skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just that you're not interacting with them, it's that it's preventing them from engaging in self-directed play, which is necessary for developing executive function among other things.

The reason TV is being singled out specifically is because it's basically causing permanent brain damage in 90+% of kids. Sure, there are other ways of fucking up your kids as well, but in terms of what people are actually doing TV is at or near the top of the list.

All these people who think it's ok to let their kids watch 'just an hour' of TV per day are probably why ADHD now effects over 9% of kids.
Robots and automated cars will require our cities to become machine-readable
My guess is that this is not necessarily the opinion of the writer, he was just given the task of writing a short article with a contrarian view on Dropbox.
> Every time I have to type it I die a little inside.

I rarely spell it "properly" on the first attempt. My brain just auto-corrects it as I type. I try to think of it as an inside joke or something, but - as you can see from my previous comment - it doesn't stop me from being snarky about it.
Show HN:BUBBLE,sharing networks on top of Twitter, check and give feedback
What I like about rubymonk is it tells you what it expected when you give a wrong answer. Codeacademy on the other hand just informs you that you were wrong and gives an extra hint (can be annoying if you perhaps, didn't understand the question properly and hence leaves you stuck on that question).
Nintendo is an interesting case that may dispel some of the stereotypes about Japanese companies and management styles.

First, the company is quite old (1889, I believe). It started out manufacturing playing cards, yet had a pretty remarkable evolution after its post-war CEO (a member of the founding family, surnamed Yamauchi) took over. While it was a top-down organization, Yamauchi recognized and encouraged some out-of-the box and risky thinking. The company at one point was invested in things like hotels and food, but started to develop a new business in the 1970s around video games. Keep in mind that in 1977 video games were not nearly as popular as they are now, and the nearest product line Nintendo had at the time was toys. Famicom/NES was launched in the mid 1980s, at a time when the videogame market was in a slump (this was post-Atari 2600). It turned out to be a massive hit, that really kept Nintendo on top of the console market until Sony came out with the PlayStation.

The Wii is another example of an innovative approach to product design. It was not designed by focus groups, as the company was worried about leaks. Rather, the design of the console and controller came from an internal group made up mostly of career Nintendo engineers like Shigeru Miyamoto (of Mario Bros. fame). Yamauchi's successor, Satoru Iwata (himself a former game developer) was also on the team. They recognized that they couldn't win the hardware arms race with Sony and Microsoft, a race that focused on specs and pleasing hardcore gamers. They thought of a different set of users, and not only kids and senior citizens waving around a Wiimote. The team even considered how housewives would react to a new console in the living room, and therefore designed a box that was sleek and stylish, and not much bigger than a stack of DVD boxes.

There's a great interview series with the Wii design team, called "Iwata asks". It talks about many of the issues they had to overcome, and the prototyping process. It was published on Nintendo websites all over the world -- I think Iwata wanted to do a little victory lap, and get on record how they came up with the brilliant ideas behind the Wii. You can start reading it here:

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/wii_console/
If Dropbox solves this, they're golden: http://xkcd.com/949/

If they don't, they'll die.
You can use iCloud on Windows... Check the website.
Their HTML5 showcase site doesn't display properly on IPhone; doesn't sound like someone I want to take advice from.
Having Fun With a Fitness Trampoline
The Future of the Tablet
Thats what the post linked to talks about.
Box.net is giving away 50GB to anyone that signs up or logs in through their mobile app. It's an amazing service but Steve Jobs is right when he says it's a feature.
> So the challenge is that as a team you are putting together something that probably everyone thinks is useless

Isn't selection bias a problem with this thinking? Yes companies that are very successful did something outstanding perhaps, going against the flow, but how much do we know about the number of companies that did stuff everyone thought was useless and it was useless and the whole thing flopped?

We hear about the success stories, I want to then also hear about every failed attempt as well, or it not an accurate picture then, is it?

