skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Safari-based iOS "shortcuts" for quick WiFi toggle, Airplane Mode, more
Yeah, but in the article they talk about the Octopus, which is a real card instead of a phone, as an NFC device.
Former Google head chef recalls 'humble,' fashionably late Steve Jobs
I'm curious what you think is wrong with the app. Most people I know seem to really like the email app and they brought a similar design to their Mac desktop app.
"you can get a small 3bdroom house for $300-$350K in a very safe area"

I'm curious where that is? In my area, the only house I saw for sale in that price range was a 1 bedroom house literally behind a strip joint.
And it's not pedantic to assume that history won't repeat itself simply because you're blinded by euphoria and hype? I'm not saying that history always repeats itself, but the human nature that causes boom and bust cycles doesn't change.
Kindle Fire is ‘just’ a big iPod touch
Ashley Isham, Jakarta Fashion Week 2012
This is crazy, the CPU is under the RAM chip (step 9). Is this kind of layout frequent? I guess you can't have a high power (and high heat dissipation)...
This should be say "free for itunes". You can't download the videos if you don't have iTunes in your computer. It is a no deal for Linux users.
yup. very misleading. they took a suggestion that MBAs take the time while in school to "get more technical" and turned it completely around. typical media bullshit
Isn't the color Nook OMAP based? And as I recall, the Galaxy Tab has a Hummingbird.

I think we're talking past each other a bit. I know that Freescale has some newish parts that they are marketing for tablets. I saw one of their reference designs at a conference recently too. But as far as I know, no one has shipped a device intended to directly compete with the iPad (which is what a "tablet" seems to be basically understood as these days) based on a Freescale SoC. So it doesn't exactly seem to me that Freescale is losing share in that area - rather, that they have not yet broken into that particular market at all. What I was trying to say is that historically the i.MX have been lower end parts that were designed into different kinds of applications, and as far as I know, they are still doing OK in those markets. (The current generation of e-ink Kindles do have i.MX SoCs, for one thing.)

Incidentally my understanding is that the Kindle Fire was done by the same ODM as the Blackberry Playbook and that they're fairly similar in terms of the component selection. Makes sense that the ODM would go with parts they're familiar with.
"When I shuffled the cards this afternoon, and came up with the order you see in the picture, that is one of 8.0658X1067 different possible orders that cards can be in. However, in the past 700 years since playing cards were invented, cards have been shuffled less than 1.546X1023 times. So the chances that one of those times they got shuffled into the same exact order you see here are less than 1 in 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (1 in 1044)." I'm too tired to do the math but isn't this wrong?

As in, is it taking the birthday paradox into account?
Megan Fox on Broadway - Actress Talks About Stage Fright
I disagree that the paper is obsolete. References and pointers abound in nearly every popular modern programming language [C, C++, Java, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby, EcmaScript, etc.] and in fact are the defining feature of all OO languages. Operator overloading is only possible in a small fraction of popular modern programming languages. Fast compilation is not even a focus of most popular modern programming languages. Type inference and automatic coercion, declaration, and defaults are in vogue in most programming languages. Also, programming languages are increasingly large and complex. Compiler optimization is likewise a hot-spot topic, as are gotos/jumping and global and out of block variable definitions.

It would seem to me that if his hints and assumptions are correct that language designers may have inhibited the growth of programming; though a programmer that knows her/his language of choice can and does take advantage of all of the inefficiencies described in this paper.

I'm really beginning to realize that the functional languages probably have it right: single value assignment; recursive function execution; compact, readable code; monads; guards; readable case statements; and narrow interfaces seem to satisfy a lot of what he recommends. Most OO languages definitely do not, although I love the expressiveness I have learned to achieve by exploiting their nuances.
This is not a hack, this is just bad character encoding handling on the website.
The problem is the 3.0 median. At my law school, where most people majored in social sciences at places like Berkeley, Michigan, etc, 3.0 is a bottom of the barrel GPA in terms of getting admitted. I think the median is like 3.8. Our peer law schools won't even take someone with below a 3.2-3.3 or so. Meanwhile, 3.3 was a great GPA at the engineering department at Georgia Tech when I was there.

You can complain about grade inflation, etc, but at the end of the day you're telling that 18 year old kid: "don't even try to major in engineering, because even if you keep up with your highly qualified peers you'll still kill any shot you might have had at a non-engineering graduate program."
Scala doesn't have great native libraries for this but otherwise I've found it a very good language for basic ML stuff. You can express the algorithms very succinctly and readably but still get good performance.
> You should play System Shock 2 some time, or Deus Ex.

