skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure you deserve the d/v's.

You want to know what it is?

Firstly the difference between the iPhone and any phone when it came out was phenomenal. It was 3-5 years ahead of any other phone. I am not exaggerating at all. It was incredible, a true game changer.

That Google managed to change Android's direction and produce a touch phone OS so quickly was an impressive feat and also showed how switched on whoever was running that project was. On the other hand calling it an homage to the iOS is being very generous. I was always surprised that Apple didn't go after them straight away with copyright it was that much of a ripoff.

The iPhone was ahead in every degree. The UI was awesome where every other phone was awful. It had a touch screen, no other mainstream phone had one. There were a lot of other details that were amazing at the time but have now faded into the recesses of my brain. And it looked incredible. All other phones looked like they'd been designed by Homer compared to the iPhone.

The difference between todays iPhone and all the others are pretty much the same but with less pronounced effects. There's a good reason Apple are suing Samsung over the design of their phone. No phones looked like that before the iPhone, it is a rip-off, we've just got used to all phone being iPhone clones, getting as close to ripping off Apple as they can without getting sued.

As for iOS vs Android? The UI is better. Not a little bit. A lot. It's smooth, it's thought out, it's a joy to use. Android pretty much copied the entire interface and still it's nowhere near as good. It's just not got the Apple attention to detail. The MS phone 7 one is the only other genuinely innovative product out there.

I'm not even a fan boy. I like Google most of the time. I respect the skill with which they brought out Android. It's still a knock off and you get what you pay for, knock offs are lower quality. They're not innovators, they're copiers and copies don't outshine originals. Apple have vision while Android just slavishly copies them. Siri is a perfect example of this. They didn't make it but as soon as they saw it they knew it was what they wanted, where they wanted to take it.

It's the only apple tech I own, but I'm sticking with iPhones for now. They rock.
"I've never owned an Apple product in my life, but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would not exist if it wasn't for Steve Jobs."

Steve Jobs has said many times that if he and Apple had not done the things they did, some other person or company -- within a short time period, would have done them.*

If you respect what he's done, then presumably you would respect his beliefs about how important he or Apple actually were.

* http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-...
Woops. Pardon me.
You’ve Got To Admit It’s Getting Better
Here you go!

http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
The problem is “parsing XML with a regex”, which you can’t do unless you take “regex” to mean “Perl regex”. This isn’t a useful script; it only serves to illustrate a point.
Can one really call this sort searching parsing? That's certainly somewhat subjective but this would never be called a "parser" in my world.

Everyone who thinks that http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/ can be parsed with a few lines of perl is just mislead. Example: Does the parser handle XML namespaces?

At best it's a trickier way of searching xml files.
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I should have been clearer. If it's inevitable that the influence of someone like RMS will wane because he's an uncompromising advocate, doesn't that suggest that Steve Jobs' influence would have waned as well?

My point is that someone's relevance depends on much more than if a majority of people find their views acceptable. Steve Jobs oversaw products that people loved by uncompromisingly advocating improvements on the status quo in design, while RMS uncompromisingly advocates something that, for many people in the world's present state, is impractical.
Much worse will be written about RMS when he dies and many will applaud what is written, never mind their contributions to technology had the same scale of impact on society... It's all in the perspective.
I'll take a look at getting it up to vim.org. Thanks for your interest!
Whenever this topic arises, we should never forget one of the best answers ever given concerning it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
Probably quite a while. Phone companies have done and continue to do this, but are moving more and more away from it.

I'd be thrilled if someone tried it, though. It's more honest and more likely to address bad user experiences than arbitrary "bytes transferred per month caps."
I love my Thinkpad T420S -- it's light, it has SSD, 8GB RAM so it's fast as hell.
looks like shit in xp/chrome. moral of this story: test your damn designs.
I'm not sure paypal is that much different from other merchant processors. I spoke to several last year, and they were all fine and dandy until I told them I take payment for 12 month subscriptions in advance (jsmag.com and groovymag.com). I also take payments for indieconf.com, an annual tech conference.

3 processors told me they couldn't work with me at all. A couple said I'd need to go to underwriting, and I'd pay a higher fee.

I asked why, and was told "possibility for chargebacks is high". I then said something like "why can a company like Expedia charge me for a ticket 11 months in advance for $2000, but you won't let me sell a ticket to a conference 3 months in advance?". "Companies like Expedia have millions in reserve to cover chargebacks" was the answer I got.

