColdFusion. When ColdFusion processes the file, it'll recognize where it needs to output data and will populate the template. It will also look for <cf> tags and perform any additional functionality. ColdFusion has nothing to do with CSS. CSS is a file that the browser is told where to look for. The browser uses the css to style html elements that's presented to the browser, post ColdFusion processing.

Granted, this is a very generic description. There's more to ColdFusion than the basic processing it applies to templates.
Fine, edited to modify the presumption wording.

Frankly, it seemed like the next obvious step from his initial complaint. We're talking about underemployment and he brings up immigrants out of nowhere as a scapegoat? Was that a prelude to an argument for amnesty? It's not my fault if it sounds bad.

And accusing me of quote "douchebaggery" while being high and mighty about what belongs on hacker news is a little rich.
https://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html
I don't think anyone is going to think less of you for going to real people with your problems. It's specifically when people go into a channel full of strangers and ask things like "how can I do a find with a many to many in rails" that I'm talking about.

I guess it's the sense of entitlement that's annoying. Why would you expect strangers to help you when you can't even be bothered to state the question in a way that would make things easy for them? I realise english isn't everyone's first language, but I have seen people who speak very broken english take great pains to explain their problems clearly as best they can, it isn't an excuse.

And no, I don't ever get snarky. People with stupid questions should get ignored at worst. In these cases, the questions are usually so trivial that being convincingly rude would take more effort than just solving the problem.

This is a better link to post in these situations: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

In fact, the bot in #rubyonrails cites this link when prompted with !ask
My take on that article is that the fact that node is written in "blub" could equally be seen as an advantage.

Popularity will also mean a broad based skill set ready to work for you when it comes hiring time.

Of ever developer who's worked in Ruby, PHP, C#, Blub... they've all had to have their hands on Javascript. So this one-ring-to-rule-them-all isn't necessarily about being the best & most powerful language ... but it's the one that might be easier to hire for.

What of the social cachet attached to working in the "cool" language?

I wrote project in node and I loved it. I learned a mountain about Javascript. And in that respect, it's been a resounding success.

It has even been mildly successful running at ~1000 uniques a day, ~3000pv. In retrospect, it was absolutely the wrong tool for the job. Totally stupid. Should have used PHP & MySQL. (Or even node+mysql for that matter).

Regardless - I'm now a lot clearer on what a good use of node is vs. what a bad use is. (Hooray for deliberate professional practice).

I've read about some other languages that "already do what node says it does" - I've heard "Ruby's twisted something-or-other does that", either LISP or SCALA or something.

But I couldn't work in those languages and simultaneously increase my knowledge and understanding within my current professional practice (in a way that is directly relevant). With node/javascript I am able to get both.

I'm not actually sure if my point is very well made. It's certainly not a rebuttal to what you've said (Or even a very effective redirect for that matter).

I'd love to know more about the other stuff & the competition (as you say), but I was attracted to node. I've only got so many hours a day to program. I've got to start somewhere and picking up node (to me) seemed a really fantastic place to start.
You might be well-served to differentiate between "Enterprise .NET" and ".NET". I'd agree with a lot of what you're saying if it's applied to folks who "think in ASP.NET", but outside of that? Not so much. You've got Mono developers, who tend to bounce between Windows and OS X pretty regularly and a bunch of other folks who are at least aware of the stuff on the other side of the fence. And then you've got folks who use it as a tool--appropriate in some situations, not appropriate in others.

(As noted in a sibling comment, it's also very common to see people turn their brains off rather than entertain .NET as a sometimes-appropriate tool.)
dang it actually let me buy it but just got a failed registration notice. shouldn't have used a coupon code :)
I listened to this over the weekend. It was entertaining, but can be summed up with "Sometimes you quit too early, sometimes you quit too late" from somewhere in the middle of the program.

Not a lot of hard data, but some interesting anecdotes.
Don't you mean on an even number? Or just a power of 2? Or are you talking about a base 10 number that's composed of all 1's and 0's? (All natural numbers are base 2 numbers...)

