skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, I know it has entered the popular culture and become a myth, and thus fighting it is kinda pointless, but the newton was not a failure, neither technologically or from a business perspective.

First off, Technologically. It worked. I have terrible handwriting, and the newton I had was the 100- the original message pad. It could recognize my handwriting, just fine, well north of %90 of the time. When it got a word wrong, it was trivial to correct. I was able to write on it at the same speed that I would be writing on a pen and paper. I could increase this recognition rate to %100 by altering the way I wrote, if I wanted to, but it was more convenient to write my normal way.

Further, this was all done on an ARM RISC 610 CPU running at 20Mhz with 640kb of RAM!

It was "technology from the future", and unfortunately it came at a time when, at least in america, "computer literacy" was a big thing. Many people weren't really computer literate, and having a computer in the home was not rare, but not exactly common yet.

Secondly, the Newton was not a failure in the marketplace. The device found wide adoption in industry where its unique features provided exceptional value. In places where a Palm could compete (because the newton's superior technology wasn't significantly more valuable) it didn't do as well... but that doesn't mean it was a failure as a product or was losing money. (Interestingly, NeXT, widely also regarded as a "failure" was also profitable when Apple bought them.)

The newton was building momentum and was about to be spun out in an IPO as Newton Inc, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. I don't know the reasons that Steve Jobs killed the IPO and the product. It seems to me that letting it spin out would have been the wiser move.

I understand why it was popular for doonsbury to make fun of it, and the simpsons, etc. It exhibited a kind of hubris. Handwriting recognition? At a time when people are barely grasping the value of a computer to begin with?

I think the lesson to learn with AI like products is to make sure that the target market is receptive to the idea.

I hope people are now more receptive to Siri than they were to Newton.
It's one of those rare cases where the comments make more sense than the article itself. Those 2% can easily disable Metro's Start Screen and get their Start Menu back.
Hi mg!

Just completed http://bit.ly/pmhS0U. :)
My first HDD was on a Commodore Amiga and was a mighty 60Mb.
Cool.

What's an "intelligent decision"?
All the developers in the beta are under NDA, so they can't write attention-getting blog posts that might actually influence Apple to do something.
Launching Wireless Hacking Series for Fun and Profit
Please, go back to Reddit.
Hi,thanks for your offer!
Can you go to http://www.codemaps.org/e/Lucene and play around with the diagrams and explorations?
Its the prototype for the system we are building to help open source developers explore the source code online.
We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback! :)
How do you judge a new medicine? do you ask if does the correct things 100% of the time? or do you just want it to be better than the other drugs ?

I think the same logic applies to other technologies: products generally have to pass the standard safety tests/level common in their industry, not be perfect.

Will this too happen in AI ? maybe , but maybe due to political pressure , the standards require from AI will be much higher.
Not that I don't believe you. It's just that I want to learn from specific examples on what kind of problems people encounter when dealing with mutable data and how would immutable data solve the problems.

So how would immutable data solve the above problems? Thanks.
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"Dukhon has in effect told current users to “take one for the team,” arguing that eventually, once everyone converts to the new system, and all the developers rebuild their applications for it, everyone will benefit. This arrogantly assumes that everyone is in the same boat as those at Microsoft — addicted for life to Windows and willing to put up with yet more years of change and inconvenience, to get to some future nirvana."

That's exactly the approach that Apple takes time and time again- pushing forward, being innovative, and telling everyone (particularly app makers) to catch up.

When they do it they are being "bold", yet when Microsoft does it is "flailing". I don't understand why.
One is +1 (to 5) and the other one is +2 (to 6). Which one is the correct one?
Apple is Building a Social Network Right Under Our Noses
I'm very skeptical as well, but Microsoft is not a company without the resources to make something like this work.

Microsoft is the leader in two major markets: browser and desktop. They are losing traction (albeit slowly) and are being dominated in the mobile phone market. This kind of maneuver is obviously the result of a company that knows it's dying.

From a long term point of view, this is probably the right move; mobile and desktop appear to be converging and Microsoft's desktop OS could not be more different than their mobile OS. The same can no longer be said for Apple's Mac OS X and iOS (they're still not the same, but with launchpad and app store, it's not hard to see what Mac OS X is headed towards).