Indeed, it's not like these are getting any less fun. If anything, it's getting easier to rediscover the classics since the likelihood that they will work under Wine is increasing.
That was my first thought when reading the article. There's probably a correlation between high IQ and college attendance, just as there's probably a correlation between college attendance and drug use.
Plus you get to hang out with Andy Van Dam http://www.cs.brown.edu/~avd/
The parent comment was actually talking about charge cards, not check cards. Those predate debit cards and credit cards. With those, you agree to pay your bill in full every month, so they are not tied to a line of revolving credit like a credit card, nor do they directly debit from a bank account like a debit card.

They are rare these days as they usually charge a significant annual fee. This is probably since there are no over-limit fees nor usurious interest rates (unlike a credit card).
tldr; John Gruber endorses iOS.
I don't want to under-estimate the importance of movable type...but what has Gruber developed? Looking at the list at http://daringfireball.net/projects/ doesn't exactly fill me with shock and awe. I'd imagine with his huge following in the apple community he could put almost anything on the app store and it would sell. Can someone enlighten me? I guess my meta-point is, why am I reading software development career advice from someone who doesn't seem to be a developer?
Nah, EE's dont. They get divorced theory and math most of the first few years. When we do actually get to build circuits early on, they are to mintutiae-focused on some slew-rate characteristics of an op-amp at a given frequency rather than systemic perspective thinking that is needed in the real world with real applications. To much focus on analysis, nowhere near enough on synthesis. A modern EE education is geared toward training autistic, perspective-deprived drones.
What I Learned Meeting with the Founder of Siri
Unitech Crestview
Perhaps, not certainly, but is that a drawback?

A mortgage is essentially a huge long-term bet, renting is a smaller, shorter term bet. The owner is betting that everything lines up nicely: the value of his property stays put or rises, nothing bad unexpectedly happens to the property, undesirable people don't move in around it, a whole-sector bubble doesn't pop. As a renter, there is no commitment: if the house is outdated you can move to a newer one with far less hassle; you don't have to worry about cost of maintenance; if you move during a bubble you can move once again when the bubble pops and pay less. The owner may end up with a property in 20 years if everything goes well, but a renter will never be underwater.
That was a brilliant MP game. But have you ever had the satisfaction of strapping a bunch of c4 to the front of a jeep and driving into a group of enemies and or tank? (BF2...ahhh memories)
I don't think that analogy really works because there is not much distinction between "Apple developers" and other developers. There is no barrier to start developing on Apple platforms and there probably won't be for the next big platform. Low barrier to entry is one key factor of a platform's success.
Clipboard Reinvents Copy-and-Paste for the Web
I actually signed up for SendWrite before, but didn't really want to spend money on sending letters from the internet.

However, I've now donated $5 because of the selfless thing they are doing. Thanks to everyone at SendWrite for doing this, hopefully it will help!
Anyone rooted the Fire yet? Ssh into it?
This is also a retort to those who try to say that a universe that supports human life is too unlikely to happen without a creator.

Ignoring the sovereign debt sized hole in the creationist's argument, made obvious by the question "who/what created the creator", my shuffling of a deck of card also results in an almost infinitely unlikely configuration. Despite this, shuffling a deck of card does not make me a god and is quite possible to do without divine intervention.
"One simple way to look at it is that there are far more people who've never bought an iPhone and who've never bought an iPad, who will in the next five years than all of us who've already bought at least one to this point."

That's one simple way to look at it. Another slightly less simple way is that the ones that already have Apple devices are the savviest, hippest, and spendiest consumers around, and you can't possibly hope to milk as much money per person from the ones that adopt later.
He's a pundit, but he's really close with all of the influential developers in the community. He's more in tune with the Apple community than perhaps any one other person, and his track record of being right is unmatched in the last several years.
According to the guidelines hacker news is..."Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Funnily the guidelines also mention this: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."
Depends on how you look at the business : Foursquare's users are the retailers, its product is the people checking in.
I was comparing that distribution to the schools I've been a student and taught at (Virginia Tech, William and Mary) in CS. It seemed on par. Then the point is not about Berkeley, but all engineering departments.
Gruber is a writer who covers Apple stuff first, and a developer only when he has an itch to scratch.

Just the same, though, Markdown is a pretty big deal. It's the de facto standard for content markup. I wouldn't call John Gruber a nobody.
It would be interesting to know, why being an Apple developer is favourable to being any other type of a developer? For example, android market share is already larger than Apple devices, and people still spend lots of time in front of traditional web browsers.

You can still make fortunes and/or have an interesting career with other platforms and technologies too.
>This is like being a Rock and roll musician in the late sixties. This is like being a film maker in the seventies following Scorsese, Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (when he was a saint).

That's a hilarious sell. Better not mention the bigger, even faster growing Android market.
By that logic, it's a much better time to be an Android developer as long as you support 2.2 and up.

