skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eric Schmidt takes it seriously.

> In relation to Apple as a competitor, Schmidt calls Siri a “significant development” and that its effectiveness as a search tool somewhat blindsided Google. http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/m0ywx/googles_er...

BTW: competition is part and parcel of business, always has been, always will be. I personally don't like it either - and it certainly doesn't "gratify one's intellectual curiosity." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Actually, there's very little on HN these days that does. Most of it is
"startup news and industry gossip". That's important for YC companies, but not intellectually interesting - if you want that, you've better off reading new scientist, r/technology, the weekend section of financial newspapers, theatlantic etc.

I propose two HN front pages: one for startup news; one for intellectual curiosity, with flag-like links + vote thresholds for moving a story to the other one. (yes, HN was once "Startup News")
Is there a tl;dr on this? Can't they just cut to the chase?We eat whatever tastes the best. That'w what we buy.

Oh, got it here: buy grade B syrup - forget grade A:

"So if you happen to relish the taste of maple syrup, you may want to find a bottle of Grade B while you still can. Once the inferior grade is removed from the label, the rarest, most flavorful syrup will likely command at least as dear a price as its blander and more abundant cousins."
Yeah, there's no way it stays under two watts per hour if a drive (spindle or solid state) and wifi are running.
Do you (and anyone else on this thread isolating Facebook to prevent tracking) do the same for Google?
Long run, one wants happy users to donate sales/marketing effort with recommendations, and pay for development of new features.

I'd MUCH rather be paid to produce new features than fix bugs.
I do think there will be much more prostitution in the future, especially in the so-called developed countries, especially among otherwise/former middle class people. Partly because of the inhibition-lowering effects of the Internet, partly because of the greater communication and market-making opportunities enabled by the Internet, and partly because of the increased economic pressure put on otherwise working class people caused by globalization, and again, by the Internet. In short, a greater percentage of people will choose to, or perhaps feel are forced to, engage in sexual acts in exchange for money. Even if just "webcam entertainment". I'm betting it will happen anyway.
Ridley Scott Says He'll Direct 'Blade Runner' Sequel
WP blog 1
I agree! It's interesting to see that our country suffered from the issue of competing with cheap labor at the beginning of its life.
SPJ (Sense of Proportion & Judgement)
Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose 'competitive threat'
Looking for Tech/Programmer= Co-founder 
i have a great idea for a startup,already have business plan, and know how to market it, all i need a great programmer/designer/tech person who is open minded. Anyone located by the silicon valley or could get to the silicon valley e-mail me, i do see potential in my idea so let me know. The programmer has potential to be a co-founder. thedivon123@gmail.com
A nice web,u will get lot cheap but good things
Instead, you can boot off a USB or SATA drive and do whatever you want. http://tonido.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=3625
Is it really that complicated? Just forget am/pm and think 24h:

10 + 5 = 15
10h - 15 = 19h previous day

Or alternatively, fire up http://www.wolframalpha.com/ and type "10am UTC+10 in UTC-5", problem solved.

The thing is you'd have the same problem if the whole world was on the same clock. It would be even more difficult since we'd lose all time references we have (noon, midnight...)
Prolog?
Kiwi Discount Club
Arguing about 'regulation' with no context or means to evaluate them doesn't get us very far.

Regulations that enhance and encourage fair competition should be supported. Regulations that reduce competition or hinder commerce should not be supported.

There is always concern for negative externalities and this is an area where regulations can have a role.
There are no real Turing-complete languages, as Turing-completeness requires infinite hardware. And certainly there are degrees of incompleteness, expressed by which programs run out of memory faster.
Thoughts on beta invite sign up forms
Check out http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox for an easy NAS/file sharing setup
"sixteen hundred" is how they say it in the US military.

Living in a country that uses the 24h system, you just say "four" or "4 o'clock", the time of day is understood from context 90% of the time. The other 10% you just add "in the morning" or "in the afternoon", or "16 hours".
list.remove() returns None. So it is a mistake to bind its return value to allbut2.