It has the potential to be very good and they could step on a lot of people's toes. It'll be interesting to see how this all pans out for them.
A must-read: “Fire and Motion” by Joel Spolsky

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

And a not-so-must-read: “Imagine if your house had Windows:”

http://raganwald.posterous.com/imagine-if-your-house-had-win...
Call to all Boards: Bring back the Steve Jobs to your companies
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Communicat...
I'd love if you could try a quick install of http://www.heroframework.com (open source) and tell us (a) how did the install go and (b) do you know what to do next to build your website with the product? :)
Hi Mike, I'm new to coding, and I'm building a site (using php) that I'm going to try to launch as a paid product in a couple of weeks: http://www.gmatboost.com

I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on what I should add, remove, change, be aware of, etc.

Also, I'm not sure how I am going to accept payment yet, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how I (i.e. someone with the bare minimum amount of coding ability) could most easily and securely accept payment.

Thanks a lot, it's very generous of you to offer.
The -E flag is specified by POSIX. Non-POSIX compilers sometimes support it, sometimes not.
I had this same dilemma 5 years ago. I was right out of college and started a new job. I hated the project I was working on (it was one main project at a medium-sized company, so I didn't have much choice) and I dreaded waking up in the morning.

I lasted about 8 months. I used my lunch hour to send out my resume and find another job. It was the best decision I could have made. My new job was much better and it lasted until a year ago.

It's more than just your job. When you enjoy your work, your entire outlook on life is better. During that 8 months, I didn't work on any side projects, because I was so depressed. The plus side is I never went out or bought anything and I got myself out of debt.

"The major question is whether I look for an internal transfer (this is a big and generally quite good company) or another job. And if I do look for a transfer, do I wait or start immediately?"

It's an option, you can try it. But, your boss may not put in a good word for you, which will make things difficult.
+ The intro instantly made me want to play. (I love RPGs.) I'm certain you've seen enough Square titles to see how they make epic introductions to their games. I'm not sure what you built this with, but an epic intro is CERTAIN to get people to try your game out.

As far as game interfaces are concerned, I need to understand the mechanics behind your game and spend more time with it than I'm willing to now. I'll spend time one evening going through it and will give a more thoughtful response over the weekend. :)
Even though it's one of my favourites, modern high performance hardware with branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and multiple issue generally makes this trick rather unnecessary. Combine that with the cleverer compilers we have these days and you get pretty much the same performance out of the simple copy.
We just recently launched our first application at http://teamloopapp.com. It's intended audience is to help manage the communication of any type of sports teams.

I'm most interested in feedback on the homepage and if it explains enough of what we do and the signup process through creating your first team. Any thoughts would be appreciated greatly!
Fred Wilson Explains Why New Angel Investors Are About To Get A Rude Awakening
Mike, this is an awesome gesture. I just filled out your survey.

If you have a few spare moments, I'd love UI feedback on http://flock.fm (no big deal if you're overwhelmed with requests and don't have time)
ICal or iHAL? Apple and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day
I'd imagine Photon is spelt Foton in pretty much any phonetic language in the world (or as they would say fonetic lol)
Great post. I would add some advice to this based on my experiences... If you're just starting out and are having trouble gaining the trust of your target customers, you should consider seeking out channels through which to sell your services.

In my example, we built credibility with our desired end clients by building great case studies working through channel partners. Once we had these examples under our belt, bigger companies were more likely to trust us. Plus, the channel partner acts as your sales rep until you can get your own sales funnel working in-house.

However, I don't recommend this forever, as selling through a channel has its own set of challenges (e.g., lack of pricing controls, inability to sell into the account without approvals, potential for the channel to copy your product/approach, inability to control the client relationship, etc.).
When they do it they are being "bold", yet when Microsoft does it is "flailing”.

There are two ways to answer that question. One is to suggest that there is no difference between Microsoft and Apple’s design and implementations, and it is simply a question of prejudice.

The other is to suggest that on balance, Apple’s changes pay off positively for users while Miscrosoft’s do not. In which case they are both doing the same thing in theory, but different things in practice.

Are you arguing either of these cases?
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Enter 'hackernews' for a 10% discount. Valid till Monday.
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The messages when you get items flash by much too quick.
If these guys were humble researchers unsure of their results, perhaps RUNNING TO THE MEDIA AND SCREAMING ABOUT BREAKING THE LIGHT BARRIER should have been agenda item #8484 not #1.

Seriously, if you're claiming you're doing FTL, asking for outside help isn't some noble act, its pretty much required. The idea that these guys are infallible and systemic errors never happen is incredibly naive.

Christ, remind me never to get between nerds and their starship Enterprise fantasies.
Possibly not clear from the title: 2.4.0 final was just released. All the new users are strongly encouraged to use this instead of 2.2.x.

Existing users should plan an upgrade to 2.4 if possible in order to take advantage of the new features.