Also related: http://xkcd.com/710/
For all you devs here, the GM seed dropped on the iOS dev center today.
I was trying to check the live blogs today and found arstechnica and engadget to be pretty unreliable!. That many people trying to get the play-by-play? Geesh!
iPhone 3G announcement and launch:

http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

3Gs:

http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

4:

http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

I'd love to normalize this with ^DJI as the x-axis along with daily (or hourly) prices overlaid with rumors, announcements, and launches.
I imagine of the ~7 billion people alive today, perhaps 6 billion are not potential Apple customers at all due to price. Quite a few billion are potential low-end Android phone users though. As I said in another comment in this thread it costs to put luxury seats into a cheap car to attempt to catch up to a BMW, it doesn't cost to put a great many features into budget Android phones though.

This is why Apple is starting to use patents, because they actually don't have much when you boil it down. Even an Apple fan would be hard pressed to say Apple is 20% "better" than the latest Android. They will mostly point to a few UI features and say 10% better. I would say Android is easily better than iOS, as do many others, it seems to be largely a matter of taste. The tidal-wave of Android phones will swamp Apple in the end unless they can sue tons of people.
Do you code? I can't imagine coding by voice.

And even for ordinary writing, the keyboard is the most efficient thought-to-written-language medium invented. Especially when paired with even the most basic text editing features of a computer. Speaking is far more tiring, especially when you're sick, and makes it far less convenient to edit and rewrite than traditional text editing does.
Wired's Live Blog of Apple's iPhone Event
This has been standard operating procedure on iOS devices since...ever.

There's also no reason that Safari can't upload photos out of the browser...except the fact that it would allow devs to write web-based apps that use the camera, meaning less mindshare going to iOS dev. Right now (well, as of about a month ago, the last time I looked), that's impossible.
Good question. The results in mobile devices seems to be counter-intuitive, to me. A faster processor often means that, according to usage patterns, the work gets done faster and the machine can go into one of the many power-saving states more quickly, leading to better battery life. That probably varies by what you're trying to do, but for a smart phone the sooner it's done and back in your pocket, the better.
Yikes, thanks, I had not seen that. That sort of stuff drives me crazy, it's the same sort of thing where someone smashes a guitar to bits on stage. Someone spent time building the guitar and it's a perfectly good guitar that if you don't want it anymore there are plenty of kids that would love to have it. Destroying things you made yourself, fine. Destroying things that someone else made, even if you paid for, is disrespectful and reveals the destroyer as a selfish immature person who does whatever he wants for attention. It doesn't look good.
Ha! I love it. You're the guy to do it, Joey.

I myself have a hazy dream of a promotion/tech/PR/consulting company that can hand-roll technologies, web, mobile and such, tailored to the creative ambitions of musicians, to find new creative tools and ways of manifesting their visions that go beyond the album-tour-album cycle, which I also think is more and more a thing of the past.
Looking for Growth Hacker (YC W11)
Is their DNS hacked?

From whois apple.com:

APPLE.COM.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.WAS.PWNED.BY.M1CROSOFT.COM
APPLE.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.IS.OWN3D.BY.NAKEDJER.COM
APPLE.COM.IS.0WN3D.BY.GULLI.COM
APPLE.COM.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM

EDIT: This is completely false and untrue (well the DNS hack part).

See this Superuser thread for more details: http://superuser.com/questions/37954/how-to-use-command-line...
And when you leave the work radius at lunchtime with the cute coworker you're flirting with, you suddenly hear your wife over the in-vehicle bluetooth handsfree.
Apple.com p0wned, see `whois apple.com`
Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

APPLE.COM.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM

APPLE.COM.WAS.PWNED.BY.M1CROSOFT.COM

APPLE.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM

APPLE.COM.IS.OWN3D.BY.NAKEDJER.COM

APPLE.COM.IS.0WN3D.BY.GULLI.COM

APPLE.COM.BEYONDWHOIS.COM

APPLE.COM.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM

APPLE.COM
The "iPhone 4S" name was a pretty common rumor, so it is not unexpected. Given the iPhone's "tick-tock" release schedule (3G->3GS->4->4S), I was not surprised.
Until recently those were the only situations in which you could get a job as a Ruby developer – hamming it out on your own, in a small startup or at a consultancy.

It's still hard to get an Enterprise job as a Ruby developer.

Hence the stereotype.