It follows the convention that methods that modify their object inplace should return None. list.pop() is an obvious exception.

You create a new list via list comprehension instead of copying and then removing:

even = [i for i in L if i % 2 == 0] # remove odd numbers
my guess, is you'll drag an image/text/file towards the dropbox button and it'll automatically save that
Grade B is definitely superior. You can get some pretty good stuff at your local Trader Joe's. About the only place I consistently find Grade B maple syrup, w/o going specialty.
This is accurate regardless of language features. You can't control 3rd party code. Using generic object names greatly increases the odds that at some point you're going to run into a namespace collision and something important will be overwritten. Proper object namespacing your objects vastly decreases the odds of this happening with benign 3rd party scripts, no additional language features required.
I always wondered why Trader Joe's and Whole Foods sold a "Grade B" product. Now I know why.
> Then 256 colours makes up for some of the things you'd use the copper for; the rest, the CPU power will sort out. A byte-per-pixel framebuffer memory layout makes easy what would be a thorough pain on the Amiga

That's simply not true.

Take e.g. Doom II from your list; In order to have double buffering (required for smooth screen update), it had to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X which is .. a planar mode even if it is 1-byte per pixel (in a slightly nicer way than the Amiga's planar mode; but switching planes cost an arm and a leg in I/O communication, so to actually work efficiently with it, it was as bad as the Amiga's planar mode).

> If you have raw CPU power, that fixes everything. You don't need a blitter, and you don't need sprites, and you don't need playfields, and you can do your sound mixing on the CPU.

I remember one (1) reasonable multi-level parallax scrolling game for the PC with reasonable performance, but not its name. (I remember it well, because I spent a few afternoons with a debugger trying to figure out how the f*ck they managed). CPU was NOT enough to not need all of these.

Almost all the games you mentioned have a 3D point of view (those that I'm familiar with, anyway) - for which the Amiga's '85 2D acceleration wasn't helpful, of course. But the 2D games of the PC, especially scrollers, were inferior.

Non of them, as far as I can tell, had 3d sound or multi channel stereo mixing in 1995 -- PC mod players back then were struggling to go below 30% CPU (I know, I wrote one of the fastest ones), and no game could afford them.

I released a sideways scroller for the PC in '94, that achieved constant 60fps (with not a lot of CPU to spare) on the 486DX of the time, and a respectable 30fps on the 386 that were still super common. To get that, I needed to use ModeX, used Adlib for music so I can use DMA sample playing for the effects (also, pure adlib was _still_ common enough to warrant support if you didn't have a soundblaster). It needed an awful lot of tricks to get reasonable performance; The graphics engine was all assembly, and some of the game logic too. And I needed continuously recalibrating the int8 timer to get interrupts at the vertical retrace so that everything worked properly without wasting CPU.

I never got to do an Amiga version, but it would have been 100 times simpler. And would have worked equally well on an 1985 Amiga 1000.
Ask HN: Is objective-C really used anymore?
Looking through the top charts on the app store (most of which are games), it seems that most apps were not made in objective-C. In order to keep up with the competition, is knowledge of objective-C still sufficient for iPhone development? What other frameworks should be considered necessary?
Thank you 10gen+contributors for giving us the first USABLE ALTERNATIVE to the classic SQL world.
You're gonna get a lot of crap, because it takes a good programmer to write good client code for MongoDB. [I'm not suggesting that everybody who reports problems with MongoDB is an inferior programmer, so don't downvote me bro!]
(I'm looking forward to getting rid of the global-write-lock issue, and I'm sure you are already working on that.)
No offense, but you appear to be acting deliberately obtuse. I am not denigrating the role of developers.

In most cases engineer #1 is the founding CTO and has commensurate equity. The first hired developer, like the first hired sales guy, marketing guy or customer service guy, is the first person in an eventual team of people, all performing similar duties in parallel.
Ahh makes sense. Thanks for the info :)
How to SEO
Search ENgine Optimization
The single thing I would say Java is missing, from the perspective of a beginner, is the ability to change code while running it. Eval and Exec are useful functions, and there is no way to replicate them in Java.