A list of improvements is available here: http://antirez.com/post/everything-about-redis-24.html
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I really enjoyed running around and thwacking things for 20 minutes. Your game looks great!

It wasn't immediately clear to me when I was leveling up - I wish there was a little more positive feedback. I also found it slightly annoying that I had to open up the inventory screen to read what the potions/spells/actions in my HUD do. I wish there were tooltips for those items.

Keep up the good work!
You can also call 'cpp' on the file. When doing heavy macrology (e.g. https://github.com/silentbicycle/kona/blob/master/scalar.h) I like to work in a file which is just

#include "the_macro.h"

THE_MACRO(example, args);

and call

cpp macrotest.h | fmt -w72

(using fmt since multi-line macros will end up on one line otherwise).
This is an almost trivial application of special relativity.

This is even less than a trivial application of special relativity, it's literally a third grade "distance = rate x time" problem:

Skipping over the relativistic stuff, which is quite frankly unnecessary (or rather, it's necessary, but the CERN authors apparently already included the corrections), the only two equations of import are (re-named vars for lack of LaTeX):

1) time_baseline = dist_baseline / c

2) time_observed = dist_baseline / (c+v)

where v is the speed of the satellite. In other words, if two things are moving towards each other, then you should use the combined velocity to compute the time. Duhhh...

Now, the fact that the difference in these formulas turns out to almost exactly explain away the problem is certainly suggestive, I'll be honest about that.

But if this was all there was to the story, it would be massively embarrassing for someone at CERN, this is the type of error I mentally ruled out immediately because these people should be way too careful to be making elementary screwups like this. This is the type of error that freshmen lose points for on a mechanics 101 test, not one that eludes dozens of physicists working around the clock for a month.

So I'm skeptical here; it's not that the author of this paper is wrong (though there are credibility red flags in the paper, even beyond the fact that he's not a physicist [he's a computer guy], like the fact that he defines gamma as the inverse of the commonly used relativistic quantity, something that indicates only a passing familiarity with the field), it's that I'm not sure that the CERN guys could reasonably be assumed to have made this mistake.

Then again, maybe everyone else looking over the work also assumed that they'd dotted their i's, and didn't bother checking the trivial stuff. It's certainly happened before...
People Waiting in Line for an iPhone Are Weirder Than Ever
Hi Mike,

I have created a free service for app developers to connect with their user base through discussions, bug fixes and a static FAQs section.

I have some features I will be working on soon (closing bugs, assigning bugs, "private" apps, RSS feeds).

Is the idea just not good enough, or is there something I'm missing that I should be highlighting?

The site is http://www.dcmntr.com/

Thanks!
What about a highly-structured ACID datastore designed primarily for short transactions reading & mutating small sets of random rows makes you think that? Log data is semi-structured and very heterogenous. I would choose the filesystem far before an RDBMS.
What is the cost like? What's the logging volume?
> But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game.

More so, they prove (again) that the technology arms race in today's video games is utterly retarded. It's also the reason many indie games tend to be so good and refreshing - they can't make a hitech ultra-HD game, so they focus on what really matters: gameplay and design.
Maybe the dude read a few articles or had time to think. Using one's posting history as a "gotcha" because we humans aren't allowed to change our minds for some reason, seems like a really, really odd thing to do.
The Gervais Principle V: Heads I win, tails you lose
hey Malux can you e-mail me, details on my profile. I'm London based, i think we've got some similar interests and there's some stuff i'd like to talk about. Cheers.
Windows XP/7. ISP is generally pretty bad (comcast) but no more than usual, and this has been a long trend.
I've always been curious, regarding "speaking with a Southern drawl, with a stuffed-up nose from a bad cold" ... are there non-native English speakers here who have had particular difficulty using speech-to-text because of an accent? Have the British, Irish, Scottish, Australians, Canadians, Jamaicans, or South Africans had trouble because of their dialect?

Speech-to-text sounds like it will be a constantly tough problem. Even humans aren't 100% accurate, or even 99% accurate, depending on the circumstances.
"Jesus, it was an impossibly long string, I can't remember. Please don't kill me, Jesus!!!"

(...Pandarus who'd blasphemed so frequently...)

Clever but weak, there is plenty of blasphemers in the world.
Reprinting a comment from another page, particularly a comment full of abuse (politically correct piece of crap? clown?), inaccuracies, and conspiracist wonderings, is not really worthy of HN.

I'll just point out the first glaring issue about the only fact that the comment even mentions: the "Little Ice Age," though somewhat ambiguously defined, is usually taken to mean the era from the mid sixteenth century to the nineteenth.
I think it's a really good idea if you made it easy enough to record and reply. The majority of your value will be based around those specific interactions. (Video hosting is pretty much solved.) I would focus a lot of your effort on the UI/UX end of it. If you're green on UI/UX, read: http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/. Alternatively, hire someone who rocks.

