skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A large part of Watson's performance on Jeopardy came from its buzzer timing.

Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing.

Watson has superb accuracy.

The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer.

Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times.

True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present.

And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least.

For my kids, probably not so much.
Master the Mainframe Competition (IBM ZOS)
Did you not read the article? The author provides a link. Here's another one:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4228505/Kindle-Fire-...

p.s. Why do HN readers keep quoting iSuppli as though it's a trusted source?
http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/isuppli
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/isuppli
Well goody for them. As a professional developer I'd like my OS without a start menu that takes up the entire screen, thanks.

Oh who am I kidding, my Windows OS is a games launcher and web browser these days, and nothing more. I don't mind how retarded Microsoft and Apple want to get, what concerns me is Canonical and their "me too" attitude with regard to stupid design decisions.
Working on an old PC without supported graphics drivers/hardware - any chance of a video?
I don't know about the overall upgrade pricing for OSX, but if you wanted to go from 10.4 to 10.6, they required you to buy the full suite with iLife and all for $129 or whatever it was. $30 upgrades are only supported if you upgrade every time.
After getting hooked on a keyboard-based launcher like Launchy (http://launchy.net), I pretty much stopped using the Start menu entirely.
Thank you, 0x12 and all of you, for your interest in my quirky creation. Naturally I follow modern FPGA technology avidly, but I guess it's obvious that my project predates that sort of thing. 2901 style Bit-Slice components were the wonder of wonders not so long ago! But modern programmable logic brings us to another level altogether.

Another revolution of course is the community of the Internet. My KimKlone project was conceived and implemented as a one-man effort, and for years it remained a de facto secret since I had no way to publicize it and almost no-one to discuss it with. These are magical times we live in, and I'm grateful to share your ideas and comments.

-- Jeff
Is It Really True The iPad Makes Flying More Fuel Efficient?
Are you sure that's the data they're basing all this on? Terribly unscientific for them, if so.
Larry and Sergey are probably just posting under pen names. ;)
I think the issue is that it doesn't play well with Word's change tracker. But I could be wrong; my change tracker is diff(1).
The article explains that people with the application downloaded wouldn't be able to access it because it requires a call to a server that was down. Although this is the fault with Apple for Siri, third party apps calling defunct servers will also have this problem.
>Fifty bucks a week for groceries. Yeah, I can do this. //

It's actually not hard, IMO, to live on a low income for a short period. It's when your living accommodation starts to fall apart, the clothes you've been wearing for 10 years are all holed and worn out, you're missing meals, you always have to say no to your kids, you never get a trip out, you never get a change from cheap food, poorly made clothing, a cold house, etc., it's knowing you have to work if you're sick, have no pension, no savings.

It's the dull drudgery of it that wears one down, erodes ones hope.
I don't think many HN readers need to be convinced that this is probably a bad (potential) law. The real issue is the appropriateness of this action by Italian-language editors as a response to this proposed law.
> Defending CGI, in my opinion, also hurts his credibility. The "good old days" weren't so good. Spawning a new process for each request? Re-establishing database connections every time? That shit only worked because there were three people on the internet at the time.

Apparently the server behind SQLite.org and Fossil-scm.org, which gets 250M requests/day, spawns a new HTTP server for each request. There's no database, though.

http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or...
The author shunned mathematics in favor of programming, but this exercise showed why that was a mistake.

Compared to serious mathematics, programming is relatively trivial.

With mathematics, you can do anything in computing.

Without it, you're reduced to this feeble exercise in self-enlightment.
Everything You Need To Know About The iPhone 4S
very nice work, we're looking forward to seeing how we can help with this. This should pave the way for more hosting companies to provide some excellent hosting solutions on top of WordPress
NYC: You can have a whole usability class working on your startup
And in that short of time frame, the only ways (generally) to communicate with the host of the material are by email or phone. In either case, there is little way to verify that someone telling you to take it down is the subject of the text.
If you're looking for particular non-mainstream framework/langues jobs in Brisbane (Node.js being one of them) you should hang around in the Meetups (MeetupJS). Good place to get noticed and job offers.
False, they're doing on device speech recognition. Servers are only used if you request information from the Internet. Look at the demos and read the hands on reports. On device recognition makes it much more usable than Google Voice Actions.
Garbage collectors are relatively well paid (~$15-25ph).
Ask HN: Anyone know where Mark Pilgrim went?
I went back to diveintohtml5.org to find something today, and it's gone. Then I checked diveintomark.org, diveintopython3.org, twitter.com/diveintomark...

