skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No that's not the proper way of doing it. You create worker threads in separate process that receive data from node.js, encodes them and send them back. you don't fork on every request.
JQuery Mobile's support for Opera isn't helping the mobile web
Yep. The self-made man would say it a certain way, and the sad truth is that most people lack the mix of ambition and discipline to look for, find, and work on ways to change their situation. For every rags-to-riches story there are a million rags-to-rags stories to match.

Another person here mentioned people using check cashing services instead of service-charging banks. You know, as opposed to shopping around for a smaller bank or credit union that doesn't do that (another thing strangely lacking as an option in the game). What makes this even more pathetic is that the bank charge is usually LESS than the 3% they are paying from their paycheck to the check cashing service! Top it off with the tendency for poor people to withdraw small amounts of cash from ATMs and take the service charge hit (which, since it's a fixed price, increases the percentage loss the lower the amount you take out) and you can't but shake your head in disbelief.

And don't even get me started on the massive amounts of money stupid people spend on lottery tickets...

It's little things like this that make (and keep) people poor, and these things are so easy to avoid with a little planning and discipline. Wealth is a long term strategy that few consider seriously.

And once you have wealth, you need to protect it from your grandchildren, because it's a well known phenomena for the first generation to make the money, the second generation to keep the money, and the third generation to piss it away. Not to mention the incredibly stupid modern practice of splitting the inheritance between your children rather than passing it in its entirety to ONE child.
Virgin Mobile updated their rates this month: "$30/mo" is now "$35/mo" and "unlimited" is now "unlimted with throttling at 2.5 GB".

It's great that small carriers are offering some great deals to lure customers and it's great that there are some cracks in the system for the tiny minority that doesn't want a data plan (or whatever) sbut that doesn't change the basic truth that nearly everyone is going to be paying for phone and data every month anyway.

These "total cost of ownership is obscene" things are always disingenuous to me. No, that's the price of the phone and phone service and a data plan for 2 years.
i'd be willing to bet google execs use hangouts quite a bit, which is technically google+..
Well, that would be a bit ironic.
Perhaps I've become cynical but before the 2008 election I (as a non-US citizen so I can't vote) strongly supported Obama, not because I necessarily agreed with his positions but because of the race situation in America.

It's an understatement to say that African Americans between slavery, segregation and just general racism have had a torrid history in the United States. Honestly I can't imagine the consequences of what that kind of cultural heritage would do to you.

Obama's election was seen by many as a symbol. Having the first African American president holding the highest office in the land was seen as (and is IMHO) a bellwether moment in American history.

Had he lost I think there would've been a lot of anger (and there's already a lot of anger in American society), possibly even feelings of despair and being deprived (as a race). Whatever the case, it certainly seemed important.

What I predicted would happen--and IMHO has happened--is that Obama as president has been deeply disappointing to many of his supporters. The US is still in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration is basically the political wing of the RIAA/MPAA between ACTA, federal judgeships, ex-RIAA lawyers filling the DoJ and so on.

It has turned out to be worse than my own cynical predictions. Obama the candidate was great. He spoke frankly and intelligently whereas Hilary Clinton (and most others) would give bottled answers to questions that made it seemed like they were just going through the motions and, in many ways, felt entitled to the office.

So what we have now is, I believe, a partial catharsis of race relations in America (which is good) and also the reality that politicians are politicians first and foremost, regardless of race or creed.

As for ACTA, at least the stupid three strikes Internet stuff is gone but the treaty is still an embarrassment both in content and execution. It was negotiated in secret. So much for government openness. Thank God for Wikileaks (and similar).

But I guess we can't call it a treaty. To do so would be a de facto admission that it requires Senate ratification. Instead words like "accord" and "agreement" are bandied about to dodge due process. Another embarrassment.
Domestic companies please.
I would guess that Apple will now use the phone to handle most of the Siri computations, and that in this old Siri app it was being done server side. This is why 4S is required.

Having the app out there for a while likely gave Siri great users to test out their system with and improve upon it before launching mass integrated with the OS.
When Windows XP was released, the newest Mac computers were the Power Mac G4, the PowerBook G4, and the white iBook G3. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#History)

The iBook shipped in only one model, with 128MB of RAM. The PowerBook G4 started at 128MB of RAM and topped out at 256MB of RAM. The Power Mac G4 started at 128MB of RAM and topped out at 512MB of RAM.

The smallest amount of memory you can get on a Mac nowadays is 2GB, and you would've had to buy an entirely new computer at least once to get Lion running in the intervening time.

(Whereas, if you didn't buy a new computer since Windows XP came out, you could run the 32-bit version just fine with 1GB of RAM.)