Additionally, I'm not certain online music teachers would be willing to pay for such a product. Have you talked to any yet? Make some interactive mockups (Balsamiq or Keynotopia) and visit a few schools. Try to find people who are already sharing tutorials online and ask them.
Seriously? Do you not understand what a plugin is? Takes about 30 seconds to install one time and you're done.

But no, you'd rather spend that 30 seconds replying with your complaint. That's because you're a hater. Once you realize that and fix it, life won't be so difficult anymore and you won't be annoying other people with your petty and off-topic complaints.
Will RIM Win Users’ Trust After Its BlackBerry Outage?
Yes. It has happened to me once already.
I really appreciate you. Thanks! (And if you left your email, you'll hear this twice.)
You might find this article, "Considerations on Exchange Rate Data Providers", useful: http://www.currencysystem.com/kb/13-143

It's from the website of the Cloanto system and has some ideas on publicly available FX feeds.
TL;DR;

Siri is a simple application with constrained functionality that uses existing technology, all dressed up to make it seem much smarter than it really is.
I might be able to offer some criticism, if I may:

* The screenshot on the right is possibly pointless as it doesn't actually show me anything (it's too small and texty).

* The blurbs are good; I get a good picture of what the app is about. Though I would scale up in size everything in the blue stripe.

* I would try to cut down the amount of text in the feature boxes.
At what point did you decide to create/join a startup?
What point in your life did you make the decision to create/join a startup?

Was it an offer you couldn't turn down from a founder? Did you hate your job and finally realize an opportunity to break free? What was the triggering point that made you risk what you had for a startup?
As far as I know analog devices still makes some ones-complement Analog to Digital Converters. But I don't know of any modern processor that uses them.
Ya, I'm wondering that myself. Or it could mean that Pandarus gave Menaleus a way for Menaleus to identify himself (Menaleus) to others. If so, then it could be something unique to Menaleus such as his finger print. Menaleus could use his finger print as an identity check and Pandarus would have no way to remember Menaleus' finger print.
Self-recursive generators in Python
To an extent, I agree with the OP, especially on the note of who is the customer.

Google very much uses people as their products and their customers are advertisers. Their goal is to turn every single person that uses a Google product into marketable data that is monetized in turn. They want to make good products you'll use, but it is rather obvious they are designed not for a smooth, slick UX; they are designed to keep you using them so they can gather data. I use Gmail - swear by it - but open up Sparrow on Mac and see the difference in how the entire thing is laid out?

I'm very familiar with this because of the rather large amount of money I spend on Google ads (both my own money and client's money). You see, with Google paid search ads, you bid on intent: "auto insurance quote" means you're pretty damn sure you will get someone who wants a quote on auto insurance. Your ROI will be high and the CPC will also be high because of how profitable the term is. Google has mastered monetizing search with these ads; they lead and Bing follows. More power to them!

Facebook has done something quite interesting though; they make you bid on people and their interests. Instead of bidding on intent, you bid on what they like and respond to. Instead of inserting an ad that should provide content about what they are searching for right now, you are bidding on being a part of their Facebook experience.

This is why Zynga, Playdom, Playfish, Kabam, et al have succeeded so well. They have integrated their product into the Facebook experience - a platform, if you will - that caught Google entirely by surprise.

This platform is extremely profitable if you know how to make it work. I make over 3x the EPC (earnings-per-click) on Facebook than Google.

What FB has done so well is make the consumer not the product; you bid on their life and being a part of it. Everything you advertise on FB is something you want people to be interested in and interact with, a totally different paradigm shift from search. So despite the notion that you are bidding on people, the important thing is the product is connecting with them.

You can see why Facebook is something Google fears very much, and why the G+ response had to be perfect.
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There are standards issues and there are standard issues.

In reality, you're probably never going to see a 1's complement machine.

Your likelihood of needing to use a piece of code under a compiler other than GCC is deceptively high.

Meanwhile, the extensions we tend to think about when we think of GCC aren't subtle things like "can you use // comments in C code". They're constructs that require many additional lines of code to replace. It is a giant pain when you find them, later on, when you need to compile something under Visual C or SunWorks. Your fix to comment syntax isn't going to break code at runtime, but your fix for the missing ellipsis operator definitely can!

From bitter experience, I think 'mansr is right on this, and it's worth making an effort not to let GCC extensions creep into your code.