Is Mark Pilgrim pulling a disappearing act?
> It's something that I wish I could to in the App Store. I need to keep tabs on my IPAs in case there's an app that I bought that is no longer available. In this day and age I shouldn't need to do that.

With the new iCloud stuff, you can go into the Purchased page on the iTunes Store and download any app you've ever downloaded, including those that are no longer available in the store.
'Educated' is not a boolean true/false. Missing out on field trips would not make someone 'uneducated', but it would decrease the breadth of their education.

Example: I'm a city boy, born and bred, but I spent summers on my uncle's farm. Due to that experience, I understand much better how rural people think and why, and the kinds of things that are more important to them.

If I had never spent time on the farm, I would not be 'uneducated', but those experiences have significantly improved my understanding of the people around me - I am much better educated for having these [lengthy] 'field trips'.

Replay this experience in shorter amounts more frequently in the form of field trips and you'll get a variety of different things to help broaden your experience and who knows, you may see something you're passionate about that you might not otherwise see.

So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life.
Yes, Watson had a major advantage at buzzing in but he was also capable of understanding or computing the questions. This is significant as the questions on Jeopardy aren't simply x + y = z but contain the complexities of the English language.
This is depressing. But I'm not sure how donating $5 to some mission is going to solve these problems; the game itself says poor people are wary of accepting handouts, and that's all this will be, right?

I'm also not sure I'm comfortable subsidizing people's bad choices. If I have to support someone, it's my nature to micromanage their lives to make sure they are using the money efficiently. No cell phones. No Internet. No music downloads. No nights out drinking.

In the end, I try to imagine how I would act if I were poor, had a child, and had no marketable skills. The first thing would be to find the smallest living space available, to save on rent, heating/cooling costs, and electricity. That means sleeping on mats that come out of the closet at bedtime, washing dishes by hand, cooking everything on the stove, and taking a bath with my kid every night to save hot water. If rich people in Japan can live this way, poor people in America can live this way. I would try to live close enough to work to not need a car (cars are nice, until they break), but if that's not possible, I'd use a car for commuting and a bike for errands. I wouldn't have a cell phone or Internet access; I'd queue up my Internet needs (buying household essentials in bulk online, resyncing my CPAN mirror, whatever) and go to the library. This would also be a good time to get some public-domain music and some books to read for the week.

It sounds primitive but I know I could make it work. If you're dumb, lazy, and have kids, guess what, life is not going to be the same as those Hollywood stars on TV. You don't get to buy everything you want. You don't get to have fun with your friends. You get to work, cook, read, help your kids with school, and keep your bicycle in good working condition. And honestly, I don't think that's a life that's missing anything at all. You get human relationships (family), a chance to contribute to society (work), education (reading), a hobby (cooking), and exercise (cycling).

So I guess the problem is: how do we convince people to want what they can have, rather than to want what they can't have? It's a cultural thing, and it's going to be a very hard problem to solve. We may be able to give people free healthcare, but where will they live, what will they eat, and how will they get to work?

(And I know what you're all thinking: the reason I'm not poor is because I can think things through and be analytical enough to make smart choices. Yes. That's why "solving poverty" is a very, very, very difficult problem. Feeling bad and giving someone money is not the solution. Deep changes to our educational system and our cultural values are probably the only way to make things work.)
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According to the video, he said that Siri knew his wife's name from "a previous conversation". Which seems to indicate that Siri has some learning capability built in.
Why, next you'll tell me Zynga execs don't play Farmville, and TV execs don't watch reality shows!
And Impress still sucks. :(

Trying to re-adapt after using Keynote for a year. It's rough. Even the simple things, like having to click half a dozen times to find the "edge" of a text box, because clicking in the middle either does nothing (if there is no text there) or clicks "through" to edit the text inside.
IPhone 4S vs. Motorola Droid Bionic Spec Comparison Chart
Did you buy it? I thought it was free.

Siri's server will be doing down once the 3GS is released.
"excellent hosting solutions on top of WordPress" is an oxymoron.
Disclosure: author :)

I don't think what a "normal" person has done on Facebook over the past 5 years is a fair comparison. Facebook didn't even have a public "subscribe/follow" concept til last week, whereas Google+ launched with one. Also, these aren't normal people, they're the leaders/overseers of the company using (or not) a landmark initiative whose leader (Vic Gundotra) clearly thinks that ideally it'd be used for both your private and public interactions. At the very least, it'd look a lot better if they had accounts, tried making a public post (even just to congratulate the team publicly), and looked engaged.
I'd bet Google management doesn't click on Google ads very often, either.
This is a great piece of legislation, it's sad that here in Canada we're seeing the opposite with the current government proposing a pretty draconian copyright bill:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/law-cracks-down...
Dear Mixpanel, Please Stop
Dear Mixpanel,

Please stop posting your job ads. The regular readers of HN are well aware that you are hiring from your (weekly?) posts and they are decreasing the site's SNR.

