skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some background on Siri:

"In 2007, SRI [1] spun off Siri, Inc. Siri was born from SRI's work on the DARPA-funded CALO [2] project, described by SRI as the largest artificial intelligence project ever launched. Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO
As I understand it, and I've only read the original OPERA experiment paper, they use the GPS signal to sync some caesium clocks (I'm assuming they're caesium based on their name CS-something) and that they've done a comparison by physically moving the clocks to check the synchronisation. The paper is pretty involved on the points of the GPS sync though so I could have misread that.

I was impressed that they allow for continental drift in their analysis and indeed that they were apparently able to detect the crusts movement by an Earthquake with the apparatus.

>Consider this: If you flipped the location of the neutrino source and destination, you'd actually get the reverse effect (neutrinos would appear to be going slower than light). //

Flipped WRT what? They've run the experiment at differing times of the day when the experiment is effectively flipped WRT the helios.

They also present a tentative energy relationship with the apparent superluminal speed which wouldn't, it seems, be accounted for by a simple relativistic [time-shift] systematic uncertainty.
tarsnap is great, though bare-bones - you'll almost certainly need to write your own scripts on top of it.
Windows 8: Is Microsoft flailing?
>But the measurement was on the ground, and the ground stations are not accelerating relative to each other, not from the satellites. So is this saying that the ground stations set their clocks initially wrong because of their relative movement to the satellites? If so, wouldn't this be proven out by comparing the neutrinos time to the time of a photon? If so, wouldn't this be proven out by comparing the neutrinos time to the time of a photon?

Actually, the satellites and ground stations are accelerating relative to each other, since they're moving in(roughly) circular paths. Acceleration only means that the velocity vector is changing relative to the frame of reference. It doesn't mean that the absolute velocity is changing.

The problem is that the GPS satellites are the ones keeping time, not the ground. The ground stations are effectively
"reading" the clocks on the satellites. So all of the relativistic time calculations should be done from the satellites' frame of reference, rather than from the ground stations' frame. The satellites are moving from west to east(with the Earth's rotation) with an orbital period of approximately 12 hours(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation#Comparison...). Their rotational velocity, relative to the center of the Earth, is twice that of the ground stations. In terms of absolute velocity, they're moving quite a bit faster. Since they are doing the timekeeping(and assuming that neutrinos move at c regardless of the frame of reference), the receiving ground station is moving towards the initial origin point of the neutrino stream. At that point, it's a doppler effect calculation taking into account the relative velocity of the ground stations to the satellite's frame of reference to find the offset.

Also, the photon time measurement isn't possible due to the curvature of the Earth and the fact that the receiving end is underground.
BdeBelleza
Venta de cosmética natural y blog de belleza. Todo sobre el mundo de la moda y el maquillaje, trucos, consejos, looks, peinados, outfits, sorteos, concursos y más.
Came here to comment on the same thing.

Makes me so excited for their future... /not
When Siri was first available, there were almost no underpinnings on it would be the next big thing or how important it would be. Suddenly, after this general release on a limited hardware, we suddenly find it the next big thing.
To this one year old, a magazine is an iPad that doesn't work
Why does it have to be a throwable ball? I'd imagine a much better picture if I had the camera on an extendable stick. Perhaps offering both options. I also wish the stitching was better, Microsoft's Photosynth app does an amazing job. An option to be able to lock exposure may help the quality.
Ask HN: Recommend startups/events to visit in Silicon Valley
I'm coming to Silicon Valley for the first time for 2-3 weeks at the end of this month. I want to go around meeting interesting people at startups and events in the day, and work on my startup at night.

Apart from Startup School, what other good events should I attend? If you have a startup, can I come and visit you?

Thanks!

PS I could also do with some help with accommodation (broke solo founder here :-). So offers for couches welcome!
Link to part II:

http://animprobablelife.com/2011/10/12/jeffreys-journey-wste...
Steve Jobs, Revolutionary: An eBook From Wired
It's worse than that. Even before Lion OS X already had Spaces. And before that there was third-party support for virtual desktops.

On Windows I used VirtualWin ever since 2000, but there are tons of other third party tools too.
> but the sats themselves are fixed to each other, right?

Whoa, why would you think that? GPS satellites are in 12-hr, medium-earth, circular orbits in six-orbital planes. How would satellites in different orbital planes maintain fixed distances from each other?
On the other hand, it seems pretty common for techheads to misunderstand what "design" is. I'd say Steve Jobs designed the iPad the same way Frank Gehry designs his buildings: by conceptualizing it and sketching the overall design, leaving the details to his aides.
The biggest problem with the Segway is that you look like a total dork using it.

Do people on motorcycles look like lazy idiots? You totally missed the reason why it failed.
Who will regulate the web?
"If Apple penalizes developers and undermines the promise it is making to users because it decides to be miserly about bandwidth, then it has to admit it launched iCloud before it was ready."

