skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if you consider something like Intel copying the RISC microarchitectures of the 90s and essentially driving the likes of Compaq, DEC and MIPS out of business, allowing those ideas to copied was almost definitely bad for consumers.

I don't understand how you can argue this was bad for consumers when it made fast CPUs so much cheaper. Okay, it stuck us with the x86 architecture, which wasn't so great for programmers, you could argue. But how was this a problem for consumers?

I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.
That would be recursive, since IE is the tool of choice for downloading Firefox.
Apple granted patent on 'slide to unlock'
Interesting move, though hardly uncommon. If anything it's good to see Microsoft uncoupling the search engine and the browser.

I'm glad that it's hosted by Mozilla, at least it ought to keep up to date with regard to the latest versions. The Yahoo Firefox is less fortunate- it's still stuck on v5:

http://downloads.yahoo.com/firefox/
Yocto 1.1 embedded Linux stack adds GUI builder
Sincerely Raises $3 Million To Deliver Real-World Postcards
If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution. Whether that is due to physical limitations, mathematical or statistical considerations, the current state of the market, what have you.

There are a lot of narrow physical constraints operating in this market: the size of the human hand, the size of a fingertip, the range of human vision, the distance from the eye to the screen in terms of arm's length. There are other technology givens like the resolution of a screen that fits in the hand and the precision of touch technology. There are cultural givens to pull something apart to stretch it or push it together to make it smaller, or to advance a view by turning a page.

The more you think about these problems, the more you realize how narrow the space for innovation was in them, and in fact how many of Apple's innovations were anticipated by the market. Apple got there first with the whole package and reaped the benefits in mindshare. But they shouldn't be able to seek rent on a solution that experts would create in a vacuum.
If rumors are true then Eric Schmidt had an iPhone prototype in 2007.

http://gizmodo.com/5479684/google-ceos-mistress-tell+all-blo...

I don't think that Schmidt stepped out of board meetings until early demos of the G1 were shown off bearing a resemblance to the iPhone.
There's some sense in this, but it's all too easy to think small and end up small. You need to concentrate on making it work well for 1 demographic, as he says, but keep an eye out that you aren't excluding others or making meaningless decisions that hurt your product on the global scale.

If you concentrate on "indie bands and their music videos", sure, you'll hit the sweet spot for them. But you might have decided that limiting uploads to 8 minutes made sense because no music video will be longer than that. It makes sense from other standpoints, too, because it's easier to store, stream, and otherwise handle smaller videos.

But what about indie movie producers? Or kids with cats? Or ... Well, the billions of other video producers out there.

A friend of mine was recently upset that YouTube was limiting him to 15 minutes. He wanted to upload gameplay recordings, and splitting them into 15 minute chunks was a real pain.

Notch's Ludum Dare coding videos would also not have been allowed, and they were excellent watching. I had never heard of the video host, and might never hear of them again... Assuming I don't use them. And I might.

So don't blindfold yourself and work on niches. Work on the big picture, but be sure to make sure your product actually does work for some specific tasks.
Looks like it's a confirmed feature in 2.12 Mono too:

http://www.mono-project.com/Mono_Project_Roadmap
Google Peep View?
NPR Syndrome
Perhaps a few hundred years ago we could read someone's work without knowing who they were. Now we are subject to the cult of the personality - and indeed, seek it out. It's difficult to detach the work from its owner without consciously attempting to do so.

(Having said that I was disappointed to read such public vitriol from RMS, surely he could have found a way to express the sentiment in a more creative manner).
Just like the Justin.tv app, I really wish they would have an iPad app. I wouldn't even care if the interface was just a blown up version of the iPhone's, I just want full-resolution video on my iPad.
Those particular statements referred to some representative economic model, not the experiment in question. In the experiment in question, the model is fully specified by definition.

As far as overfitting goes, that applies when you have a parameterized general model and need to discover the correct parameters. You probably won't get the exact correct parameters; instead, you'll (hopefully) get parameters that approximate reality well.

More closely matching the training data can actually make it a worse approximation in the general case.
Identify verification via Facebook? That doesn't instill much trust.

Where does the authoritative information come from for "Enterprise" and "Whitelabel"?
Can you describe what the contraption looks like? Is it pretty much like the Google Car but a tripod on wheels instead?
RMS is a delightful man (I've had the pleasure of interviewing him at length in person), and his demands are completely in line with his philosophies. His dedication to free and open-source ideals, if impractical, is also inspiring and rare.