You bring the dynamite, I'll bring the pickaxe & canary, let's gold rush!
I share an office with the VM Farms team, and I can confirm that this setup works even better than you'd expect. Not having to organize how you sit and face the monitor that's running Skype (or whatever) is quite convenient.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3241304
Wow: Intel unveils 1 teraflop chip with 50-plus cores
He is referring to the probability that this specific shuffling has come up before, not the probability that there have ever been two shuffles with the same result (which is where the birthday paradox comes into account).
This might be true of Apple, but it is definitely true of both the software industry and theoretical CS. The industry is expanding--computers are getting cheaper and more plentiful so we need more and more software. Since we also have more computational power in our hands, we can do more and more interesting things with computers.

Theoretical computer science is also in an exciting time--it is a nascent field with many exciting discoveries and inventions to be made even without gigantic budgets. I think it's something like physics in the early 20th century, before they started needing gigantic particle accelerators and the like (I'm sure physics is still exciting and I'm just showing my ignorance, but I think there's a parallel nonetheless).

Right now is a perfect time to be a developer or computer scientist anywhere, not just at Apple.
My Views on Corporations & Taxes
Do you also like job postings looking for "rock stars" and "ninjas"?
This is a five year old post. These days Python is probably the way to go with NumPy, SciPy, Theano, IPython, matplotlib, Cython, etc. I'm also really looking forward to PyPy's NumPy support -- should allow you to write in pure Python code but still get most of the optimization benefits of writing in a statically typed compiled language like C++.
I installed Windows as dual boot on a friends Mac.
It's far easier than installing it on a windows PC.
Put in the windows disk and follow the Apple instructions - it includes all the drivers and even gave advice about sharing files
.
Vapor Pro 2 Iphone 4 / 4s for Sale on Ebay
Google TV 2.0: With apps and more, it’s finally ready for a close-up (review)
hmm, who are the influential developers in the iOS community?
How many pundits are developers? How many have co-created markup languages?

Gruber's technical abilities and his keen understanding of how Apple works give him more bonafides than most of the people writing tech columns in the field today.
In all seriousness: some folks on HN (not all) seem to be the guard in the center of the panopticon.

If you could see a list of who downvoted you, I'd bet that something interesting would happen.

I almost expect to come back and see my karma drop as a result of this comment.
In a word: Gruber. His bias towards Apple is unmatched.
Show HN: Word Chain Solver (in Ruby)
If you write software for a big company then that piece of software could impact the lives of millions of people.
There are quite a few recent games in that vein: the Serious Sam series, Bulletstorm, and (most recently) Hard Reset (http://hardresetgame.com/). People still make them, but their appeal is limited; while I could happily thrash that years ago, circle-strafing around hordes of enemies is just as stale to me now as the current Modern Warfare-esque FPS (sadly).
it was just barely on the Santa Clara side of Lawrence expressway (but not very far so) there's a highschool right there (willcox high? yeah. the place was about a block north of that.) go a few blocks further north (or, rather, a few blocks towards 101) and you get to the Lawrence caltrain station, which isn't a nice area, but isn't scary (I once lived in an apartment across the street from the Lawrence caltrain.) It was an older place, of course, and looked very suburban. I think it was closer to $350 than $300 but I'm certain it wasn't above $350 (We didn't look at anything that had an asking price higher than $350)

It wasn't big; just under a thousand squarefeet, if I remember right, not counting the garage or the shed. 3bdr, 2 bathrooms; one of the bathrooms was an un-permitted conversion of a closet. (oh man. so many houses in this area have been badly converted to hold more people than was originally intended.)

The roof was in fairly okay shape; it seemed structurally pretty good. It badly needed new carpet, appliances and paint inside and out.

When was last time you looked? Things are bad right now, I mean, if you are trying to sell; I looked at rather a large number of houses over a period of a few months (we stopped looking, oh, two or three months ago) nearly all the properties we looked at were either short-sales or bank owned. Most of the places we looked at? last sold for close to 2x the current asking price.

But yeah, there seemed to be plenty of livable stuff in the Sunnyvale area for under $350K, and it gets cheaper as you get closer to San Jose.

This wasn't the cheapest thing we looked at, but most of the cheaper single family homes had more significant problems like a roof that should have been replaced five years ago.

There was a very small 2 bedroom house on America over near arques and central expressway in sunnyvale. Well under $250 if I remember right, but it needed way more work than I wanted to put in. (incidentally, it also had a poorly-done bathroom addition; this one opening to outside. at least it was enclosed.)