That's the key right there. The size of the Instapaper database is determined by the user. It will only fill up a user's iCloud space if they decide to save a lot of documents. Plus, they always have the option to buy additional space!

Aside from making sure the documents are reasonably compressed, the size of the Instapaper database should not be Marco's concern.
The site is currently down, here is a google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?gcx=c&sourc...
I still find flight attendants young and attractive (a present fact, not some dream or whatsoever). The thing is, it's just not so happening in US airlines, but in Asian airlines. Policies on age requirement have let the state as is, even there are also unions in those airline companies.
I quit my $150K Info Tech job in the spring of 2009 due to extreme quality of life dissatisfaction. I was out of work a year. I spent that year learning Google's algo. Now I make 1/3 of what I once did, but I have a life again. I work 9-5 M-F to keep a lawyer on page 1 and my quality of life has gone up dramatically. I was working 7 days a week 20 hrs a day all over the world. I wouldn't go back to that for $500K a yr.
Having done quite a bit of freelancing, I can tell you that the offer of equity is not very enticing. Regardless of how brilliant any idea might sound on paper, when it comes to execution, start-ups generally take a long long time before (if at all) that promised equity is realized.

If you are looking to add a founding member in return for equity, you are better off having that conversation face to face.
My Programming - The comprehensive way to start programming
Honestly, if you wrote Siri as a text line parser, would anyone be impressed by all the fancy features? It's more that current voice response systems are so incredibly primitive.
google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SvjDtey...
I'm not clueless (I'm a CS graduate, I've cut my teeth on Sun OS) and I find it more useful than Spaces. YMMV, but when you assume you make an ass out of you and me.
when they beat a turing test.
Instead of looking for a typical outsourcing company, why not look for a blogger or forum member (stack overflow or HN) that answers questions/writes tutorials on the topic you are struggling with.

Contact a few with the offer of a small bit of work and I'm sure if you email enough people you will get a response.

By already viewing their work and being able to hand pick only the best you will ensure that their work is top-notch.
Everything Apple releases must be the next big thing, like Apple TV, Ping or iAds.
No. ~0 has type signed int, which on a one's complement machine is a negative zero. Converting this to an unsigned type yields zero. On a sign-magnitude machine, ~0 is -0x7fffffff (assuming 32-bit for simplicity). Conversion to unsigned 32-bit is done by adding 0x100000000, yielding 0x80000001, again not what was desired. If the variable being assigned to has a width different from that of int, things get even more interesting.
Android is not a free operating system, but originally claimed to be one. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/19/1756241/RMS-Is-Androi...
"The biggest problem with the Segway is that you look like a total dork using it."

And you'll look like a dork telling your phone that you like Italian food.
And the ground stations have a different potential with respect to each other, so their reading of elapsed time could differ. That's what I understood from another article on that subject.
When they can feel emotions.

The one place where AI actually is a term of art -- gaming -- is also uniquely distinguished in that for agents both human- and computer-controlled, the goals are definite and the number of choices of action limited.

Out here in the real world, things are a lot more fuzzy and complicated. Accordingly we are not willing to give a bot AI status until it can demonstrate competence at "real world" goals (presumably including having relationships with other sapient beings in the world).
New Zealand vs Australia live streaming.
I have thoughts on the particular question you asked too. But I cannot cram every bit Of thought I have to one blog post. It would make a terrible article. This article makes a prediction baldly. It asserts a threshold in A.I. is crossed and it's implications will be big. Diverging into startup funding in this area would just not fit in well. That deserves its own post. :-)
Dutch Court denies Samsung request for iPhone, iPad injunction
Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)
Hello!

Every once in a while, I like to offer my time to help other passionate people be a little more successful with their goals. If there's anything I can help you with, just ask here. No strings whatsoever.

If you'd like my help: Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish...your goal. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out.

I've done this before a few times now, and it's worked out well for everyone. Check out some of the previous "No strings" sessions I've done to get an idea of how I can help. (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mikegreenberg)

Cheers

PS: If you'd rather give than receive: Go find someone else to do something nice for...like give them a back rub. Those are fantastic! Or spend two minutes helping me validate a market. http://bit.ly/pmhS0U (Thank you!)

PPS: I will try to help all requests made before tomorrow afternoon or so and will attempt to complete by the end of Sunday. Be patient and check back. Also, I thought it was rude to mention before so I removed it, but I please keep requests to tasks I can do in ~15 minutes. I'll spend more time willingly, but smaller requests lets me help more people! Thanks. :)

PPPS: You guys are totally welcome to help each other out, too! (Request-maker, be sure to tip helpful replies!)
I had thought about MongoDB, but bit worried about its global write lock! Surely that can't be a good idea!?

