skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Makes sense. The primary driver behind economic growth is consumer spending. If there's a lot of inequality, there will be less consumer spending. What you want for strong economic growth is a large and healthy middle class, with plenty of disposable income and a willingness to spend it.
You lost me at Mango and iOS being in the same category - and then you want to "throw Android out and start from scratch"?... what?

Android is not quite iOS but its a very close second and better than what anyone else has been capable of creating.
Problem is that not all those are "decisions" people make. Many of those are not decisions but arise out of life circumstances.

However many times people do chose to do the "fun" thing and instead of strive for a good job take the easy way out. That easy way is short-sighted.

Unfortunately we are seeing life from the walls of the castle, staring at the peasents saying "shame on you for not being royalty". However over the years I've grown to think that maybe 60%+ of the cause of people being poor is their fault. I see my friend partying every fucking night. She has no money. I have plenty of money yet cannot party because I have responsibilities. Yet when shit hits the fan, I have a buffer while she goes into a "shit my life is going nowhere" regression.

Sure her circumstances did not allow her to get the same living environment as I did, she is not a mathematically-inclined person, but she went to college, got a worthless degree after 4 yrs, and now complains how she has no money. She barely works, when she does its not for long periods of time, and is older than I am.

So yea, my sympathy has been declining. Shoulda finished high school. Shoulda gone to a community college and studied your ass off. Shoulda worn a rubber till you were ready. Now it's too late, and you are standing there with your arms in the air begging for help.
Thoughts on Siri: Apple's Introduction of Mainstream AI
Honest, Persistence, Survival and Other things I learned from Charles Bukowski
Most of the time, I'd rather hit StackOverflow than interrupt a coworker.

Apart from that this solving sequence is on the spot, even though the author is apparently critical of it. For the record, I started programming in the early 90s, before I had access to the internet.

Here's a message that I got while doing some Haskell code. If I were to RTFM first, i.e. read the Haskell Report, it would take me perhaps more than 1 hour to understand the problem. If I google it I will be able to understand the general idea and decide between the compiler's suggestions in a couple of minutes. I can always go back to the specification later to acquire a more solid understanding of the language.

Ambiguous type variable `a' in the constraint:
`Show a' arising from a use of `show' at ParseQuote.hs:123:11-16
Possible cause: the monomorphism restriction applied to the following:
f2 :: a -> String (bound at Foo.hs:123:0)
Probable fix: give these definition(s) an explicit type signature
or use -XNoMonomorphismRestriction
You're missing that software which works perfectly still wont do what you want magically. Just because it works on a terminal server doesn't mean it will select and install itself on your cluster when you want it.

Just because it generates reports promptly without crashing every time doesn't mean it will know which reports to generate or which data to pull from, or how to include your new office statistics.

Just because your phone synchronises email when abroad without messing up doesn't mean it knows which email addresses to forward to which people.

Support people would then be primarily involved in using technology to help businesses do things, instead of primarily using technology workaround other technology's problems.
Doesn't voice processing go "through the cloud" ?

Doesn't Google do this for free on Android via their servers?

http://www.google.com/mobile/voice-actions/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGbYVvU0Z5s
This is super interesting. Did you know of anyone else that set up these types of family trusts, or was it just your dad and his brothers? Did you do anything to make it legally binding, and how long have you been doing it for?

Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks? Are there any other things that are shared in the trust, or just companies that you own?

So many questions.
That already happens for a lot of different verbs on android. "Call" "navigate to" and probably more but those are the only ones I use.
Which point?
How can we reduce medication cost?
There are all sorts of chronic disease ranging from diabetes, adhd, HIV, etc. And depending on the chronic conditions, medication costs are extremely expensive.

This may be a stupid questions so please let me know if that is the case. But, I was wondering if there would be some sort of innovative approach to lower the cost of these medications through a flash-sale (i.e. groupon, fab.com, gilt) business model.

I guess the main objective is to find ways to provide expensive medication to those who are in need that would not just benefit the patient but also the pharmaceutical companies.

I came across this website: http://www.goodrx.com/ that is definitely heading towards the direction that I am talking about.

I need all the input/comments I could get so feel free to give me some ideas! Thanks!
The 'Liquid Grid' Street Layout, A Replacement For Cul-De-Sacs & Block Grids
Sorry, what is mango?
The new generation does something that the old generation says will ruin everything.

The new generation gets old and their kids do the same. Rinse, repeat.

What is different here?
I'm not trying to be funny, but there's nothing weird about characters in Star Trek speaking to the ship's computer.

"Computer, make me a coffee." See? It's okay.
I'm not PG, but let me describe the trajectory of a successful firm at YC:

1) You bust butt for 3 months.

