skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People expect different things from their hardware. Some people are super careful with their kit. Always keep it in a special case when not using it, always transport it in a padded bag, always put it down very carefully, never but anything on top of it etc. Others simply chuck their phone or laptop unprotected into whatever bag they happen to have handy and set off.

Personally I'm very much in the second camp. I expect my hardware to keep up with me, not to change my habits to accommodate my hardware.
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No, Lumia has three capacitive windows buttons and physical camera button in addition to N9 hardware. N9 has buttonless interface.
>However the government, culture and venture capital industry in Australia are still far behind. Few grant programs exist

Are you really suggesting the reason they don't "get it" is that the government tit isn't big enough to help you bootstrap your for-profit enterprise? If I was an Australian, I'd be offended.
You could just change the $ to a £, like seemingly every other bloody company ;-)
Does the link unsubscribe instantly, or must the user log in bla bla bla ..

More often than not, I find following those unsubscribe links very annoying because I have to log in and fill out 5 different forms.. and then it doesn't even work :(
I expect them to improve because there are obvious, straightforward, practical improvements they can make already. As an obvious example, the NLP is currently limited in terms of the variability of ways to add things to your shopping list. Adding more variants of that would be easy.

The huge amounts of data they're gathering about what people actually use this for is indeed a huge advantage. With that kind of data, they can build a centralised dictionary of common patterns for asking just about anything. Because of Siri's practical orientation, there is no need to build a "generic NLP engine" (which is what you're, quite rightly, suggesting is slow to improve). They merely need to improve the effectiveness of the NLP engine they already have, by making it understand more common patterns. That's achievable through expert-system-like functionality that's existed for 30 years.

In terms of the voice recognition, that has been progressing steadily for 30 years too, and I imagine Siri will benefit from improvements to the technology base, as others will.
Apart from a Developer Evangelist... what other roles will you be hiring for in London?
But Bing I think? Would DDG work standalone?
Just get the N9. 1GB of RAM and no buttons. Seems to solve your problems. Also, Lumia sells about half of the iPhone 4S price; high-end models are due in spring.
An optimized Haskell version running in real time, by Ben Lippmeier, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_0Yyl19fiI
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I don't want to highjack this post but after reading through all the comments here I decided to create a new poll with more information. Check it out : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3157719
IF Siri can become a CLI for the world, then that is brilliant. But the most powerful feature of the CLI is the pipe - "passing the output of one program to the next, to make magic happen" - and I remain skeptical if something resembling that can be made to work using a voice interface. Basically, I want to be able to say "Find a bus 19 that allows me to be at work at least 15 minutes before my first meeting each day, add it to my calendar and update every day at 9 pm", the equivalent of which is pretty simple in a Unix CLI. But, not having the command line to review and edit, I also need to be able to say this without first carefully considering the exact structure of the sentence.

Being able to control and input data to an increasing number of applications reliably is undoubtedly very good, but considering the many many many failed attempts to replace text entry to describe anything mildly complex suggests that it's not going anywhere.
Hands on video: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/26/nokia-lumia-800-hands-on/
So before I came back here to comment I decided to skim a few of his other posts. There's no content. Ever. None.

I suppose what I'm about to say can be construed as a stock phrase, but I mean it very literally: the overall tone and quality of his articles are that of a stereotypical angry teenage blogger (perhaps modulo the author's journalistic knowledge of the tech field).

> It's like Batman's Robin getting upset with Holmes' Dr. Watson.

Ugh.
They thought of that. You can put it up to your head like you're on a phone call. You don't feel self-conscious talking on the phone in public do you?
Here's my dream scenario: Nokia offers the same hardware with two different OS selections and also has Qt working on both Meego and WP platforms.

This would obviously be a win-win situation for both the developer and the user. But this would be beneficial for Nokia as well, because:

1) It'd provide Nokia with hard data based on sales and user feedback on which platform performs better in real-world scenarios. Currently, the decision to drop Meego for WP platform is mostly based on "hopes and promises".

2) Having both platforms compete on even terms would also improve the overall Nokia experience on both platforms as this open and fair competition would motivate both the Microsoft and the Meego teams to do better.

So, why this wouldn't happen?
The main reason why most users don't use a command line isn't, as the article says, because "most people have been satisfied enough with that [the GUI], so they haven't ever bothered learning to use a command line".