Lists in Java are an unholy pain that redefine cruelty in an entirely new way. You can't make a list, to the best of my knowledge, that accepts arbitrary inputs. Does the utter lack of a slice operator count for the addition of multiple lines of code to replace what is normally three or four characters?

Please, tell me how. This is an honest question. I have been learning Java since school started, and I miss my functional techniques.
Something else that's interesting is reversing a list but not in place: x[::-1]

The built-in reverse() method will do it in place.
Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose 'competitive threat'

Br'er Rabbit pleads, "but do please, Brer Fox, don't fling me in dat brier-patch
Holy mother of creation. Why don't you submit it yourself? I'd like to see 10gen's reaction to this.
I use DuckDuckGo: http://donttrack.us/
Suggestion: could you change the "connection error" javascript dialog into something that doesn't block the page, e.g. a growl notification? My connection is spotty and I get that box a couple of times, rather disruptive.
11/12 season top quality new Werder Bremen away orange soccer jersey
Enjoy your shopping of wholesale Bremen Football Club Jersey, discounted Werder Bremen Soccer Clothing, cheap 2011/2012 Werder Bremen Soccer Uniform and other nice Bremen Jersey from China
Grade B is also what you use when you want to flavor beer.

Trader Joes sells B in wine bottles that do the job well.
I was so happy when I saved up enough money to buy an Indus floppy drive. It was heaven compared to the damn 410. I still cannot believe how much typing I did on the Atari 400's keyboard.

I miss Antic and Creative Computing.
Why would the server have to be at home? Why would it not be enough for everyone to have e.g. their own EC2 microinstance?
I'm not sure this really explains how the price came to be that way?
7 Stones: Rabbit replacement breakdown
Out of curiosity, did any Atari computer owners on HN, have the Action! Programming language cartridge?
As a startup in the adult space I know there are lots of opportunities in adult...especially since the industry is going through a huge transition. As much as people love to say how porn brings innovation, that's not the case anymore. In the beginning it was way too easy for many of these porn sites to make money. Basically you just had to stick up a thumbnail gallery and a payment page and money would come in.

However, now as free porn is prolific on the internet many of these webmasters don't know what to do... so not that much innovation going on. If you can bring in good tech people there's no doubt they could kick butt. That's what we're trying to do, but just being in adult makes people look at you funny. Something that comes with the territory.
It's now DrRacket. DrRacket is pretty much like emacs with only 1 configuration. I use it a lot
Closures don't need to take parameters to be useful, but you're missing the point.

There is a simple, unambiguous rule -- () calls, no-() references. In order to... what? save two keystrokes? -- you have added a strange corner case, and then tacked on a new bit of punctuation for partial application. Though now it seems you're adding the rule that functions without parameters can't be referenced.

This takes a simple yes-or-no rule and adds edge cases for no reason. Two keystrokes on the occasional parameterless function call is not a real savings, and you've just made it harder for someone reading the code to spot all the function calls.

This fundamentally makes no sense. Why would this be a good idea?
Missing Person - Tracy Williams, Technorati Employee
I saw this on Twitter and thought perhaps the HN community could help. My heart goes out to her family and colleagues.
We have built almost our entire warehouse/fulfillment infrastructure on a number of FitPC2 boxes, which also draw about 5-7W with solid-state disks.
Google Maps: Captures Aeroplane
Labor concerns, market speculation & the markets failure to self-regulate. Sounds rather familiar...
Chandler's Thriving Arts Scene
I get and agree with the basic premise, but I think the upside down map example would be much improved by an illustration.
I must strongly disagree with this. Learning functional programming was one of the best things I ever did. It gave me a huge advantage when tackling certain problems, which helps me to this day. At my current workplace people call me in to help when they have tricky problems because they are aware I have a different skillset.