To put it in other words, it is a bit like encouraging people to play the lottery by showing images of winners. "Look these guys flipped a coin, talked to their astrologer and now look, they are winners!". But what about the ones that play and lose?
Offer HN: Ask Siri Anything
As an engineer I was curious about how Apple's new iPhone assistant Siri works and what it can and can't do. I upgraded to a 4S and I wanted to offer the chance to play with Siri to anyone on Hacker News.

Post a query and I'll ask Siri on your behalf and transcribe the results. I'll also note when the server has issues, or when I have to make corrections. Other questions are fair game as well, and anyone with Siri access is welcome to chime in. I should be around much of this evening (PST).
Or maybe Spanish (palmarés), that has that same meaning.
JavaScript and PHP immediately come to mind. Ruby has a few MIME libs of a poor quality. Perl and Python have excellent MIME facilities but, as I said above, many developers simply aren't interested in learning MIME to begin with. We eliminated MIME on the receiving end earlier (see our "email routing" API) and now we've taken the next logical step: we have eliminated MIME on the other end.

Besides, email is huge. In includes at least 4 non-trivial network protocols, several storage formats and a sea of proprietary ESP-specific extensions is error codes. There is no such thing as an "email support" in any language, only bits and pieces of uneven quality, therefore the most honest and shortest answer would be "all of them".
Dropbox executed well. But where can Dropbox expand to? Unless dropbox can get better and better, eventually the competition will catch up.

Better device and product integration? That will require more and more cooperation from Windows, Apple, and Google.
It's the law of nature at play. The infinite cycle of life and death. Old making way for the new. Apple will go weak one day. Some other company will come to the top.
This law of nature cannot be challenged. It is inevitable.
I'm excited to go to this.
Do you worry about a robot invasion?
It's pretty trivial to bind MIME C-libraries like GMime for use in any language on any platform.

http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/

It's a high-level library (unlike most other MIME libraries) which makes constructing and parsing MIME trivial.
There's still room for improvement in both of them, too. If you want to have a lot of connections open, you have to choose between lots of threads with blocking I/O, or using event-driven I/O, or using some kind of magical light-weight cooperatively multitasked greenlet/fiber thing.

As Erlang and Haskell show, it's totally possible to combine an event-driven I/O subsystem with lightweight user-space preemptive multithreading that supports a huge number of threads, takes advantage of multiple cores, and doesn't need to worry about blocking-vs-nonblocking magic. I would love to see that in a more mainstream language.
Damn, the line up is amazing as usual. So thankful they're recorded and posted online. I've watched many of the previous talks repeatedly.
I'd say the smart bet is in learning technologies that are relevant and to be comfortable with your tools. I don't recall the last time a client asked/cared what technology stack we're using. They usually just need stuff built.
DNS poisoning via Port Exhaustion
Agreed.

The article basically says "I don't pay for dropbox, therefore it will fail." The backup for this is "Dropbox is a feature, not a product." And "other companies that I have made this statement about have failed."

Somehow this isn't convincing for me at all.
English is a living language. If that's how people start spelling the word, then that is how the word is spelled.

I know, you get far more entertainment for your buck complaining, but even so, who cares?

Side note: many things commonly refered to as "americanisms" cannot be accurately described as such. See color/colour. Pedants beware.
Do you think it might be possible that moving that money between market participants is actually a good thing? Let's say someone decides to put 10% of their fortune into a hedge fund and the fund goes to zero. Is that worse than just giving 10% of your money to the church? The children of the limo drivers, pilots, fund administrators, sales desk people, all deserve to eat (in my opinion).

This is not a frivolous reply.
HN is probably not the right place to ask for help.

When you do ask for help, it's always best to explain what you have figured out and what still confuses you. Explain how you think the program ought to work. Pointing us to a programming class assignment page is not an effective way to help you figure things out. Trying to figure it out on your own and asking specific questions will be much more effective.

You might find it useful to begin by writing the various modules of the assignment in outline form with some documentation of interfaces and functionality. Writing a coherent description of what's needed can be very helpful.