They've been satisfied enough with the GUI because the alternative, the command line, was several orders of magnitude harder to learn than the GUI. Siri is comparable, or possibly easier, in terms of learning difficulty.

Fact is, with a command line you don't "talk" to a computer. You actually program it

But with Siri, you talk to it. That's where the NLP piece comes in. "Wake me up at 7am" works, so does "Can you set an alarm for 7am?", etc. The syntax is deliberately loose and not programming-language-like. So you don't need to be exact at all.
No only that. SunTrust presents it to you as an "advantage" -- "We don't want your largest bills to be unpaid".

Somebody in the marketing and PR department got a bonus for making that shit up. It is like they slap you in the face, then smile at you and ask you how your day is going.
indeed, 500 days without government and still no catastrophe in the country, perhaps governments are not so mandatory/important/needed after all, just image how much we are saving on wages for politicians ;-)
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I have and know kids and am currently not at all convinced. We all read quite a lot (of children's literature). Certainly the eldest of my close group, she's 11, would be most interested in getting a pre-publication copy. She and her younger sister have not had any exposure to programming AFAIK.

If you've a copy to spare ...

Sorry if you find my forwardness offensive.

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Back in the day, "heavy spending on warehouses, data centers, and digital content offerings" would be labeled what it is: plowback.

The company is reinvesting some of its earnings back into the business, rather than using those profits simply to reward shareholders. It's a long-term move, and Wall Street analysts these days seem wholly incapable of thinking further out than a quarter or two.
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That's going to vastly increase the number of attempts required though, which may be sufficient to make it practically impossible, no?
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While that's possible I would say that's extremely unlikely, so you're better off getting the feedback.

Think of this way, on the spectrum of loathing to loving your idea, they have to be on the top end and have either the resources or technical knowledge to execute, and now they have to pass you who has a hypothesis already and is looking for feedback. They don't know how much or what you've already gotten, so if they flat copy/paste based on what you've spoken to them about they could be heading off in a different direction. If that's the case they're not really competing with you because they're somewhere else in a different niche.
Damn, got all excited about this until I noticed the no-SMS in the UK bit.
I never said revolutionary, you did. Had you asked, I would have probably characterized it as "evolutionary" more than anything - but most innovation is.

I disagree that this is imply "voice input". Siri takes a step beyond simple data input and manipulation and provides a new interface to several system functions and services in a cohesive and purposeful fashion.

If, as you contend, that Google is well positioned to respond to Siri, then they probably will - I'm not sure you actually read my original comment - I had pretty clearly indicated that both Microsoft and Google have assets that they can deploy in response to Siri.
Their merchant banking setup may only allow charging in USD. It would be worse to show a price in pounds and then be billing an amount that differs.
We can't peek under the hood or tinker with things like decades past.

You can't peek the lid of a PC like you could with an Apple ][. There's no pre-installed BASIC to play with. No schematics. Even most cars are now "no user servicable parts inside" when you lift the hood.
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Charging in Dollars is /precisely/ something that changes every time the exchange rate moves.

It also makes you look like:
A - amateurs
B - you don't understand or care about markets outside the US
That's off-topic, but this this is a pet peeve of mine, I'll bite. Have you tried code signing Blackberry apps? Desktop apps, java apps? Shockwave xtras, god forbid? Apple made something really complicated & poorly documented into something that was only moderately difficult and mostly automated, and with Xcode 4 it's possible to know basically nothing about it and develop apps on your own devices, so I'd say Apple did it pretty well.
I agree that piping will be the next big step, and that's not there yet. But it's on the radar, and Siri does seem to be built with interactions in mind, thanks to its context tracking.

So for example, a stepping stone for piping might be:

"Find me a bus 19 that leaves from home to arrive at work before 9am every day for the next week."

"Ok, here are the buses that match your requirements."

"Add those to my calendar."

"Ok, I've added them."

"Also remember to perform this task again every Sunday evening."

"Ok, I'll remember."

That's not exactly what you suggested, but it's close enough and not that far from what Siri is already capable of offering in theory, if it was plugged into the right services.
There was a fantastic article a year or more ago on HN about a vulnerability in a standard library where some loop in a function returned as soon as it failed, which means that the more wrong your hash guess was, the quicker it executed, but the difference was only a few clock cycles.

And then you think so what? There's no way an attacker can use that because all requests are transmitted over the internet where latencies are way, way bigger than a few clock cycles, right?