I could go on for hours about all the poorly-done bathroom additions we saw. At one house, someone just took a toilet and plumbed it in to the corner of their enclosed back patio. They also had a completely free-standing shower insert plumbed in to the same area.

but yeah; in that price range you see a lot of stuff that needs a whole lot of work, but you will also find a few places that are livable with new carpets.
Key question: is it possible to fail upwards deliberately or is it just a matter of luck?
tldr; Develop for the App Store and you could be famous and make loads of money like <insert cultural icon>, or don't and you might just regret your entire life.
There's a lot of talk here on how credit cards trump every other form of payment, on credit lines and rewards. Americans love their cards:

* 1.4 billion credit cards held by U.S. consumers

* Average credit card debt per household with credit card debt: $15,799

* Total U.S. consumer debt: 800 billion (down from ~1 trillion in 2008)

Yeap, look at that debt, credit cards are amazing.

Let me put my f___ the system hat:

1. $2 trillion in transactions per year.

2. Merchants pay between 2-4% in fees for every transaction

Many people seem to forget about the second - "I'm not paying any fees" :/.

That means around $40 billion in fees per year. A few billion short of the national budget for the US Department of Education. I really, really doubt it's costing all this money to send and track (mostly virtual) money around. And we haven't taken into account the late fees (around $20b/year), overcharge fees, annual fees, banking fees and others.

Credit cards are just money harvesting machines.

Why exactly do we need a third-party to handle our payments? Banks own our data and most of the infrastructure. Electronic payments should be part of the basic account package. "Reward" cards are just another marketing gimmick to get you to use more cards.

/hat off

Cutting myself short, I'm extremely excited with what Dwolla/Square and others are doing. It's 2011, I want to make payments with my eyes!
What sort of programming. I've enjoyed the minigame competitions: http://minigamecompo.weebly.com/ this year's seems quite light on entries so far.
An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide to Ext2/3 File system
That is indeed lutorm's point.

But the shuffling model used in the Diaconis and Bayer paper that the reply referred to (the "7 shuffles to randomize" result) takes that into account. In particular, the shuffling model gives reasonably high probability to "imperfect" riffle shuffles that take several cards from the left pile and then several cards from the right pile.

This model is on the first page of the paper

http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?vi...

Basically, you split the cards at random, and then you draw sequentially at random from the two piles with probability L/(L+R) versus R/(L+R) (where L is the number of cards remaining in the left pile), to assemble the new deck. This will allow shuffle sequences that take a run from the left and then a run from the right.

As people above have noted, of course the "randomization" of the deck is not perfect after 7 shuffles. But for lots of Markov processes, including this one, the distance of the shuffled deck to the uniform distribution on all decks tends to zero exponentially fast. So you get a quick change-over from "not random at all" to "very random". See table 3 of the paper.

Persi Diaconis (http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/), to whom this result is partly due, is a legend in mathematical probability. How many math professors are bona fide magicians?
A week ago, Jack Baty, also having been allured by static site generation hotness, switched back to Wordpress after it took 8 minutes to regenerate his Jekyll blog with over 1,600 posts. "Life's too short."

http://jackbaty.com/2011/10/new-blogging-hotness/

At the moment, Jekyll (via Octopress) is more interesting/educational to me than plugging away at familiar Wordpress, so I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
No, this is one fixed example : Akin to someone in the room having exactly your own birthday.

The birthday paradox is the observation that it's much more likely than you'd think that two people in a room share a birthday - which is equivalent to two decks ever having been shuffled into the same order anywhere.

It doesn't make much sense to calculate out that probability on the figures used in the article, since the author has purposefully over-estimated the number of shuffles ever made.
Your comment rests on the assumption that the savviest ones are also the spendiest ones, which most would probably disagree with.
You haven't made a deductive argument yet. In fact you've made no argument at all. If you think you have, please do point it out, as I've seen nothing but a series of questions trying to pin down what I think and not a one making an actual argument as to what you think and why it must be. Other than your original statement which was an assertion, not an argument for why it must be true.

Your tactic appears to be an attempt to bait me into making an argument that you can dismantle without actually making your own case hoping that I don't notice you haven't actually made your case. I'm not biting. I don't need to explain the presence of the universe to say that claiming gods did it isn't logical nor do I need to provide a counter argument. If you believe gods did it, you must make that case; you haven't.
Gruber is like a person who really enjoys eating cupcakes. He knows all about cupcakes, and even goes so far as to think he knows how to make them. He's probably baked a few things here and there. Sadly, he also thinks his 'expertise' on all things cupcakes makes him an all round bonafide chef.
I should probably clarify why I think the analogy works; It's an exciting time, it's changing rapidly, there's a lot of opportunity and developers are garnering a lot of focus from a lot of different areas.
Is this feasible? Is it something you can control, or is this largely controlled by the content authors choose to put into their books?

Also, just a bit of advice - not having competitors can be bad. It could indicate that you're trying to build a company in a market which can't exist because it's just not viable.
Someone who calls themselves an Apple developer and who doesn't work for Apple needs to consider expanding their horizons. Mobile developer? That's a little better. Or just, developer. It's a great time to be a developer.
Iran: Duqu virus has been aimed at its nuclear sites