Be sure that you understand about how clients and servers work. Take a look at the python library, which has a number of different servers, for examples.
Wow, that's kind of embarrassing. To eliminate ambiguity, here they are in order:

http://norvig.com/lispy.html

http://norvig.com/lispy2.html
Why does the article assume is made by the same people who wrote Stuxnet? Stuxnet source code from an IDA Pro dump is available in GitHub and in torrents.
"Do you worry about a robot invasion"
Siri: I've never really thought about it.

[I believe this is a generic 'non answer' to various questions]
In the 90 minutes since we launched, 698 people have solved at least one exercise at http://RubyMonk.com, with a total of 8404 exercises being solved. Thank you for trying us out and giving us feedback!
Filosofia.mx | matiasmassa
Google's Dart on the JVM
Interview Question: Largest Continuous Sum
How the iPhone Got Tail Fins – Part 1 of 2
Jobs did apparently use focus groups; he would show off prototypes to selected friends and watch their reactions. Their reactions would, as you say, inform his ideas about the design.
People on Silk Road offer automatic BTC transfers from various payment companies.
From the source: http://us.blackberry.com/blackberry-release.jsp

The press is talking about QNX but it looks like Cascades is the real news.
How would you say it compares to something like Eliza? It sounds quite similar, with a number of predefined trigger words.
The great thing about Dropbox is that it is a feature. Why? Because it's decoupled from any other product - with iCloud, I have to buy into the OSX/iOS ecosystem, which even if I wanted to do, I can't afford. With Dropbox, their product has no reason not to support as many different OS as possible - so I can have a mac syncing with an Android, etc.
I did this last year. I put up $500 to have a coffee with Richard Da Silva from Highland Capital. Great insight, got a contact that I've been able to talk to since, well worth it. And I flew in from Toronto to boot.
I have no idea what this does, the explanation is not clear. there is no way for me to try it without signing up for an account. Therfore I am going to ignore it and close the window.
What are my options regarding text formatting on HN?
Lets see:

* string type one

* string type two

* string type three

* http://string.type.four.com/

Is that all? The URL somehow didn't work.
After two years of suspense, Steve picks up the Durant vs. Sloan story. Write more, Steve! Please!
http://steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1/
Android? Linux? Why would I want to use a cloud service that I can't sync most of my devices on?
Steve Jobs sold pre-IPO stock to get Xerox PARC "open its kimono."
tchrist's OSCON Unicode talks:

http://98.245.80.27/tcpc/OSCON2011/index.html

Specifically the third talk:

http://98.245.80.27/tcpc/OSCON2011/gbu.html
http://98.245.80.27/tcpc/OSCON2011/gbu.pdf

Excerpts:

Its String functions like upcase or capitalize won’t even look at
anything but ASCII.

It’s completely missing a whole lot of critical Unicode
functionality:

casemapping & -folding
grapheme support
normalization
collation
text segmentation, &c &c &c.

Every Ruby string carries around its encoding, instead of sanely
unifying into Unicode internally like nearly everything else does.

Also:

> baked right in to the language

is not synonymous with "intelligently implemented"

Note that I wasn't implying that "half-ass," "partial," and "just plain wrong" necessarily all apply to Python and/or Ruby's implementations. Some may apply to some areas while others may not, and really this extends outside of just Python and Ruby, but I'm trying to stay in context here.
This was a very low-key offering. These initial experiments led to the AI, DB, and ML classes that are being offered for free, all of which have great production quality. Even Stanford professors have to approach problems incrementally.
This is a really nice example of what WebGL can do, but am I the only one who finds it really visually noisy? I play a lot of fast 3d games but this still made my eyes ache after a few spins up & down the spiral.

Make it less visually violent and this could be a winner :)
Just to do (dia)magnetic levitation, you could put together 4 cubes of neodymium magnets, then cleave a very thin sheet of pyrolytic graphite and gently suspend it on top of the cubes.

If it's thin enough, it will float.
I can only comment on my admittedly limited experiences, none of which have been stellar.