Wrong. Using statistical analysis over a vast amount of requests you can find out which ones execute a few clock cycles faster than others, and then you're home free.

Lesson learned: I'm not smart enough for security. :-)
That's good for usability, but then it's not like the command line ;) My point is that to have both things you would really need an "expert system"
More generally: from an unregulated bank. The tradeoff that came out of the Great Depression was that the government insures bank deposits, and in exchange the banks agree to be bound by rules that enforce responsibility - both fiduciary and to their communities. Over the past 20 years, the American banks have succeeded in shedding many of the regulations that used to bind them to those terms of responsibility. Not only has that resulted in more cynical and opportunistic 'service' to customers, but also it has resulted in the financial instability that led to the big crash of 2008.
Google seemingly has AI answering questions?
These interns better be paid.
I thought so too, but that means the slide title is wrong, they're not doing that much traffic without a cache.
I would also recommend Charles Schwab.

If you open an investment account with them, and keep at least $1500 in there, you get a nice checking account -- refunds ATM fees, free rental car insurance, good customer service.
How do you people think this would cope with using NoSQL approaches, such as MongoDB, instead of SQL based ones?
Personally speaking (as a UK based user of many cloud services) - I have no objection to be being priced in dollars. Amazon charges for its EU and APAC datacenters prices in dollars (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/)

And to be honest, I'd rather pay the same standard US price, rather than some inflated price where $1 suddenly equals £1.

The other thing you'll need to watch in Europe is VAT (sales taxes, currently 20% in the UK). Which if you're not including in your prices, you should mark as such.
It may not be exactly "like" a command line (whatever that means), but it will effectively function like one, as far as most people are concerned. To a large extent, you could argue that the command line is already an expert system - after all, it only understands a few specific commands and needs very exact syntax to work. Siri is already one step ahead of that, by having looser syntax.
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This is one of the best "What the hell does this thing do" pages I've seen. I wish every business had one like that for their products:

http://www.twilio.com/api

Takes about 4 seconds to explain what their service does. Wonderful.
Oh right. Then yeah, they have to keep the price in dollars.
Should we be encouraging use of CD-R anymore? Online and local replication is a much better option.
It's not clear from the site if they are although some of the roles do mention being paid. I'd hope so as well but I guess it's up to the individuals involved if they want to pay/work for free.
Oh right. Good point.

Let me rephrase what I really feel: After my three previous Nokia phones, I don't feel Nokia is a viable producer of high quality phones. In fact, part of me wants to punish them for selling me such junk and enveloping me in some sort of cognitive dissonance field that made me think they were doing good work.

Then again, Elop got there to change exactly that, so perhaps I should give them a benefit of doubt now.
"In terms of the voice recognition, that has been progressing steadily for 30 years too, and I imagine Siri will benefit from improvements to the technology base, as others will"

Will it progress to a point where ambiguity is reduced to nil? The strength of the command line abstraction is its completely unambiguous interface - do what I say.

The do what I mean interface of Siri could be limited to actions with insignificant consequences - the human brain incorporates the best speech recognition available and still makes mistakes. Any speech AI performing significant actions would need to outperform the brain.

edit: That is not to suggest AI speech recognition outperforming the brain is not possible. There are probably metrics and methods for disambiguating common sources of confusion which could be performed in the blink of an eye rather than the minutes, hours or weeks later you find yourself thinking "Oh, THAT'S what he said!"
In which country are you operating?
Can't tell whether this is snark, but I will respond as though it's not.

Obtaining phone numbers in every country is a bit of a tricky legal process. If we waited until we had all of Europe lined up it would take quite awhile and that wouldn't be very "lean" of us. What if it turns out nobody wants to buy numbers in Croatia but we spent a bunch of time trying to get numbers there?

In the end we will roll out incrementally as we bring on new carriers and forge new relationships in other countries in Europe.
Or expense, including accommodation.
The do what I mean interface of Siri could be limited to actions with insignificant consequences - the human brain incorporates the best speech recognition available and still makes mistakes. Any speech AI performing significant actions would need to outperform the brain.

Or actions which can be undone.

I'd be very concerned if the US army decided to use Siri to control its nuclear missiles. Less so if someone uses Siri to change their thermostat or query their fridge contents.
That plate looks way too small and square to cover up the holes left by most rectangular thermostats. Look at 0:12 in the intro video, you can see the mounting holes for the "old" device. Interesting that the holes are painted white and have no screws in them.
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I'd be very surprised if they weren't already working on a Qt to CIL compiler.
In the UK (and I believe much of the rest of Europe), the monthly line rental is basically paying off a loan for the phone. You can get (just about) any phone for £0 up front if you're willing to pay enough every month.