I could have received a merchant account through any of those companies by lying about the nature of what I was selling, but had they found out, my account may have been suspended or I may have had a certain amount subject to reserve holding.

I don't see the behaviour of paypal as all that different to most other processors, except that most people don't tell paypal ahead of time what they'll be selling.

I have a merchant account through BoA - got to meet with a real person who answered questions, asked me some, pushed things through underwriting, and it all went OK, but I still run nearly everything through paypal and google checkout right now still - both paypal and google checkout have pretty strong name recognition and people are generally comfortable with them so far.
Millions? I doubt that.

There are socially sensitive nerds, but "pleasant" usually describes their SELF-image, not the view that others have of them.

Usually nerds like you describe are socially anxious and attempt to "take care" of everyone around them by conforming to their expectations and desires. Normal people actually find it exhausting to hang out with socially anxious "nice guy" nerds.

Also, almost all "nice guys" have a lot of repressed anger and rage from trauma in the past. The "nice guys" have repressed it and so are not aware of it, but others see the anger, usually manifesting as cynicism, sarcasm, or passivity.

Anyway true pleasant, sensitive people are rarely also described as nerds. They'd be described as socially comfortable, pleasant, emotionally sensitive, and intelligent.

"Nerd" would not enter the description unless there is some amount of social anxiety, awkwardness, or intense need for external validation.
Ok what's 'helpd' and why does it call Akamai servers?

http://imgur.com/IDc5f
The XML spec refers to them as "empty-element" tags.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-starttags
All parsing is is discerning structure in flat input, so yes, it’s a parser.
This is why I wrote the article.
Simple example: pre-iPhone for the vast majority of people if you wanted to put your phone into silent you had to choose the correct "profile" (is it quiet? or is it meeting? what's the difference?).

Post iPhone, you flick the hardware switch that you can reach while the phone is still in your pocket.
Jeez, why is this on the home page. This drives me crazy. Please, stop.
If they had changed the "4S" to "5" with identical hardware I think he would have been happy ;)

The camera updates alone were brilliant.
frankly, there's a lot of innovation and value that gets created by the developers and how they utilize sensors, compute, and new features. Apple gives developers some blocks to work with, and developers can use their own imaginations to organize them. That is to say, a lot of the value creation happens after Apple releases their product, and developers put things back into the ecosystem.

Samsung or other competitors haven't done a great job with this (and of course it's not an easy thing to pull off).

Mainstream reporting doesn't have the technical chops to have the imagination, and it's also (maybe unfortunately) not their job to do so. It's probably some sort of failing of communication between engineers and media and mainstream audiences.

What you're missing is that much of Apple's value creation and pushing the envelope happens through the ecosystem (that's not an esoteric statement, their ecosystem creates real jobs and real money). We're living in a mobile world, the tools and the distribution are in front of you. I prefer that over an ecosystem where the masses are only given the option to be consumers rather than also participators.
We do something similar in one of our app, although we also permit the user to block connections it doesn't want to.

http://www.metakine.com/products/handsoff/
Apple Files Patent for In-App Purchases
At the risk of pounding the Jobs-is-dead meme too hard, this reminds me of a good story I read recently about Steve Jobs:

Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."

An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.

"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.

"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."[1]

[1] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798...
Is the 1 GHz A5 twice as fast as the 1 GHz A4 or are you saying that dual core means twice as fast?
You can go to http://news.ycombinator.com/changepw to change your password when you are logged in.

The link is available through your profile, 4th from the bottom.
Ooooooohhhh neat, OK that makes GPL a whole lot more attractive then. Assumption destroyed; paradigm expanded. Thank-you.
I also don't like this, although it's no big deal, and it happens with a few other settings (e.g., 'number'). One way around it is to forget about using the 'set' command entirely and to assign all settings using the setting variable directly. Every setting has a corresponding variable that can be accessed by prefixing with &, so to set paste off you can just do ':let &paste=0'.
> They've made it incredibly clear that their policies and actions are arbitrary and they don't care about their customers at all.

It seems to me that they're incredibly consistent and care about their customers exactly as much as any other merchant account provider. This exact story with a game developer taking preorders then having PayPal problems has played out a half dozen times on Hacker News alone; in reality it happens regularly. It would happen if these developers applied for a merchant account and said they were taking long-term preorders on the application too.

The only problem with PayPal is that merchants don't expect PayPal to act like every other processor, and have no experience dealing with the risk/underwriting departments of banks to realize that what they're doing would be a problem anywhere.