I'll keep my mind open. I think Jessica is a fantastic interviewer and has the potential to make this year's talk with Zuck the best one yet.
It already supports Android, OSX, Linux, Windows...
thanks for the tip, wmboy. congrats as well to rubymonk - this is great!
It already supports Android, OSX, Linux, Windows...

I'd quite like it if they had Music syncing option, mind.
So by the content of this post I will guess that you only worked at a trading firm for a year or two?

Narrower spreads by definition make the coordinates of that forward price known with more certainty. By definition and by construction. It is not hubris for the market to think it knows that price -- that's the price.

I wish people would stop selectively questioning some post-modern economic constructs, like buying and selling derivatives, then conveniently ignore how the company that wrote Go buys and sells.... search terms! And eyeballs!
How else are we all going to eat when farms and factories are all automated?
Luddite.
Air Jordan 11 (XI) Retro White / Black Dark Concord Cheap Jordan
OK, so we were learning about greedy algorithms at school and I implemented a very naive implementation of a change making algorithm for Canadian coins. Here's the Haskell code:

makeChange :: Int -> [Int]
makeChange amount = loop 0 [200, 100, 25, 10, 5, 1] []
where loop total coins@(c:cs) solution
| total == amount = solution
| null coins = error "no solution"
| otherwise = if total + c > amount then
loop total cs solution
else
loop (total + c) coins (c : solution)

(I could make this a lot better by returning an [(Int, Int)] and by using integer division, but I wanted to just follow the algorithm described in the textbook.)

To make sure that my code was correct, I wrote a QuickCheck property:

quickCheck (\(Positive n) -> sum (makeChange n) == n)

However, running this after compiling my file with GHC causes a stack overflow and I need to Ctrl+C out of the process.

On the other hand, the exact same algorithm in OCaml runs extremely quick and without a hicup.
Sure, but good to repeat it in this case - Python's urllib/urllib2/etc. libraries are famously hard(er than necessary) to use.
Ask HN: Is there anything similar to DocumentCloud for non-journalists?
I'm looking to be able to store pdf documents in the cloud and be able to search them. DocumentCloud looks perfect but I'm not in journalism. I'm having trouble finding an obvious alternative. Do you guys like any other services or know of a simple way to do this with NoSql? I was looking into using a hosted mongodb service but I can't find any information on searching binary data. Thanks for any pointers.
This Week in Google, This Week in Tech, and StackExchange with Spolsky and Atwood.
There is another set of full length 'intro to C and computing' lectures by Richard Buckland of UNSW. He's a fantastic and very engaging teacher. Videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/UNSWelearning#g/c/6B940F08B9773B...
Hilarious that the content & domain name could lend this to being classified, in some filters, as a “shock site” ;)
I'm sure you know enormously more than I do about how to do dense-array number crunching. My claim, though, is that it's being applied much more widely than previously, not that there are new and better ways of doing it; so there are fewer and fewer places where such concerns are not important.

In the 1960s, there were those who claimed that the benefit of recursion was not worth the complexity it added to programming languages, except in certain special domains. In the 1970s and 1980s, we had the same argument about depth-first search — SNOBOL's and Prolog's backtracking feature. It turned out that the proponents of recursion were right, and the proponents of backtracking were probably wrong. (Although the backtracking feature of SNOBOL's child Icon directly inspired Python's generators, although implementationally they're maybe more similar to CLU iterators.)

Now, when it comes to matrix and vector manipulation, should we imagine it as a single domain, or as a feature that's useful across a wide range of domains?

I'm arguing for the latter.
Pandora jewellery
I see. Thank you!