2) You continue busting butt for several years. During this time, several major life events happen to you. One of them will be signing contracts the size of a college textbook. On the signing of these contracts, one or several houses worth of money will show up in your business' checking account. You'll have plenty of things to spend the money on, like making sure the families of your employees eat on a regular basis and have access to healthcare.

Does the trajectory of a successful YC startup sound like something which is easy for you to swing when cramming for second semester sophomore finals? No? Then you should probably expect a question like "If it looks kinda likely that you have a shot at being one of our successful startups, are you all going to drop out?" If your answer to that is no, or if YC perceives that your answer to that would be no, YC is wasting time with you.

Unsolicited advice: Get the degree, come back in a few years. YC will probably still be here.
Battling botnet blight: It's going to take a big village
In Brazil in the 1970s, there was an economic philosophy that argued that 'the cake should grow before it can be divided'. Actually, what happened was that, as inequality grew, the rich changed their spending habits and industry chased after their needs, instead of expanding to fill everyone's necessities. The result was that growth eventually stopped. In 1980s Brazil you saw as many products on the shelves as you would in the eastern bloc. So yes, even if society gives everyone a fighting chance to get rich, it should take care not to let the gap widen too much so as not to shrink its own market.
It would've been great to see Siri being adopted on multiple platforms. Such a waste!
Unreal Engine 3 coming to Flash Player
I don't see any of these spammy results for the domains mentioned in the title at this minute, everything looks quite normal to me. Maybe the problem has been fixed?
What would an iPhone 5 be, though? Same new innards, different case? The iPhone 4 is a sharp looking piece of hardware. It's not like they need to throw it away just because a few tech nerds want different cases.
__People are tribal. Some people are attracted to tribes, become attached without really knowing why, and start having the strong urge to fuck with the other tribes. Apparently this was good for the survival of the human race. Perhaps it's a bug now that we should consciously compensate for__

That this tribal behavior occurs among software engineering is a rather disappointing fact. Computers are pretty much the edge of technology in many aspects, technological achievements by Mankind should be the prove that we're able to use our brains in more advanced ways than basic instincts and produce great achievements like modern software.

This flood of programmers that prefers to join a tribe instead of enjoying the good things from many different 'tribes' just makes me wonder how many of us are really devoted to do something useful/positive.
I didn't want to end up "stuck" knowing only .Net like so many of my co-workers.

I'm in the same boat. It's a shame too, in my mind at least, because I really do enjoy working with the better parts of the platform (MVC, WCF, C# 4, VS 2010, etc).

I'm currently working in a .Net shop and the work is not terrible by any means (it's a fairly large scale web application used by school districts), but I'm starting to fall out of love with the MS lock-in and general attitude of the folks I've worked with so far. I'm pretty sure 95%+ of my current and past co-workers have no idea what hacker news is (or even /r/programming for that matter). The general reaction when telling someone about my side projects learning Scala/node/rails/etc on my (gasp) Mac at home is along the lines of "huh?".
Top 5 Tech Tips That Help You Get Things Done Faster
Siri was only for US when it launched, and the screen shots of the current implementation don't look any more favorable.
Sick of cubicle life, programmers Google, Apple, and Yahoo start a fight club
That one is fairly short and is mostly an overview of prior work. I think the original sources he's referencing are these:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2011/sdn1108.pdf
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.cfm?sk=21769.0
Yes, but I was able to access through Google cache. I clicked around other links on that page; the error disappeared.
I really don't get it. Why's everyone underwhelmed? Is a new case the only thing people wanted?
And you're still restricting yourself to the US market. Globally, your second sentence is a lot more representative, I think, because handsets aren't bundled with contracts. So the real prices of the handsets are reflected more accurately.
Apple Brands Siri as "Beta"
Same here my frugality got the best of me this time.
The author of the article clearly isn't familiar with the ideas or even the terms he's writing about. Controlled, man-made fusion has been done before, in many experimental fusion reactors around the world. This might be the first one we can extract usable energy from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_reactor#History_of_resea...

Plasma isn't really the same as gas, it's actually a different state of matter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)
AT&T Not Allowing Early Upgrade to iPhone 4s
> I remember writing my first program on a Commodore Pet with 4K of RAM.

4K? Luxury! I started with 1K and that included the screen memory!
Windows Phone OS
YC Application Checklist (apps due in 1 week)
Yup. As a top student in K-12, I really disliked how the trouble-makers (who had no discipline, repeatedly acted out, etc) seemed to get coddled by the teacher. It seemed like a disconnect, and like the trouble makers actually had a stronger connection than I did, and of course it also slowed down the speed of learning in the classroom. (In college, where attendance was optional and a large amount of learning happened outside of the classroom, it was much less of an issue.)

It's actually kind of a problem for me now. I have very little empathy for people that I perceive to be the kind of people who wasted my time in elementary/middle/high school.
Without replying to what should happen, what will happen is that I'll be able to get my sink fixed for under $1. It's gonna happen. And it sounds awesome!