As far as why businesses still use PayPal? Nobody else operates in as many countries. Nobody else has over 200 million members already signed up and trusting the payment process. Few MOTO merchant accounts actually beat the fees PayPal charges, especially once you have >$10,000/mo in volume, when you actually add up all the transaction fees. And few gateways are as easy to implement or built into as many other ecommerce products.

It makes no sense from a business standpoint not to use PayPal (which in 2011 does not mean sending someone to paypal.com to pay if they want to pay on site). They're cheaperc, more reliable, allow you to accept all major credit and debit cards, bank transfers, eChecks, payments from 200+ million members' balances, and pay you your funds immediately. If you're that worried about having a problem, have a backup in place to switch to and don't hold a PayPal balance -- risk free.

You would think the HN community would look at PayPal and see a success story to be shared and celebrated. They were the only significant 3rd party payment processor to make it through the dot com bubble. There have been many attempts. They all went out of business due to fraud. PayPal was bleeding over $10 million a month to chargebacks and fraud at one point. They created the software and systems to make a global 3rd party payment platform possible and survived. Now they make possible an enormous amount of ecommerce for tens of millions of people that would not be able to accept payments any other way.

Instead we see the occasional "horror story" that would likely happen whether the developer was using PayPal or anyone else, and a PayPal Sucks website that's accumulated barely 2000 threads in over a decade (what fraction of a fraction of a percent of PayPal users is that?), and certain vocal people pile on the "why would anyone ever use PayPal" bandwagon...
I’ve been writing a lot lately, and I’ve gotten in the habit of submitting all of my blog posts to HN in order to get feedback and see what interests the people for whom I’m trying to write. It’s on the home page because enough people thought it was interesting that they upvoted it. If it drives you crazy, all you have to do to make it go away is refrain from upvoting.
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Cost per GB isn't really even what you want to measure, and doing so is what causes so much confusion.

Let's say you're an ISP and you have a 10Gbps connection to the outside world, and the routers etc. that can keep up with that speed.

To a first approximation, your costs to serve up 10Gbps to all the customers in your area is 0 (you've got to pay for electricity and engineers and etc, but this doesn't vary with user activity).

If your customers in your area all queued up nicely and downloaded stuff at full rate, never overlapping with each other, you could transfer 10Gbps * 1 month for basically nothing.

However, your customers all want to do stuff at the same time, and thus contend with each other for a slice of that 10Gbps. If you want to serve all of their requests, you're going to have to spring to upgrade your total capacity.

If you don't own your own fiber, you have to rent a link from someone else, or if you do and there's no more available you have to physically come up with more (and pay to dig up the road and etc.). Now your routers and etc. might not be able to keep up with your new backhaul speed, and you have to upgrade those...

You really want to measure "Marginal cost of +x Kbps during the busiest typical hour."
Here's To The Crazy Ones
>I think it's pretty telling that tablet computers have existed for ... what, 15 years? And that tablet computing didn't take off with consumers until iPad. I think that's a fine example of how Steve influenced a change in the world.

Consider that for most of these 15 years, the hardware wasn't good enough for mass appeal. The combination of a CPU powerful enough to render video and to support custom apps written in a high-level language, the RAM, the screen technology and the battery able to sustain all these for many hours didn't exist until probably 2006 or so.
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Muscle memory, or engrams? How about: off CPU EEPROM with very slow burn in rate.
The computation is handled remotely, or distally, but the computation only becomes overriding after a certain number of like computations.
Can be unlearnt: erased.
The iPhone 4's A4 chip was clocked at 800 MHz, only the iPad had it at 1 GHz. I don't know what the A5 is clocked at in the iPhone 4S, but it's certainly possible it is faster clocked as well as dual-core.
> This isn’t a problem if you assume your input is well-formed. I’m talking about parsing XML, not checking whether some input actually is XML. Correctness is a Boolean, after all: invalid XML is not XML. ... [proceeds to parse HTML]

even validated HTML isn't XML, let alone tag soup.
Is this a serious point or an attempt at sarcasm? Because I've never seen any other phone with that "feature".
In Japan the main provider of iPhones (Softbank) is attempting to prevent people jumping carriers to AU who have better reception by offering to waive the remaining payments of 3GS owners who upgrade. Good plan - and gets iPhones into the hands of younger siblings / wives of early adopters to get them hooked for iPhone 5s imminent release in the near future.
I have this now. It seems to work pretty well to encourage heavy use of the connection out of hours.
Future of Apple after Steve Jobs
Nope, I didn't. Actually the issue was getting the correct packages from apt-get. DLL hell all over again. In the end I simply formatted the machine with a non-stable version and the drivers installed as expected. Easy peasy.