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/How+does+concurrency+wor...

Or does that only apply if "safe mode" is on, rather than fire-and-forget unverified writes?
(having just wireframes eliminates ~0 risk)

Wireframes might not eliminate risk, but "has wireframes" is a great metric to add to the list for selecting a bizdev guy. The leap from "idea" to "screens/wireframes that outline how the fantasy product should function" is surprisingly difficult for a lot of non tech cofounders.

The willingness and ability to even create the wireframes with sensible description of how the product works separates the top 10%.

If someone comes to you with just an idea tell them to build the wireframes, you'll be surprised how few people come back.
Yes that's right. But if Microsoft embeds the brand of Skype instead of live it has good chance to attract more businesses.
AND a machine learning mechanism to decide what content to deliver to the visitor.

This sounds like a pie-in-the-sky idea. How can you develop a startup around a ML algorithm when you can't code and have never studied ML? Do you have a technical co-founder?

What kind of "mechanism" (these are actually called algorithms or machines) will you use? What frameworks or languages (NumPy/SciPy, pandas, Weka, Mahout; Java, Python, R) will you use to implement this algo? Do you know what data you'll analyze? Or how you'll normalize that data?

Get to the point where you can answer these questions and you'll be on your way. Until then, you'll struggle to find a technical cofounder (or, if you have one, you'll struggle to communicate with them and evaluate whether they are good at what they do).

tl;dr: unless you have a technical co-founder, you'll need much more than a Stanford ML course and some PHP to make this work.
Even if you're not an assembler expert, there are a lot of detailed comments that explain how things are done. Well worth a read if you're interested in the real guts of classic games.
That 4 byte lookup's useful. I needed to do it recently and had assumed it wasn't possible.

If memory serves, CodeWarrior for Mac (and possibly other classic Mac compilers) had syntactic sugar mapping single-quoted four-character strings to the ubiquitous OSType. Something like:

OSType creatorCode = 'TTXT';

where OSType was typedef'd to uint32.
I always get the impression that Ubuntu is trying to be OSX for PCs. I know it's more than that, I don't have a use for it myself, and I won't hold it against you because you use it.

The point being that OSX is the one to emulate (in the non-computing sense) if you're going to do it, and I have to say, Ubuntu now looks better than Windows does, which is always so damned ugly. At least I found myself liking what I saw.

But actually whilst we're on the point, what the hell are Microsoft spending their money on? Mac OSX has been around for 10 years and you would have thought MS would just take a pile of cash, hire the best graphic artists out there and catch up. What's stopping them?
There are already companies doing this with actual open standards (SIP, IAX2) for very reasonable prices. E.g. onsip.com -- I've been using their services for years now.
And, technically, aren't you accessing the Services through the interface provided by Google when you access their public API?
Faust, China, and Nuclear Power
Although if you want your C to compile with a C++ compiler, you will need to cast the result of malloc(). C++ is more strongly-typed than C, and the compiler will complain.
>Flipped WRT what? They've run the experiment at differing times of the day when the experiment is effectively flipped WRT the helios.

It's "flipped" only with respect to the center of the earth. Since this isn't a point of measurement(the satellites are the ones effectively holding the stopwatch), it's not really worth taking into account.

If the neutrino stream was going west->east(i.e. with the satellites) rather than east->west, the receiving station would appear to be moving away from the starting point of the neutrino stream. That would effectively decrease the speed of neutrinos.
There is a body of work in cognitive science that suggests that intelligence is what emerges from communication between unintelligent agents.

Marvin Minsky's book "The Society of Mind" is an older but pretty complete treatise of this idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind

"In a step-by-step process, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence which is built up from the interactions of simple parts called agents, which are themselves mindless. He describes the postulated interactions as constituting a "society of mind", hence the title."

I don't think that consciousness or intelligence is merely binary. There can be and are varying degrees of intelligence that show up all over nature. Dolphins and primates are easy to point to as consciousness that probably is most similar to our own. Dogs, cats, wolves; they all have varying degrees of what we consider intelligence.

To take this even further i'll pose this thought-adventure. Is a single ant conscious? Is a single bee conscious? Hive systems at least appear to have a kind of intelligence. There are termite colonies that have reasonably sophisticated air conditioning systems. Are the chemical and physical messages sent back and forth between insect agents all that different from the communication between subsystems in our brains or the individual components of siri's architecture?

All of this is very theoretical, but at least a fine thought adventure for a friday morning.
Was just going to post this link -- you guys put a lot of time into your AWS posts and they are excellent. You have a really nice/robust AWS deployment there.
I think most people would be impressed if they could just type in what they wanted as an English sentence. Most users are familiar with GUIs, and may have heard of command line interfaces, but an English interface would be new. And maybe a plain English typed interface would even be useful. Some percentage of people type full English sentences into Google.
Suggest enhancements for future releases of F# language/Visual Studio support
Remember that 20 years ago, before the era of superpowerful consoles, arcade titles usually pushed the state of the art in game mechanics and graphics. Home consoles could benefit from longer gameplay, but that usually came from larger game maps and way too many boss screens.