I started out in 'scripting' languages, and I can even say that learning Java, in a group with some very skilled OO gurus, was a mind-expanding experience.

I have even seen it happen, en masse, at a company which was composed of various language partisans uniting under one roof. After exposure to each others' ways, I think we all become better programmers for it.
Doesn't really matter that they don't speak for everyone if they are the gatekeepers.
I saw this on Twitter and thought perhaps HN could help get the word out, particularly around downtown San Francisco where she was last seen. My thoughts and prayers go out to her, her family and her colleagues.
How To Empower Your Communication
I have not! If this is a document that says "you'd better be doing 95% of these things, because Google does 100%", you should definitely say that more clearly!
Actually, to be fair, the $233 price is for a prior edition--the latest edition "only" costs $192 (and $154 on Kindle):
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Gregory-Mankiw/...
PHP Learn It - CEH - Saher Team
Guilty as charged.

We saw and liked fiverr, but we didn't want to do just a clone site of it since we felt they had the market pretty cornered. We'd just be a "me too" player. Looking around we realized there wasn't a good system similiar to fiverr for adult. That's when we decided to test it and see if there was a market. We've been surprised.

Pornification has been going for some time, it just hasn't been well publicized (since mainstream tech news doesn't really cover porn unless there's something crazy going on). Youtube / youporn is a great example of one. In addition the site gamecrush.com is very similar to the adult webcams sites that are up. They added the twist where models can't be nude and they play video games with customers.
That attitude is why we have so many crypto bugs. Crypto is (usually) software, and no software works 100% of the time.
Indian actor mammootty
Pfft, all Google need to do is update Google Voice search on Android to more-or-less clone Siri functionality. Or alternatively they could integrate Siri functionality directly into Google.com search as a kind of contextual search feature where Google has a conversation with you to refine your search.

The winner in this game won't necessarily be the one with the best features, but the one with the most input/searches. i.e. more people use Google voice than do Siri, and so Google has more existing and incoming data to help improve the algorithm to make the "perfect" Siri.
Fetchnotes Wants to Be the API to Your Brain
yum install postgresql-server

service postgresql initdb

service postgresql start

sudo -u postgres psql .....

postgres=#.....

If all you are doing is writing code, that's sufficient on an rpm based platform. On Debian, use apt-get instead. On Windows use the 1 click installer.

PostgreSQL comes with a default user and a default database, so the criticism on this thread is a bit..... incorrect.

Now it is true you have to set up a system user if you are compiling PostgreSQL from source. However, that's really optional in most cases unless the code you are writing is, well, a patch to PostgreSQL.......
Before your jump into your code, grep it and change every instance of [:] into list or copy know that it isn't that easy. Most Python projects will use all four common variations of copying a list or object. Here they are with benchmark times[1]:

b = a[:] 0.039ms
b = list(a) 0.085ms
b = copy(a) 0.187ms
b = deepcopy(a) 10.592ms

First method for short lists, eg. function or system args, where you know you have a list. The Python manual suggests this method when copying a sequence as the fastest/best method[2]

The type constructor list will convert any sequence into a list and will preserve order. If you pass it a list, all it does is return the sequence using the slice operator anyway[3]. It is slower because of the type checking, but it is implemented in C. So you can think of list() as just [:] with a type cast - no need to call it again if you know you have a list.

copy and deepcopy are implemented in python, and are generic functions that attempt to sniff the type of the object to be copied. They will use the __copy__ magic[4] of the object if it exists, so you can override it in your objects with return self[:]. You need to use these if you have a generator, a list of non-basic types (such as lists of lists, or lists of tuples, or lists of objects). Both functions use a module-level cache and deepcopy will iterate and apply copy

there is very little performance degradation by aliasing copy to deepcopy and using it everywhere, although it could save you time by catching bugs. (Edit: scratch that, I got my benchmark wrong - deepcopy will still be slow even if you pass it a shallow list, see comment below, thanks tedunangst)

Read the source of copy and deepcopy so you can understand them and can implement your own custom version for more advanced types. Find the file:

>>> import copy
>>> copy.__file__
/usr/local/python/2.6/lib/copy.pyc

Each of these methods has its own use case, if you grep through a well implemented project such as Werkzeug[5] you can find how each is used efficiently. For eg. [:] is used when you know you have a list, such as template variables. list() is used to force into a list, eg. before these vars get to other objects and copy() is used on custom data types, making a copy of environ (which can contain almost anything) and in copying the routing table (which can not be trusted to be a list).