If you are simply trying to keep your post on the jobs page, is there a way to do that without dominating the site feed?

Also, now that you have kept us informed that you are trying to hire, what have your numbers been? How many applications have you had in response to each post? How many of those were junk, and how many did you follow up with?
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Thanks, but I just submited. It is copyrighted to OutsideOfSociety 2011, http://oos.moxiecode.com/. They did the great job.
> I just don't see a realistic turn of events where suddenly everyone is paying for CDs again.

Lots of people pay for Spotify.[1] CDs are dead, but because of the medium, not the concept of paying for something.

[1] http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/02/09/spotify-second-large...
This is probably better news than the iPhone 4S. Standardization of MicroUSB is a win for all consumers. Aside from the EU economic fallout, the EU has done something right!
I'm the author and you're right. I hadn't thought of that, I was just thinking in the narrow space of consumer-y services/devices that have a broad target market. Something like "and being intimately familiar with them" would have been much better.
Yes, thank you for writing this. We are all humans, even if we don't want to be, and we have to think about our actions in the context of our genetic programming. In the case of tribalism, even though it's a strong feeling, we have to ignore it because it doesn't get us anything in programming language debates.

The best attitude to have is one of acceptance and an open mind, because the right programming tool applied to the right problem can make solving that problem orders of magnitude less difficult. You can have programmer friends even if you don't unconditionally hate the enemy. In fact, it seems, most people don't care about who you don't hate.
Do you have WebGL enabled in Safari? (it isn't by default)

To turn it on, first turn on the Develop menu in Advanced Preferences, then select "Enable WebGL" in the Develop menu.
I don't think they went into it with an agenda of proving how hard it is. Morgan's got an agenda for sure, but he's generally pretty good about putting it aside it seems to me. In any case, what got them was the health costs. Which is partly bad luck. But I mean, you go long enough you're going to eventually have to go to the doctor. And with out insurance that costs you an ARM and a LEG.
Actually, no, since the display would be 80x24.
Bluetooth? 　-- Don't need it. Only accessory I would use is bluetooth headphones, and wired is good enough.

HDMI? -- Don't need it, why would I hook my tablet to my TV?

Camera? -- Don't need it, I have a camera and a cell phone.

Microphone? -- Why would I need a microphone on a tablet?

micro/SD slot? -- Don't need it, my content is stored on Amazon's servers. It has enough physical space for content when I'm on the go.

GPS? -- Don't need it, I'm not using this for maps on the go. That's what my cell phone is for.

3G? -- One valid point.

Android Market? -- The most valid point, but not a deal-breaker.

Lists like these are almost always ignorant of typical use cases. That's partly why Apple does so well -- they engineer for the typical use, even if it excludes power users.
I think you need to look at it bigger picture. Ask yourself, why they are not disiplined, and why they repeatedly act out?

This notion that people are born smart, and others are just born morons, is a false dichotomy.

We shouldn't be asking the question "Should we seperate dumb kids from smart ones?" we should be asking the much harder question of "what socio-economic issues are causing there to be a divide in the the first place, and how do we combat that?"
I don't know what you mean about "many ways to declare... a function." Unless you mean the fact that you can elide repeated types ("func foo(a int, b int)" vs "func foo(a, b int)"), which is just simple sugar to stop repeating yourself; or maybe you're referring to the named result parameters. Both of these are conveniences, and I wouldn't really say that they are different "ways" (syntactic constructs) to do something.

Variables in Go can be a bit tricky, but it's really not too difficult. In functions, declaring a variable with "var" requires a type and optionally and initializer. The ":=" construct declares and initializes a new variable whose type is inferred to be that of the righthand expression. Again it's just a convenience so you can stop repeating yourself.
(I'm the author). Your last point is very true, and the chart tries to make it very clear it's only talking about public posts. Obviously entirely true that they could be using it purely privately, but I still think is an observation worth making that they're not using it publicly.

As far the correlation in general, as I mention in the thread above, these aren't normal people, they're the leaders/overseers of the company using (or not) a landmark initiative whose leader (Vic Gundotra) clearly thinks that ideally it'd be used for both private and public interactions. At the very least, it'd look a lot better if they had accounts, tried making a public post (even just to congratulate the team publicly), and looked a bit more publicly engaged.
Anyone else reading the OP (and these comments), think it's completely elitist?