E.g. if the phone costs £500 out of contract ("pay as you go"), it will probably be free on a 18-month contract that costs £40/month. If you chose a £20/month contract then you'd have to pay about £200 up front.
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In this Wooga presentation they talk about how DB hosting in the cloud is 20x more expensive than on rented dedicated servers, or 5x more expensive per DAU across the entire variety of servers required.

http://www.slideshare.net/wooga/games-for-the-masses-scaling...
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But it wasn't introduced with the iPhone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=T... 4 minutes in.
I've found a similar thing with many forms of social media. My business site gets 500-1000 views a day with a 30-40% bounce rate. Two days ago, we got 5500 views with an 80% bounce rate -- turns out, we got featured on Reddit and were reasonably popular, but people just aren't interested in viewing your site or buying anything, they want to click, see it, be entertained, and move on.
At the end of the day, all transactional RDBMSs need to do the same things, and if they're mature and optimized enough, they'll all reach the same physical limits of what the underlying disk can handle. There will be small differences, but all numbers will be in the same magnitude.

Switching from MySQL to PostGRES in the above scenario wouldn't do much for performance, some operational tasks might change, complex queries might change in speed, but the baseline of simple updates/selects per second won't really change.

To get magnitudes more performance, you need to use a different model. Redis is a NoSQL key-value-store which keeps the entire dataset in memory and occasionally flushes changes to disk. Of course that's going to be faster than a system which flushes all changes to disk individually.
This probably explains why we have very different points of view: My idea of an expert system isn't at all similar to a Unix shell. No problem though :)
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Cool. We're thinking a monthly subscription. We're still working out final pricing.
Just because you're not seeing ads for a particular use case, doesn't mean that the data is not valuable for some use case in the future where you will be seeing ads.

It's Google's interest to make the best, easiest way for you to get your personal data in and out of their system.
For instance, if the father wasn't a custodial on the account he can't deposit money in the event he needs it.

When did that start? I've deposited money many times into other people's accounts without problems; you don't even have to show ID -- just fill out a deposit slip with their account number and hand over cash.
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Agreed, the title is misleading, and should be changed to "Twillo launching in UK"
"I'd be very concerned if the US army decided to use Siri to control its nuclear missiles. Less so if someone uses Siri to change their thermostat or query their fridge contents"

Indeed... A command line for non-critical parts of the world.

For launching missiles? Nothing less than a bash script! ;)
It's not intended as snark. As a resident of one European country, Italy, not particularly known for its ease of doing business, dealing with what can be a fairly bureaucratic industry in the whole lot of them is Not My Idea of Fun. Launching in several and then continuing the roll out is completely sensible.

If I recall correctly, even the original iPhone was rolled out country by country, or at least groups at a time, and Apple certainly has a lot more resources than a startup.
There's a tension: the great advantage Siri has is a constrained domain (as you note); adding patterns, services and "ways to add things" etc expands this domain. (And adding new patterns, if they amount to grammar rules, can increase the domain dramatically.) It's a tradeoff between expressiveness and error.

My information is that the progress in voice recognition has been terribly slow, and in the last 10 years or so has been made mostly by limiting domains.
Nokia Lumia 800 vs. Nokia N9: the tale of the tape
The app was posted to a Twitter account with 150,000 followers. A reach that large only produced 40 sales (0.027% conversion). OP is using it as an example of how ineffective Twitter is as a marketing avenue. It's not an example of cognitive dissonance.
Great when it will have SMS support.

Since most of the people I know have unlimited SMS it opens the possibility to many services. Including "extending" Siri.
Gates said it perfectly about the barriers to entry of most startups being directly related to "over-patenting." I have experienced this a couple of times personally, but I keep on hearing it over and over again from friends who are also trying to execute their thoughts. Outsmarting a big bully can be tricky.

"A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Great guys, welcome to this side of the pond!

Does this mean that outbound rates to EU countries (e.g. Holland) will drop sometime soon?
I, for one, am tired of playing Reality in fixed first-person view. I just need the LED-embedded contact lenses to get to a high enough resolution for over-the-shoulder.