And I've already wrapped my head around the fact that I'm going to have to be agile to keep figuring out new ways to earn my own paycheque, so that I can afford that $1 repair.
5.5 seconds isn't that great for the class of car it's in.

The Roadster is a sports car. It's 30k more than a 911 Carerra and slower in 0-60.

That said its torque curve is amazing which means you don't have to stamp on the gas pedal, and handle the transmission like a race car driver to get that 0-60 time.
A lot of the rumors seem to indicate that it's an iPhone 4S feature because of processing power requirements. It sounds as though there is a lot of processing happening on the device. It goes to the "cloud" for looking things up that aren't on the device itself. Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Weather, etc.
iOS and Mango are in the same class in fundamentals. Use a device with iOS, Mango, and Android. Honestly, try it. The iOS and Mango device respond very similarly to basic things like swipes, pinches, etc... Android is a lot more jittery, even on the SGII HW. The odd thing with Android is that it's not a LOT less jittery on the G1 (although it is).

Android is second best in apps. And #1 in terms of market dominance. But if you jump back and forth for a week between the iPhone for and Nexus S, you'll feel a huge difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7.5
Someone claimed to have solved this:

http://preprint.math.uni-hamburg.de/public/papers/hbam/hbam2...

Then withdrew it, and is currently busy trying to fix the problem.
Took 24 years to ship, but the Apple Knowledge Navigator is finally out ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0
> You've got to filter the noise out. Don't submit every article about something to HN. Don't tell your friends "hey, read this article about a guy memoizing fib, completely missing the point that it was an example CPU-bound algorithm". This is all noise, people that don't know what they're talking about talking.

>... Programming is hard. Let's stop blogging.

The problem with this sentiment is right now too many programmers equate popularity with quality. Their only esthetic is "X number of people follow the project on github". Combine this with the relative inexperience of most programmers and we've got a situation where you can easily flood the market with shitty technologies that only work because everyone believes in them, not because they actually work.

I'm not really talking about Node here, but more your assertion that "this is all noise and us serious real programmers should ignore it". The sad reality is, real serious programmers should speak out about shitty popular technologies before every job requires "20 years Node.js experience".

I'd love for the state of the art to be defined by the state of the art, but sadly, it's currently defined by the best marketing and propaganda. Answering that propaganda with criticism and writing better software is the real answer.
Don't take things that don't belong to you, and you don't need to worry about having your internet taken away.

The AAs want to cripple my computing devices and eliminate my fair use and first sale rights, regardless of whether I "take" any of their IP. A world without copyright would probably not be ideal, but I'd choose it in a heartbeat over the Right to Read world that they're demanding.
I don't know about headphones, but using a cell phone in public was at one point considered rude/embarrassing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finale_(Seinfeld)
In Pareto distribution only the middle has strong motivation and enabling abilities (like education, etc..) to work on moving forward(up) as the bottom will not move up much despite any effort and the top have comparably much less motivation.

The sharper the Pareto (ie. the more the "inequality" perceived or real, doesn't really matter, it is just numbers describing statistical properties) - the thinner the middle.
It depends, but I don't think either one is inherently simpler than the other. As a general rule of thumb, I find that asynchronous solutions are generally better for I/O bound stuff while threads are better for computationally expensive stuff.
Overall, it may be very telling that Apple labeled Siri as "Beta" because it could very well be that most of the above could still come true in months and years to come. Apple invested $200 million to purchase Siri, and most, if not all, of the original team from acquisition has stayed at Apple to continue working on the product. Time will tell but I still believe Siri (they still ought to come up with a better name) has a lot of room to grow.
I don't get it either, it's pretty much what the rumors predicted.
I'm not getting any of this. http://www.whois.net/whois/apple.com
Siri to be exclusive to the iPhone 4S – will jailbreakers change that?
Nothing, and it looks like this article is over two years old.
Looks like Apple had their domain hijacked
I believe the voice recognition accuracy of Siri is far superior to Google Voice Actions and requires the dual core CPU.

Google has taken a different approach, where your voice sample is uploaded to a Google server, processed, and downloaded back to the device. This takes less CPU power but is also far less accurate, as the voice sample must be very low quality to have a quick response time from Google's server.

Apple/Siri are taking the approach that high quality voice recognition must be done on device in order to provide the level of performance and accuracy that voice recognition requires. I think we will find that Siri actually works and doesn't have as many errors as Google's voicemail transcription.

This is the reason for requiring iPhone 4S.
There is a saying I really like:

"The poor are poor because all of their choices in life suck."