Saying he has "a retarded way of dealing with people" is perhaps too general. I myself found him enchanting and enlightening in our interactions. Maybe you just didn't like the way he treated you.
So wallpaper only on the lockscreen? That's disappointing but not surprising, now that I think about it, as the Windows 8 developer preview I tried was the same way.
Let's even accept your implicit contention, which is that Apple is the origin of features used by Android (and ignore all the points to the contrary given by others in this thread). What about Android's millions of satisfied users, who I suppose were, shall we say, taken away from Apple's rightful clutch? To you, do they not constitute prima facie evidence of a competitive landscape that's extremely healthy, forcing Apple to innovate again whilst having given consumers greater choice and cheaper access to paradigmatic phone design?
> The problem with filing the patents personally is that it's expensive to do

You can get a patent for under $1000 and that patent is likely to be worth significantly more to a company whose looking to build their portfolio for defensive measures.

> and astronomically expensive to defend them

Agreed, but I'm sure these individuals had no intention of defending their patents. Unlike trademarks, patents don't become invalidated if the owners fail to go after infringers.

> they have become a May Day parade of tanks used to impress
> the enemy with how powerful you are.

I think an arms race is a better analogy than a parade. Most (though not all) companies pursue patents because they feel they need to in order to avoid annihilation -- not because they want to show off.
Verbose means excessively wordy. I think you mean succinct.
Yes, just like the windows 8 preview.
> For instance, use bindings implicitly generate a try-finally around the code that follows them to ensure that the Dispose method is called on the bound value. This means that no calls following a use binding will be tail calls.

Reading that just kind of made me break out into a cold sweat. I imagine I will be looking at some IL tonight because of this.

I still don't quite get the reason for why try-catch or try-finally blocks cannot have a tail call in them?
If I wanted to build one, what off-the-shelf components would I use (electronics and controller especially)? What pieces of hardware and software would I have to implement?

Bottom line: this is cool, how would I build one in my garage with as little wheel-reinvention as possible?
Vinod Khosla's Five-Second Rule
Something along these lines was predicted 2 years ago. Remember the Google Maps is Scary video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyjms9W8PCc
Famous Logos Designed Entirely in CSS
This is exactly why we need funding sources like Breakout Labs, to fund "science entrepreneurs and inventors" without the overhead of the university/grant system.

Imagine if half the money your web start-up raised paid for the salaries and buildings required to lecture to you about HTML/CSS and then test you on it, for secretaries to handle the paperwork required to beg for money, etc.
We certainly appreciated the efforts you contributed to the v1 version of our API Python library. As we had mentioned to you in our support exchanges, we realized our old Python library was not up to our standards, and that we had been working on a new client library - because this is such a large project with many working pieces, we were keeping it slightly under wraps to allow for flexibility in the release cycle.

That being said, we know many merchants will opt to stay in v1 of our API for some time, and your client library will be very much appreciated.
iPad and Android coming soon!
> Was the example he provided from CPAN?

Man, please, you could at least read the whole thing. I provided the sample, randomly pulled from CPAN and that dude harped on one small extract.

> mixins

Hm, gonna have to admit i have no clue about those. Will read up at some point.

> It depends. If I'm on a modern Linux, sure, if it's not already there I can apt-get it. That's not always the case though.

Perl is on every linux, no exception. It may not be the newest one, but even then you can use perlbrew to install whatever version you want for your own user account. But seriously, perl is on every linux.

And even on windows it's as stupidly simple as downloading an installer and clicking 5 times.

> moose ... boilerplate

You wouldn't include Moose in a boilerplate thing.

> criticism

I work daily with Perl, i've considered MANY criticisms, i have a whole book of criticisms of my own. The problem you're running into is that i've already spent a hell of a lot more time thinking about those criticisms than you have.
It would make sense if they wanted a prototype to possibly compete with Blackberry.
Tipogram - super sweet embeddable and vector interface iIcons
Developing My First Windows 8 App - My Experience
Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
Can anyone think of any ways to collect data on just how big AWS really is? So far it seems like everyone is just trying to infer based on the "other" line of their revenues and anecdotes from the cloud community.
It may not be a common word but the fact that it has such a negavtive meaning is not good for the brand particularly if its a name for the whole lineup and not just one device.
To be absolutely sure it will work.

Recurring billing is a whole separate issue. I've rolled my own before and realized how much of a pain it can become. Using recurly allows all non devs on my team to handle all the subscription and recurring problems without me having to build anything.
We're only using Facebook to pre-fill fields so that users don't need to manually enter their first name, last name, birthday.

All three "levels" use the same dataset to verify the information. We use a third party provider that provides a look up service against a mix of credit and government issue data.

Would love any additional feedback!
You either have a maid or you are a maid. Even some of the maids have maids, go figure.
And while Amazon is stuck with maintaining both computer and physical infrastructure, Google will have effectively offloaded the physical infrastructure to the free market. Not only that, but while Amazon must seek economies of scale and efficiency at every point of the distribution network, Google can leverage the irrationality and inefficiency inherent in a distribution network composed of individual retail outlets. In the same way that eBay doesn't have to worry about packing up and shipping millions of disparate items, it just takes a fee off the top for delivering the sale.