A bunch of privileged kids wanting more privileges... LOL. Right, we should tax the poor more, and the rich less as well (oh wait...)
The iPhone 4S Is Finally The Knowledge Navigator
Ask PG: Distributed Open House '11?
I did a Google search for startup school site:ycombinator.com and found the Distributed Open House 2010 page. Is there anything similar in the works for this year? Searching has not yielded results.
family is definitely the most important thing... and without family support is is incredibly hard to start something. best of luck Marc -- you know I'm rooting for you and your love of starting something great
Effective tax rates: Taxing times
Microsoft provides free updates in the form of service packs rather than calling it a new version.
Good question

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2011/10/04/searching-for-m...
Since I'm at the age of where my friends are getting married or having babies, I can see this being useful for the really expensive gifts on wedding registries or baby showers. Heck, it could even be useful for contribution towards a honeymoon for friends who can't afford it after their costly wedding!
Yes there might be a good correlation between dogfooding in senior management and great products, but it's not worth shoving a square peg into a round hole to meet this superficial criteria.

The reason Facebook and Twitter executives use their respective services is because that is the core product from the very beginning. Google+ on the other hand is a tertiary product. Just because management realizes they need a foothold in social doesn't mean that they should forcibly try to transmute themselves into the target market. Instead they should have people in charge of the product that care enough to use it naturally, and I think that's what they're doing.
(I'm the author) That's a really good observation re the content of the founders' posts, especially Mr. Brin's.
I wonder what percentage of the HN readership is in the San Francisco area or would at least consider moving there.
Dreaming Nightmares Opening
Searching for Mark Pilgrim
Conflating the digital representation of items with their value to society isn't any sort of logical argument. It's merely restating the problem in reductionistic terms in an attempt to sidestep the messy, moral consequences of our actions in society.
Agreed. A company is not one person, and if it is, something is wrong with the company.
BTW - for anyone interesting in something similar for drupal, there is Drush:
http://drupal.org/project/drush
They are looking at the change in usage, not the total usage. Your complaints would be more apt if they were just looking at data for a single release, rather than a trend across releases. If users are switching to another method, regardless of what it is, you can argue that this is a failing of the Start menu.
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Haha very true.
I saw this on VHS when it originally came out, at an Apple user group meeting. I was 15 years old. I remember thinking at the time that it all seemed to far-fetched to become reality. I'm glad I was wrong.
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Mark Pilgrim seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Eric is searching for anyone who might know him personally to make sure he is ok.
Is it really a good idea in any language though? I mean, if you're instantiating in your consumer, it feels like you're not really leveraging Composition.

It's OK to pass a Class to an IoC container (my own Ruby version: https://github.com/wiecklabs/harbor/blob/master/lib/harbor/c...), but if you're actually injecting them into your objects that feels wrong.

I really wish I were more eloquent and could explain why it feels that way. :-/

I guess perhaps it just feels a bit primitive to be managing dependencies manually in the manner of the example?

That said, I'd rather work with code that at least attempts to break out dependencies like in the example, making testing and re-use much simpler over code that's tightly coupled any day of the week.

EDIT: Just to be clear, after reading further, nit-picks aside, this really is a great, eloquent article that makes several important concepts very accessible. Very nicely done IMO.
I think that's a very sharp observation. I tried it, but in order to exponentiate the vectors (instead of floating point numbers) I end up with the original matrix algorithm (pre-eigenvalues)...
Wow... No 3D card? That's a SERIOUSLY old PC.
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You guys might want to talk to Peter Thiel. He's trying to start an incubator by funding high school graduates.

http://www.thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&...
Can't remember the source ... "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried."
(I'm the author) Actually, I would tend to think that TV execs do watch their reality TV programs & even suspect Zynga execs have at least played a bit of Farmville, and certainly should if it's their company's biggest initiative of the year. But I do think the eat-your-own-dogfood applies more in some businesses than others, as jonmc12 pointed out below. Though Google+ is one where it certainly could apply - not exactly steel beams or something.
http://diveintohtml5.com/ seems to still be working
IPhone 4S new 14.4 Mbps HSDPA 4G speeds won't help Americans
I'd definitely like to know what happened to Mark Pilgrim and hope he is well. It's still reassuring to know that his websites are still archived by the Internet Archive. (e.g., http://web.archive.org/web/20110726001953/http://diveintohtm...)
That's a charitable interpretation of their inability to ship for most of the 00s.
One of the problems with being somewhat famous and being on these things is that you get barraged with stuff from random people.

I was mentioned in an early Googler's post and I still get barraged with stuff.
Vic is higher in the org, I think