Methinks you doth protest too much about expensive upgrades.
Systemizing Will Liberate You - with Harold Mann
The analogy to text editors is bad though, since everyone can choose the UI they like for text editing, whereas for source control the choice of UIs is much reduced.

In other words, I can choose Vim/Emacs, slog away and get proficient, and someone else can read my code with notepad. With VCS, I'm asking casual and hardcore users to use the same UI, so it better appeal to both.
This app posted to my wall without asking first.
The US neither has nor is presently debating any copyright laws which impose (or threaten to impose) a debilitating burden on the Wikipedia editing process and its content.
Removing malware from phones and the market is entirely reasonable. That's not the problem. The problem is deciding what kind of non-malicious apps people can use on their own hardware. For example:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2009/11/12/apples-rejection-i...

It's not reasonable for a hardware provider to dictate how I use my hardware.
Will the iPhone 4S work with 3g on t-mobile?
Now that it's a 'world phone', will it be able to get 3G on all networks, or will it be like the iphone 4 with only 2g on T-mobile?
This is really a big news because apparently 25 percent of employee bonuses are tied to the success of Google+.

The news is that Larry didn't convince his management team and the board that G+ is very important for the future of Google.
Living in Suckville
You can create one and the user can change their item to an item of lesser value after their fund has entered "inactive" status.
Deliberatly not supporting it? It takes developer time and thus money to continue supporting old software- and the older it gets the more it costs to support.

The developers were probably happy to see it go after working on it for 10 years, too.
> I think Java is much easier to learn because the online documentation and community is superior to C#'s.

This does not match my experience in the slightest. MSDN is leaps and bounds better than the Java documentation and the available resources at places like Stack Overflow tend, in my experience, to be of higher quality and quantity. In this I find that C#'s lack of favor as a pedagogical language works in the C# developer's favor: there's much more signal to much less noise.

> I've also found that you can't understand the entire stack in .NET because that information is often just not available.

This is simply not true. There is very, very little information that is not available about .NET (largely derived from either reading the specs or inspecting the IL) and essentially nothing unavailable about the .NET libraries thanks to Rotor (for legally safe inspection of certain libraries) and Reflector (which poisons you for Mono contribution, but is a fairly accepted practice).

> When they do, it's nice to be able to peel the abstractions away.

You can, trivially. It is an indictment of the largely ASP.NET-focused developers mentioned previously that they do not, but it is not a difficult task.

> Oh, and Scala naturally lends itself to writing maintainable and bug-free code.

After some confusion from this statement I entertained, if unwillingly, the thought that you are serious. Scala is no Perl with regard to its distaste for readable code, but it lends itself to ambiguous or stupid syntax (the inanity about "using what you like" for parens versus braces comes to mind as a minor quibble, the flinging of underscores throughout "idiomatic" code being a much greater one). To complicate matters, Scala's IDE support (even in IDEA, the best of a sorry lot) is horrifyingly bad. To what Scala lends itself, I have not yet been able to ascertain, but "maintainable" has surely not been an adjective I'd use. Partial credit for "bug-free" due to its tendency to encourage immutability, for which I am very thankful, but...only partial. I still have to read the byte-vomit.

The best compliment that I can pay to Scala is that it is better than Java--damning with very, very faint praise. I'm praying that Ceylon or Kotlin comes along and deals with this insanity in an adequate manner.
We're frustratingly close on voice recognition, and I know people using computers for day to day dictation. The interesting thing is that the problem is training and practice, not algorithmic, and Google's wrapping that up now. (As far as I can tell, they're on the forefront of computational linguistics.)

We have the ability to parse out questions and return answers at the level of Jeopardy champions with Watson. Today, Watson would have been #113 on the supercomputer 500. In 2005, it would have been #3. #113 in 2005 was a cluster of 1024 Xeon 2.4Ghz.

I hate doing apples to oranges, but the only comparison I could find was from cpubenchmark.net, which puts the Xeon 2.5ghz as 381 on their propriatary PassMark. A $335 E3-1275 runs a 9,109 with 4 cores. That's back of the napkin 20-25 times faster. Let's go with 20, extrapolate and say within six years a n equivalent 64-processor machine would be sufficient for Watson-level performance, well within the range of an individual lab, with "good-enough" voice recognition!

The last piece here is conversational flow. Chatbots have demonstrated that we're nowhere near yet. That's algorithmic as much as anything, but it's a pretty big topic in computational linguistics, so I'm hoping we'll have that cracked soon.

Expert systems look to be reasonable in 5-10 years with fluency, with conversational AI not far behind. We know what we need. It's not an unknown problem at this point, for the most part.
That's never the same thing though (even assuming this rumor stands up). You can dogfood products like Wave internally all you like; the lesson that Google has actually learned here, for the most part, is you also need to spend time field testing in the real world.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". (Not) Henry Ford. The sentiment still applies.