EDIT: But that wasn't the point. The point is that those kinds of problems still happen with Linux, but only sometimes, with specific distros in specific gear, but when they don't happen (such as with Ubuntu 99% of the time) Linux gets praise and adoption from non-techies.
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Ask HN: What is the best way to survey existing customers?
Interested in a discussion around survey techniques used in startups
That's the point of the post. There's lots of money out there. But it gets spent in ways that are different from what the typical entrepreneur and VC expect it to be spent on. The dynamics of how purchasing decisions are made are around cost, not quality.

Let's talk data. How many students spend money on educational services? 15% of students take SAT or ACT prep outside of school. By the time a student is 16 and has some discretionary spend and has some influence of a parent's spend. If students took their spending power/influence and prioritized educational spend you would have a lot more than 15% of students getting test prep outside of the school.

Consumer spending is huge. Consumer spending on education is large. Consumer spending on education where the primary driver is quality is much smaller.
Could technology make car insurance cheaper?
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That string does serve to show what you get when you throw some tag soup at the thing, though.
Oh ofcourse, I thought evincarofautumn meant the SGML/HTML thing where you don't need to close certain tags.
We can go back further than that. Hal Geneen was the CEO famous for expanding ITT into a multi-national conglomerate using rigorous metrics-driven management. His favourite saying was,

“Managers must manage.” As in, your job as a manager is to overcome the obstacles, not to use them for excuses. What do you manage if not the impediments to success?
I think of it as a concept graph . Nodes represent concepts and weighted edges navigable relations between concepts. Further one can associate excitation levels with concepts.

At any given instant there is a set of excited concepts. Then there is some algorithm for time evolution of the excitations.
No, he is not anything like this letter in real life. He is happy to have wide ranging conversations without reference to his own history or accomplishments. I suppose that in the letter he was trying to establish credibility and rapport with the Spotify guys. It certainly worked out well for both of them in the end.
Awesome work... Keep it up!

I will be interested in hearing more about it as time goes on...

Thanks,
Ilya
More than likely the trademarks are being registered by a holding company. It's unlikely that Amazon would spin the product to a separate entity. Most big tech companies register domains and trademarks under holding companies to protect the product identity before launch.
Some observations I came across in a cognition class:

-> We can perform a visual lookup (identify the circle colored differently from these other circles in this group of circles) in O(1) time. Or if we are asked to locate a friend from an array of people (array fits in field-of-view), we can identify said friend in constant time

-> By nature, we classify objects based on how we use them. So a table and a chair have the same physical 4-legged, flat-top structure. But we differentiate them because we use them differently:

So, my guess :

-> A highly trained decision tree allowing us to perform classification of objects in our environment based on their use. (the training set is whatever is in our field of view and as such we are bombarded with large amounts of data). A hebbian-rule based ANN for training.

For dealing with visual stimulus at-least, I would bet that this is the model we are using right now.

Also, our classifier seems to be operating in parallel on all the objects available in our FOV.
That's a funny example because nowadays when I want my iPhone to stop looking for WiFi because I'm going to be outside for a couple of hours I need to go to Settings and select Wi-Fi and turn if off, sort of like choosing the right profile but more annoying since on any Nokia phone you would just press the on/off button and select the right profile. But then I also want to turn brightness much lower and there I go again.

On the TouchPad that's like 5 seconds to change both.

(I understand I'm comparing a tablet to a phone but I never tried any other mobile OS so I have no idea how quick you can do that. I can guess it's like the TouchPad though.)
Bitcoin. :)
Apple's real genius (video - talk starts at 11:25)
Good article post, thanks for linking it.

I think that overall, what many in the press missed, is that this upgrade isn't about the iPhone 4 - it is about the 3GS.

While I have a 4 and was lucky enough to get a full discount on my upgrade, there's a massive number of 3GS users that weren't eligible for an upgrade until now. They've all seen the 4 and wanted it but not been willing to drop the extra cash on it and now they have a chance with the full subsidy.

Furthermore, Apple opened the doors to iPhone use a bit wider with Sprint and also the free 3GS and lower priced 4. A great move that has increased their appeal without actually cheapening the image of the product.

It is important to remember that Apple doesn't play for tech press. They play for the people that you see every day. Android phones are made for carriers, not for consumers; the iPhone is made for people.
ESR On Steve Jobs’s passing
I second this. Society shouldn't shy away from experimentation with LSD. Imagine what we can unravel.