There are of course two completely different ways to read that. I find that the first interpretation that jumps out at people speaks volumes about their world-view.
The latest news was that iOS 5 only adds Nitro for homescreen web applications. At least tabbed browsing is now in Safari, so there is less reason to use 3rd party browsers, though that is little comfort to mobile app developers using webkit.
Actually, this is getting pretty funny. Don't bring your logic and reason to this and ruin for those of us who just bought a bag of popcorn.
Hey, I'm just musing on the causes of unemployment. For the record, I do support deporting illegal immigrants back to wherever they're from, and I'm shocked that this is even controversial in this country.

I'm not actually even an American. I'm merely temporarily here on a visa. But once you've spent as much time and money on US visa renewals as I have, you don't have much sympathy for the line-jumpers who enter the country illegally.
I would guess they're banking on LTE for the iPhone 5... so in that step up you'll see a much bigger upgrade, but as a technology LTE is probably a bit immature for Apple's standards.
"I always thought that we software engineers are reasonable people. But apparently a subset of us aren't."

Unfortunately no one is immune to it, not even engineers, scientists, Wall St., etc. I try to remind myself of this and keep my baser instincts in check by periodically rereading pieces like Charlie Munger's 'On the Psychology of Human Misjudgement'[1], the list of logical fallacies [2], and anything I can find relating to the psychology and neuroscience of judgement, decision making, perception and bias. Becoming emotionally invested in anything makes it more difficult to admit you're wrong about it and change your mind in the presence of refuting data.

[1] http://duckduckgo.com/?q=munger+on+the+psychology+of+human+m...

[2] http://duckduckgo.com/?q=list+of+logical+fallacies
My 32GB 3GS was free with a contract 27 months ago.
I would expect the 4S to be the same on the 14th.
:( aww.. Got a bit excited there.. I knew it was too good to be true.

But has the price gone down compared to previous releases?
Depends. For an application where you have significant CPU work, a simple worker pool (not coded by you), with an accept loop

while (s=accept()) { dispatchToWorkerPool(s) }

And an application-programmer method handleConnection(s) is pretty darned simple. Just do blocking I/O from your threads and rely on the machine to swap in and out appropriately.

For the next level, you can have an evented i/o layer that passes sets of buffers back and forth to your worker pool. That's more complex but still spares application programmers from having to worry about either eventing or threads, they just worry about passing back the right bytes.

Here's where things get interesting, though. It turns out someone studied this (in Java) and actually found that stupidly throwing 1k threads at the problem with blocking i/o performed better than a clever nonblocking server, due to linux 2.6's threading and context-switching improvements.

http://www.mailinator.com/tymaPaulMultithreaded.pdf

Some of that might be specific to Java's integration with linux, but think about it.. the linux guys did a pretty good job at getting the right thread to wake up and assigning it to runnable state. Moving to evented i/o might be the right move for your workflow but it also might make no difference at the cost of some additional complexity.

tl;dr context switching has gotten cheaper/better as linux has improved, 16 CPUs vs 1 CPU changes the math about context switching vs using select(), and worker pool libraries mean you shouldn't actually manage threads yourself.
Sorry, I mean a power of 2 :)
It's a matter of signaling/conspicuous consumption. People with brand new iPhones have no way of distinguishing themselves from people with the old model.

It's also another way that Apple drives upgrades in the high end: by making the old model look old and dated.

And it's a pretty old model. I agree with you that's a beautiful piece of hardware, and I think it looks better than any of the other models, and better than any of the 'teardrop' mockups. But it's already been in the market for, what, 16 months? If they don't have another refresh until next year, that's a pretty long time to have one chassis.
Great strawman!

Of course the protests are partly about the wall st bogus wealth creation scheme. But more so, they are about the fact that in this supposedly free and just society, monetary value is literally the only thing that matters when it comes to predicting outcome of stuff that should not be bought, e.g. elections, court trials, laws, the ability to start business competing with the entrenched players (who buy regulation stating they are the only player). It is about the fact that people who bust their ass (including the mythical startup founder) mostly just get screwed, because as soon as they figure out how they can reap benefits, that option is taken from them by those who need that extra .005% because somehow it matters that they have $1.1 billion instead of $1.0 billion (both numbers that mean essentially enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life, and the lives of your great grandkids too). It is about the fact that they paid taxes and built the infrastructure that is now being taken from them, in place of some privatized bullshit that they must re-pay for, because they can't buy laws to protect themselves. It is that they face imprisonment for attempting to come up with different business plans and attempting to play by new rules, while those who have giant companies can do what they want and hide behind liability sheilds, wherein there is no punishment for changing the rules for anything.

But sure, startups will cure everything because "duh startups are magic unicorn poop that always disrupt everything and never ever fail 90% of the time".
Agreed about Safari, but iCab for iOS can upload photos from the browser. I have uploaded avatars to Twitter etc using iCab and those sites' regular upload forms.