Or are you saying that already?
...it's not the recent blog posts that are the problem, those are a response to hype huffers in the community spouting scalability nonsense. Having vague wording in the front matter for the project's main page doesn't help.

Many of the people currently "bashing" node are more or less aware of its capabilities. They aren't mad at the technology itself, just that it's being sold as much more than it is.
How to launch a start-up and lose everything else along the way
also Siri is a purchased piece of tech, not at all developed by Apple
Link to their podcast -- more enjoyable than reading a transcript.

http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id3546...
It's 4S, Not 4G
An open letter from a former tea party member to Occupy Wall Street.
I think they should have stopped after the second paragraph. Though some of their grievances are valid, others are not in the absolute control of only corporations.

Let's not forget that these corporations could not exist if the 99% didn't support them financially.

Starting off with the 'illegal foreclosures', this is the first I've heard of this issue, and it makes them sound out of touch.

Have corporations perpetuated inequality and discrimination? I don't think so, individual people within a corporation may have done that, but I don't see that as a major issue in corporate America.

Outsourcing labor is a reality in the flattened world. The answer would be protectionism, and everybody would complain about the costs of things. In fact, they already do!

They have donated money to Politicians, but is that the corporations fault, or the politicians?

Basically, I agree with their initial sentiments, but when you get into the details, I think they still need to work on focusing on the change. If they expect to tear down the capitalist system, I suspect the cure could be worse than the disease.
Sharp vs. Blunt Instruments
Well, it's certainly not safe for them to continue running under the .it TLD if they're in violation of Italian law, but they could redirect to "it.wikipedia.com" (which, I just checked, actually is the Italian Wikipedia) and thus be within the US domainspace. That seems pretty safe.

And yes, you're correct that the US has asserted control over the generic .com/.org TLDs for historical reasons. They have a "silent .us" appended to them, from a functional standpoint. So they're not safe if you're in violation of US laws, but that doesn't seem to be the situation here.
Yeah, it's like they have 2 OSes in there. I love the new "tablet UI", but it's jarring to have to switch "home" from one application to start another. They need to include have a search box in the traditional "desktop" somewhere.
Except that Siri has been out on the App Store since 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohzWSkAU7c

Until today that is. It's been artifically limited to Apple's forthcoming iPhone 4S, and current customers will have the service shut off for them on the 15th.
I understand that part. I'm just amazed that the demand for the 3GS is sufficient, and AT&T desperate enough, for Apple to retain the tooling to build them.
I think a lot of people would find this comment more helpful if you explained why.
I've had to write a few network based applications that each had their own unique performance requirements. Node.js would not have been a fit for any of them. I'd really like to give it a go, but it seems that every scenario where it would be useful is better served by a more specific environment. Granted, I'm pretty lousy at javascript, so getting to use javascript on the server doesn't count, what is Node.js' ideally suited for?
Sounds like a good idea. How about this - a "microincubator". For a 0.1% "advisor" stake in your company, I will advise you on how to get into YC. If you don't get into YC, you get your equity back. To apply just email me a rough draft of your YC application ;-)
Ah yes, of course. Sculley came to consider himself a visionary and artist, sponsoring a couple of projects like these.

I'm not going to attribute the near-attainment of this lofty vision to the guy he fired, but I'm glad it has been brought this far.
You really don't know what "compromised" means, do you?
EA Legend Analytics Set to Give Advertisers Full of Info About You
Javascript integers can only reliably represent values up to 2^53, as they are implemented by 64-bit floats [1]. This means that fib(73) and below are correct, but fib(74) and onwards are almost certainly going to be wrong.

The one-millionth fibonacci number, fib(1000000), has 208988 digits when written as a decimal. It takes about a minute to compute fib(1000000) with python 2.6 and write it to file.

I am completely missing the point, but this does amuse me. Framework/language pissing match descends into performance benchmark battle where no-one cares about correctness?

1. http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...
I actually found one change to the Start Menu the enabling change for me: Typing the name of something and (often) just getting the application that I wanted to start. Just saying what I want and let the machine to the finding for me just feels like the way things should be done to me.

I'm finding it hard to believe that people are actually pinning infrequently used things like the Control Panel to the task bar or is there another way to access it that I don't know of? Isn't that leading to visual clutter? Users never cease to amaze me.
Yep: mechanical_fish. :P
Facebook is forming a PAC
$250 (handset) + $35/mo * 12 mo = $775. Approximately half the cost of ownership.

I think this thread is about the cost of ownership of a "free with contact" iPhone 3GS vs. alternatives, targeted at the low end. I think that's a significant difference for this market. You disagree?
Argh, I hate when I get downvotes without explanation.