[1] Benchmark times taken from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2612802/how-to-clone-a-li... which I had bookmarked as a reference

[2] http://docs.python.org/faq/programming.html#how-do-i-copy-an...

[3] http://docs.python.org/faq/programming.html#how-do-i-convert...

[4] http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus7/html/page85.html

[5] https://github.com/mitsuhiko/werkzeug
Agreed. It's bad math. Even if they gave away something every now and then, it definitely does not explain 100% off. They would have to give away everything and make money some other way (say shipping) - which could be plausible, but I don't see it explained here.
CapitalOne Bank taken down by Anonymous hackers
Weird. It was my experience when looking at people to just assume a Math major who could code was do just as well as a CompSci degree.
Not Russel Crowe - please not Russel Crowe
One reason Moose rocks for Perl is it gives you the ability to get some stronger type checking in the dynamically typed language.

So yes, I think dynamic typing can lead to debugging nightmares. It just so happens that often the fact that other factors make up for this in many cases.....
You can't say just looking at b[:] that its creates a copy unless you know its type e.g., if `b` is a numpy array then it doesn't copy the data and by changing b[i] you change a[i].

list(a), copy.copy(a) are more explicit.
Forgive me, but I feel like I am coming in the middle of a convo here.

What does this thing do?

They say it's like a pocket NAS that you can move anywhere and anybody can easily share files like Dropbox, but then it only comes with 512MB storage? So I am very confused.

Can someone explain in simple terms, what this does and why I (as a Dropbox user) might be interested.

Thanks.
Great - going to get the new version. That is much better
Yes, but then Android would be so slow that it would also be user-proof.
list(x) is also used for converting a sequence x to a list.
x[:] is actually more explicit because it only means 'copy x'.
So sales produces a prospectus that suggests this is a bad investment.

The prospectus presumably described the security being sold as long on housing. If housing went up, it would have increased in value. Since housing went down, it decreased.

The security did what it was supposed to do. The fact that the people who bought it made an incorrect bet doesn't make the people selling it evil.
I'm working using ML in the casino industry. I use multiple forms of classification and forecasting.
That's a blatant lie.

In light of the recent monopoly hearings in the Senate, Mr. Schmidt is clearly trying to persuade Senators that Google is weak and vulnerable. But Google published findings that show that in natural language processing, it's really the quantity [1] that determines quality. Note in particular the discussion of "stupid backoff" (a smoothing/interpolation technique), which relies on the raw quantity of data. Who has a copy of the Internet's treasure-trove of text in its data centers?

Ultimately, NLP is something that's Google's to win if it truly desired. I'm not sure what powers Siri directly, but large data is Google's answer, and it's much more effective than Mr. Schmidt would make you believe.

[1] Large Language Models in Machine Translation: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/D/D07/D07-1090.pdf
Node Cluster? http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cluster.html

Is it me or does this look like the early makings of an erlangish otp, eh?
It's important to note that Google has an incentive in this case to make it look like there is significant competition; the senators were investigating whether Google is a monopoly.
5 Tips to Healthy Eating For Children
Stick a External USB Drive or connect a internal SATA 2.5 drive into the bay first. http://www.tonidoplug.com/screenshots.html#galleria/img/toni...

Then you have access to all the files in those drives via the web browser or via iPhone/Android apps.

You also can sync your files to this plug device by installing a client software on other computers (much like dropbox) but your are files are always private and never stored on the cloud.