And...weren't some of the most popular SNES games ports of popular arcade titles?
Ah. Thanks! Is there a ones-complement or sign-magnitude architecture still in production anywhere? (I'm curious; I have no idea.)
Interesting, I think they mis-characterize Steve Yegge's rant. Steve did not give Google+ a glowing opinion, but the "pathetic afterthought" part was aimed only at the API part of it, not the entire product.
This is the start (progress?) of the much-anticipated and denounced molecular nanotech. Notice the article carefully avoids calling it that...
IMO, if a system can make intelligent decisions based on the input, then it's intelligent, since it's man made it's also artificial.
How to draw a circle (HAKMEM 149 through HAKMEM 152) reproduced below.

ITEM 149 (Minsky): CIRCLE ALGORITHM
Here is an elegant way to draw almost circles on a point-plotting display:

NEW X = OLD X - epsilon * OLD Y
NEW Y = OLD Y + epsilon * NEW(!) X

This makes a very round ellipse centered at the origin with its size determined by the initial point. epsilon determines the angular velocity of the circulating point, and slightly affects the eccentricity. If epsilon is a power of 2, then we don't even need multiplication, let alone square roots, sines, and cosines! The "circle" will be perfectly stable because the points soon become periodic.

The circle algorithm was invented by mistake when I tried to save one register in a display hack! Ben Gurley had an amazing display hack using only about six or seven instructions, and it was a great wonder. But it was basically line-oriented. It occurred to me that it would be exciting to have curves, and I was trying to get a curve display hack with minimal instructions.

ITEM 150 (Schroeppel):
PROBLEM: Although the reason for the circle algorithm's stability is unclear, what is the number of distinct sets of radii? (Note: algorithm is invertible, so all points have predecessors.)

ITEM 151 (Gosper):
Separating X from Y in the above recurrence,

X(N+1) = (2 - epsilon^2) * X(N) - X(N-1)
Y(N+1) = (2 - epsilon) * Y(N) - Y(N-1).

These are just the Chebychev recurrence with cos theta (the angular increment) = 1-epsilon^2/2. Thus X(N) and Y(N) are expressible in the form R cos(N theta + phi). The phi's and R for X(N) and Y(N) can be found from N=0,1. The phi's will differ by less than pi/2 so that the curve is not really a circle. The algorithm is useful nevertheless, because it needs no sine or square root function, even to get started.

X(N) and Y(N) are also expressible in closed form in the algebra of ordered pairs described under linear recurrences, but they lack the remarkable numerical stability of the "simultaneous" form of the recurrence.

ITEM 152 (Salamin):
With exact arithmetic, the circle algorithm is stable iff |epsilon| < 2. In this case, all points lie on the ellipse

X^2 - epsilon X Y + Y^2 = constant,

where the constant is determined by the initial point. This ellipse has its major axis at 45 degrees (if epsilon > 0) or 135 degrees (if epsilon < 0) and has eccentricity

sqrt(epsilon/(1 + epsilon/2)).

For the full MIT HAKMEM (a report everyone who programs should read at some point) http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hacks.html
I have a question - what does 'give an identity check' actually mean? Does it mean that Pandarus has to give Menaleus a means of verifying that Pandarus really is Pandarus in the future, or does it mean that Pandarus has to verify Menaleus' identity?
I wouldn't agree that I need to be some sort of "special" person or anything like that. I do view life as something to explore and to enjoy. In my opinion they sort of go hand-in-hand, but you may disagree. I don't believe in any sort of destiny and never had a problem with drugs, it was everyone around me who did.

You are right that I am very goal driven, but I try and read at least 50 books a year. Most, if not all the books I read tend to be non-fiction, so I may benefit from actually opening up a classic or well written novel every now and then. For now I enjoy reading memoirs about the lives of ordinary people and the different issues they face. Those sort of things give me a different perspective on how to approach certain topics going forward and I find value in that.

I agree with your last one, but to seek out people in that way is not always the best form of doing things. Instead, I go out and try new activities. I make friends through those things. I talk with people when I am out and if something happens then great. If not, then it doesn't worry me too much.

I appreciate your response and despite it coming off a little hostile, there is value in it.
Not really, because while you are being tortured you would explain in detail "I am supposed to repeat the exact following phrase 'I am unable to remember it'". It's not like torture just makes you answer only technically correct but able to withhold actually giving them what they want.

What you are describing would probably work in a sitcom, but it makes no sense in real life.