The fact is that sensor size affects image quality as much, if not more than megapixel count, and if the camera is marketed with statements such as "With 8 megapixels and all-new optics, this just might be the best camera ever on a mobile phone." I feel that both inquiring a major factor of image quality and comparison to current market leader are justified.
In coming releases we’ll make it even easier: just pass --balance on the command line and Node will manage the cluster of processes.

Internet trolls do improve software!
I agree with your hardware comment, I wish PCs wouldn't look like Macs. So cold and austere. I hope with the ultra-lights, PC manufacturers start experimenting with alternative materials, like Asus did with their bamboo line.

I've also always wondered why the CPU isn't stuck on the back of the monitor where it can be provided with better airflow.

As far as the ribbon, I have to disagree, it seems such a hodgepodge to me, and though I like WP7, I don't think it has a warm inviting feel, it's just cool.

iOS always felt boring and cold to me.
Of course, I'm an anarchist, so I might be projecting..

You're totally projecting. The constitution is pro-liberty and anti-tyranny, but it isn't really anti-government. One example: Patent protection is in the constitution, not exactly an anti-government stance.
Actually I don't think people have been talking to their phones (voice command) as much even though the feature has been available for the longest time. One reason could be that the feature was very poorly implemented. What these features lack is the context that we so readily assume when talking to a person.

The reason at least I don't use voice commands is because I feel stupid doing it if the phone does not understand me in the first attempt. I haven't used Siri myself. I use windows phone and it has damn good voice menu system. But I still don't feel comfortable enough to use it.
My first reaction to this whole business: why would anyone run fibonacci on the same machine that is serving traffic?

For that matter, why would anyone write a CPU-intensive web application in anything but Native Client?
Maybe they all have their accounts in Google Apps and G+ is just not available to them yet :-)
What is the best way to escape the police in a high-speed car chase?
I just bought my own health insurance because I'm self-employed and I'm only paying $80/month. I can pay $150 and have doctor visits/prescriptions mostly covered.

You must have had lots of health problems in the past or your are lying about that number.
The iPhone 5 Failboard: How Everyone Got It Wrong
I could really see myself using the Divvy app and the concentrate app... thanks for sharing, nice article!
There's another post that claims you can check your status here http://news.ycombinator.com/susrsvp. Seems ligit. Is it?
For a 0.01% advisor stake in your company, I will advise you on how to get into hn-user lacker's microincubator. If you don't get into hn-user lacker's microincubator, you get your equity back. ...
How it works page is needed but apart from that. A nice side project indeed.
Mean time to pretty chart - DevOps meets data porn
1. Process creation and termination are heavy operations considering that it's being done in a tight loop.

2. You don't want to fork on every request, this is very vulnerable to fork bombs.

3. In worker threads model, you already have the work threads spawned and ready for crunching, which will reduce the system load because you aren't forking on every request.
Totally agree with you. Sometimes I dream a bit about having my own company, but when I look at the hassles the owners of my 3 customer companies have, I am grateful that I get to work with 3 groups of talented and interesting people, potentially learn 3 times as much on the job, not as many hassles, and have a "diversified" work base. I won't get rich consulting but I still count my blessings.
Right, but that is just your opinion.

This is clearly a value proposition offered by apple.
Some people don't mind the closed system, and opaque rules.
IBM has tried several times to obtain this patent.

Previous discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2759642
I was just checking the hardware specs on ifixit. Looks like the iPhone4 has 3 microphones in it. So I am guessing they are sending audio from more than 1 mic. I found no such hardware info on the teardown of 3GS and below. Maybe I didn't look hard enough but there does seem to be a hardware-related reason for doing this.

EDIT : I believe > 1 src is needed for fighting noise so you sample the same audio from 2 locations and can distinguish between multiple audio sources in the input signal. This seemed to be one of the selling points of the mic array in the kinect
I think the point is that even senior googlers don't think its valuable/useful enough.
>If you were to sit down today and design how the educational system should allocate resources knowing that your intelligence would be randomly re-assigned afterward, would you allocate more resources to the smart (knowing you might not be smart afterward)?

I am not sure if you are aware or not but that's called the veil of ignorance. One of my favorite ways to think about social issues.
I'd think of it as a 2-3 car setup. The truck is shared at my company, and my gf doesn't have a car of her own yet, so having two personal cars would be reasonable.

But what I really mean is that no one is likely to be happy with JUST a battery electric vehicle; they will want access to a refuelable car for longer trips. And, personally, I don't want to put 1500 mile trips on an $80k new car; I'd rather keep my NPV $12k 2006 audi for that kind of thing, and keep the miles on that.

For a daily driver around the bay area, though, the model s looks perfect.
But not Google+... and thats exactly the point.