I wonder about the benefits versus the costs to stores. Though you can already walk into a retail store and Google up an item on your phone to see if it's cheaper somewhere else... and you can already search for reviews of an item online, etc. I guess what is interesting here is that Google is delivering the physicality of a store to your screen; so conceivably some walk-ins that might have occurred just to check a place out will now occur online. On the flip side, turning every retail outlet into a 24 hour business has got to have some appeal.

Going really crazy with this, looking ahead to Google's driverless cars getting approval to run without a safety driver on board, you could Store View to your favorite cafe, put in your order for the caffeinated beverage of your choice, have the Google car drop by, the barista puts the drinks in a carrier in the back seat, the car picks up some Chinese food, energy bars, and a pair of earphones for you on the way back, you get a text telling you to go outside to pick everything up, you scan your GoogleID into the car, get your stuff, head back into the office and prepare to code all night. If you are so inclined, you drop a few bucks into the online tip jars of the coffee shop and restaurant. Based on your tip ratio, the star rating of the establishments in question are bumped up ever so slightly.

Google has the computers, cameras, and cars to take over the world of running errands.
Dell had more operating income last year than eBay or Amazon or Adobe.

Michael Dell is worth $15 billion.

I guess we have different measures of success.
Preview words with the fonts installed on your computer
Every model is "wrong", by definition of it being a "model" and not "reality". It's one of the few mind opening things I've learnt at university.

That's not a problem if you take it as an incentive to improve how much you know about the real world. It's a problem when you put the model before the people, and say that "models got us in trouble because of calibration problems".

An economic crisis is not an unavoidable natural disaster, it's people screwing up other people.
"essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" George EP Box - one of the greatest truths imho :)
They were lying.

There are no limits like that because that wouldn't make sense.

I really wish we threw managers like that in jail though. They know they're enough of a roadblock that their denial to help will squash most legitimate complaint, letting them keep most of their stolen money. A 5-8 years sentence for fraud for them and coworkers who aided and abetted this would do wonders to stopping this kind of thing.
He certainly manages to get your attention. I saw him speak many years ago, the room was full of young, passionate enthusiasts and true to form even with his unkempt appearance we were glued to every word. I have no doubt he has been almost entirely responsible for maintaining the high profile nature of free software (for all his complaints about 'open source', the side affect has been to create a rich culture of sharing while producing work you can get paid for).
that's like saying the Beatles are shit and anyone could've written all the songs in Sgt. Pepper.
TLDR: Don't buy a parrot for RMS's sake.
This wasn't clear to me at all from what I saw. I assumed it was just trusting Facebook's data.
For those that want to read more about the "Van Halen and M&Ms" story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581
Use jQuery.animate() to increment / decrement numeric text or an element's value
I think my favorite piece, aside from the parrots, is this: "If the police want information about free software, they are welcome to come to my speech."
* Danger Hiptop, though that's been mentioned in other places.
* My Verizon featurephone had a "Verizon Wireless Store" where you could purchase little apps and games.
* Linux package managers have been doing this for literally years, just not on mobile devices and without GUIs.

I appreciate that Apple's done good work but they built on the shoulders of everyone that came before them.
There was an article recently about how, in a courtroom, a judge held up an iPad and a Samsung tablet and asked the Samsung lawyers to identify which was their tablet, and they couldn't. I think that's a clear indication that Samsung hurtled over the line.

(I'd provide a link but I'm on a flaky connection right now. It was on reddit, and probably on HN as well).
Software Psychology: Narcissistic Interfaces
"Verbose" is definitely the wrong word if he's defending this contract. Not sure I would call it "succict"; maybe "thorough" or "explicit".
What you have to realize is that refactoring is a dangerous concept in Objective-C, regardless of which IDE you use, because of Objective-C dynamic nature. Classes can be loaded or switched at runtime, non-existant methods can be called, and class and methods can be variables. Cleanly refactoring is much easier to achieve in a statically-typed language such as Java, which is why Java IDEs are so much better at automatically refactoring.
For such a specific rule, it must have happened before.

I'd wager somebody once gave him a parrot for breakfast.

"Good morning, sir. Your host ordered you a breakfast of eggs over easy and a parrot we've named Lenny, The Open Source Linux Parrot sponsored by Coke®."
... since you're only returning one element in that array, this should probably be "${$ref}[0]" which returns a scalar only.