I rarely find restaurant food to be a good buy, but I guess if you'd be buying a restaurant Coke anyway...
AngelPad’s Third Demo Day: Fifteen Startups Take Flight
Should your next mobile app be an HTML5 web app?
Show HN: review my 1st start-up launched 2 weeks ago
I just launched http://www.VehicleShare.com - an extremely simple online car show for antique/classic car owners & enthusiasts
Copy it into ~/Dropbox/Public. Right-click, Dropbox, Copy public link. Paste. Done.
The perverse incentives baked into the typical compensation structure are bewildering. I can only think that it is herding behavior, similar to the way VCs and other investors rain client money down on tech entrepeneurs who often cash out or throw the money away before their companies have been proved viable. Groupon is a top of the mind example. How could they have been allowed to just cash out when the company had current liabilities that needed to be paid?
Hi zds, I'm excited to see what you guys come up with!
You're right. Except most of the world doesn't know it (yet).

_Lots_ of (mainly non-technical) people _do_ use their email archive as their "(not so) secure password storage".

As someone who regularly deals with website owners with non-technical audiences, I see all the time that this decision by the Wordpress devs is almost certainly a sensibly pragmatic choice. Those of us who know and care about password security can deal with it - delete the email when it arrives, if you're particularly paranoid go back and change it (I'm pretty sure Wordpress only does this on signup, not on password changes).

Until my mom uses 1Passwork or KeyPassX or PasswordSafe (or an equivalent), I can easily see why many many Wordpress site owners think this is the right compromise between password security and useability.
Samba 4 Python Scripting [pdf]
Siri: "Do you know Eliza? She was my first teacher!" http://1876.voxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/siri_weird... (from https://thisismynext.com/2011/10/12/siri-weird-things-iphone...)
It seems to be pretty good in its domain. It can handle odd phrasing, but sometimes miss-matches things a bit, such as "what is the best phone wallpaper" Siri: "you're kidding, right?" which is probably a miss identification of 'what is the best phone'. Sometimes it will miss something like "show me a periodic table" (giving a list of restaurants), but if you hint a little "Search wolfram alpha for period table" it works.

There seems to be a pretty good list of valid options: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to... I think it's a bit more subtle than just 'trigger words', more like it is categorizing based on content and context. I was impressed with "What is the area of a circle of radius 2.5" giving a correct wolfram alpha response.

At the end of the day, if you know it can do it, it's usually not too hard to connect with that functionality, but there are edge cases to fall into out there as well.
It's been my experience that once you have dev you don't go back. I was lead engineer for a pretty complex technical product that needed strong technical testing and money wouldn't win. I think it's part perception. I have seen using something like a performance engineer role work, in that it's technically QA but usually works in as a dev role and highly specialised and technical. We used our (small) technical consulting staff during their downtime a bit which helped. They'd get to train up and be involved in the product direction and we'd get highly experienced engineers which could give us feedback like if an API /felt/ right. One thing I have come accross that I thought was very successful was at small software company here in oz (now part of oracle). They'd get fresh software engineering grads or final year students and get them in as (paid, mostly part time) technical testers under the mentor of experienced testers and software engineers. They'd get them to write and develop automated testing systems and learn to test systems and understand what made a good system. They'd then go work in the R+D teams better prepared. So part apprenticeship learning product development, part recruitement and job selection filter.
I have been charged with maintaining 5000 LOC of J at work, so I use it weekly or so (5-10 hours ... as little as possible...), and I have spent at least a hundred hours or so with it before that.

And my somewhat informed opinion is that J sucks ass. To start with, input/ output suck and it's hard to read and maintain -- it is the least pragmatic language I know. But what I really hate about it is the community -- full of true believers who think it's a cosmic language and "mathematical", even though you can't prove theorems in J (that's what would make it mathematical, duh), who babble about how they can calculate pi to 1000 digits in only 4 characters, as if that is remotely useful or profound (neither)
Excited to go, but I do have to say the amount of valley stars that come every year is a testament to the quality of the event. And link for previous year's video clips (this years stream too?): http://www.justin.tv/startupschool
How about automating the supermarket in the same manner as the library? I usually get the same stuff. I'd like to place my order over the web then walk/drive over to pick it up.
Music syncing, etc. was what I was referring to. I don't think they'll flame out right away, but in 5 years, what will they have that doesn't ship with your OS?
IPhone 4S security hole uncovered