It's perfectly fine to use the array sigil, in which case it's a one-element list instead of a scalar. That's useful sometimes.
An allergy to cats and a phobia of dogs seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to list in a rider.
Financial-risk models got us in trouble before the 2008 crash

Is this accurate? I remember reading that all the alarms were going off, they were just ignored or the models were "adjusted".
My funniest memory of Richard Stallman is once he was invited to give the commencement speech at my local university, Lakehead University. He was pretty oblivious to the fact he was at a graduation, and not at any point in his speech did he address the students and their future. All he talked about was free software, how copyright was bad, and that the university should be using free software. Most of the students were pretty pissed off at him because he ruined one of the most significant moments in their life. He didn't even say, congratulations well done on graduating, or even a simple "hello." He only spoke about free software.

I think the video is still up on the university's website somewhere. If you're interested in it, I could try to find it and post it.
>If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution.

As a universal truth, I don't buy this. This is partially based on my own engineering experience, but in terms of the smartphone market I see WP7 (and to a lesser extent Palm) and see touch phone experiences that are significantly different than what Apple developed/evolved with iOS (although it is true that some of the implementation details like pinch-to-zoom are present there as well, but other details are different).

There is no universal axiom that says that a smartphone experience has to look like an iPhone. I think everyone would be better off if Google took more of an independent route rather than just building an experience using bits and pieces of iOS and WP7.
Watch LinuxCon 2011 Europe keynote videos (free)
Any app that wasn't specifically designed for Windows Phone 7 is going to feel really out of place of the platform.
Google disrupted the search market. Sure, the basic idea of searching the web wasn't new, but Google did it so much better than anyone else. Since then, they haven't done anything at all disruptive. They've just been copying other people's products and hoping their huge size will let them win.
I can't figure out how to get inside your store. I feel a bit like I am playing badly-designed video game.

Also, you own a food business!?? I am fascinated by the idea, can you talk more about it?
"I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol. If the network requires a proxy for SSH, I probably can't use it at all."

I wondered if this applied to all net usage or just email, turns out he never uses a web browser, ever. If he needs the contents of a web page, he emails a daemon which wgets the page and emails it back to him: http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
But it won't be $35 3 years ago.
If I produce a second edition, we will publish the HTML online as a proper website.
The Shady Marketing Scheme That's Buying Off Your Favorite Bloggers
If there is something else interesting and unique in this link, please tell me
about it. Maybe I will be interested.
Coding is easy. Herding cats (internal politics of hackers) is hard. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/HURD#Developm...
Hey Sahil, I usually love the design sense in all your products but the lack of contrast on that body text is killing me! I know it looks better that way, Please make it a little more readable!
Macroeconomics resembles a science in exactly two ways: it looks at history, and it makes predictions (or prescribes courses of action; these are equivalent).

Greek mythology resembled a science in those same two ways.
The UI is definitely not enjoyable but I still like the effort and what we have now. It's been a great way to scout places in advance to figure out where I'm going and suitability for renting.
The My Tmobile store was filled with apps and games. and this was 1999 when I first got a phone. The only difference is the name...
Show HN: Thotly - An Anonymized Layer On Your Local Reality
This is more like Firefox going to give up on Google for revenue.
The point of the tail call is to not push an item on the stack frame. That is why tail call is an optimization you can perform when there are no other operations after the tail call. You can jump to the next instruction and be done with it.

But if the tail call is in a try-finally block the "tail call" is not actually the tail. There is more code that needs to be run after the execution of the tail call. The code has to return back from the tail call and execute the finally code.

What you thought was a tail call is actually no longer a tail call at all.
Also, $a is a global variable within the current package, which means that if you don't have to declare it, even if strict is turned on.
Ask HN: Has Anybody Heard Of Inbound Marketing University?
I just found out that Hubspot has a online marketing training program called "Inbound marketing university" (http://inboundmarketing.com/university )and that if you pass their test you get a certification.

Does anybody know if this is legitimate/respectable?

Thanks.
>Are all riders this god damn picky? It wouldn't surprise me. I imagine there is a great amount of antagonism between performers/speakers/etc and the venues.

For certain performers, it's pretty much necessary. Someone else has mentioned Van Halen's "No brown M&M's" clause here, which they used as a quick way to see if every line in the rider has been followed. That's especially important when pyrotechnics or special stage instructions are in the rider, because if the venue is following small details like "no brown M&M's", they're much more likely to follow large safety requirements.
That is a phone - not produced by google. The OS is android, and from this image, you see none of the featureset.
Money.js and the Open Source Exchange Rates API = better currency conversion
But you do remember the talk and you are still willing to promote it, so from his point of view that's mission accomplished.
This is EXACTLY what I would expect from HTC. I had their products before and I got burned this way.

It is one of the reasons I switched to Apple.
I'd definitely like to see that!!