skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His review may be a bit hyperbolic, but this is how I predicted people would respond to Siri.

10 years ago there was a big push in commercializing automated ("intelligent") speech recognition systems. AT&T, TellMe and BeVocal were big players in this market during the last tech boom. Naturally, there was a lot of marketing behind these systems. Many claims were made that these intelligent agents would understand you and make common tasks easier.

It was all hype then, and it's all hype now. The dialog management found in Siri is likely based on research that's 10-15 years old - a slot-value style of filling in a form. VoiceXML is an example. It's the bastard spawn of speech recognition and XML, born in the late 1990s. It's woefully underpowered and simplistic, but it works reasonably well if you have good UI designers. Unfortunately, DARPA cut the cord on speech recognition grants in the early 2000s because they considered it a "solved problem." The number of speech dialog research projects fell and the subject has stagnated a bit.

Apple has great design for GUIs and hardware, but VUIs are a different beast altogether. Nuance (which provides the ASR software for Siri) has experience with creating VUIs for large corporations, but I can guarantee you they don't have the end-user ethic that Apple does. I don't think this will affect Apple much, but Siri will likely fall to the wayside like Facetime did.
There's a series of books by David Brin that explore the idea of "uplift", where humans learn how to augment intelligence in certain animals (dolphins, chimps, and gorillas) and then get busy doing so.

In my opinion, "Startide Rising" and "the Uplift War" are the best books in the series.
Should TechCrunch be promoting copyrighted BBC content?
The basic principle is different. Silkscreen reads the PSD directly, so you don't need a second monitor.

Also we've heard that LiveView is crashy on Lion, but I never experienced that.
Scientific Flag-Planting
How should I spend my eBay/PayPal class action lawsuit settlement?
I was going to write a blog post about this, comparing one of those 3 passwords to the lock on your toolshed in your backyard.

Obviously you want to protect your house against break-ins, so you spend money on a great security system. But people would think you were insane if you spent an equivalent amount to lock up your old lawnmower, charcoal grill, and gardening shears.

Google and my bank are my house; those passwords are secure. The password to my MySpace account? If someone discovered it, the biggest annoyance would be finding out which of my friends still have accounts.
What would happen if The Aliens put one of those in orbit around Earth?
In the long run, our sun will age, and could expand to a red giant phase where our planet would become uninhabitable.

Scientists believe this will happen in billions of years, but it could happen tomorrow.
A behind the Scenes My Lead System Pro Review
That alone is definitely a very skewed test of what makes someone an engineer. But the author writes:

"The rest 199 do not understand why a bitcount of 1's complement of bitwise XOR of two variables would give you the number of similar bits in corresponding positions in both variables, why one can not create a regular expression to match only strings with balanced parentheses, or how to find the shortest chain of connections between two friends in a tiny social network. Note that I have used 'or' as the conjunction and not 'and'."

If I understood it correctly, anyone who knows at least one of those three problems passes your hypothetical test. This is not very skewed IMHO. If someone doesn't understand either one or two of those things, he may be a good engineer. But do you think any programmer worth his title would not know all three of those?
Easier technic to preview a PSD on iOS: Open an additional view for your file (Window -> Arrange -> New Window) and place it one the side. Download the free tool 'LivePreview' http://www.zambetti.com/projects/liveview/ and place its window on top of your cloned Photoshop view. Open your iOS device, install the 'LivePreview' app and connect to your machine. Wolla - a live preview!
> Their plugin for Chrome is just sort of ugly and clunky (Chrome's fault).

How is it Chrome's fault? It looks like pickled ass on every browser I've installed it on as a plugin, and it looks like ass as the iPhone app.
Paper: Capability leaks in Android phones
Right -- the first thing I did after reading a few paragraphs was load a complex web page and try scrolling it -- it continues to render just fine (on a single core iPhone 4). I've got a very old iPod Touch which does seem to lock up page draw when I scroll.

I think that the simple answer is that there's no simple answer -- which is what the earlier post was pretty much saying.
I was also wondering why he or she was reluctant to do this. Maybe the decks are already printed? If not, I don't think toning down the name and the marketing would take too much from the essence of the product.
Honestly, this mostly feels like someone who's miffed they were snubbed by Gowallans.
I'm surprised it took them this long. The whole company stinks to high heaven.
Having lived with the "best friends" of humans (cats and dogs) for many years, I am no longer sure what "sentience" is because I find the difference between us and them in everything to be a matter of degree.

We're _better_ at being 'sentient' than they are, but I can't find anything that we do that they don't. I'm serious here. You totally hit the nail on the head when you talk about anger and empathy.

They can learn, they can feel, they can teach their offspring, they can empathize, they can demonstrate their emotional and physical needs, and they can communicate both with us and amongst themselves. They know right from wrong (keeping in mind that in reality there are no moral absolutes and right and wrong very much relative concepts even to humans, and even on what we consider to be an axiomatic basis).

What's left? I honestly would like to know.
Notepad Business Card
LiveView is free and you see your edits live without having to press Cmd+S.
When is it alright to make money selling information?
The man on the school board is drawing the wrong conclusions.

His role today is one of management, and he has no need for anything beyond basic maths. However, there would have been a time when mastery of things technical meant a promotion, or an opportunity to supervise younger graduates. I know of many brilliant managers who no longer have their technical chops.

For all we may know, his degrees may be in Biology and Marine Science. It means that his profession would be one that doesn't have to worry about differential equations, or chemical reactions, or American History.

However, there is an interesting point whether too much irrelevant material is taught at school. I hear this in universities too, that professors keep adding material to the curriculum. I don't have an answer for that. I think schools focus too much on abstract thinking, and too little on effectual thinking.
What the post doesn't mention- devices that are unable to upgrade. As the iOS product line matures there are going to be increasing numbers of devices left behind and unable to upgrade to the latest OS. Not the majority of course, but it's something to bear in mind.

Also, why automatically target the latest and greatest? The app I'm working on doesn't use any 5.0-specific features and I would imagine that a ton of apps are the same. Develop for iOS 5.0 when you're using a feature it provides.
Short Stories - A 14 year Old Short Story Sensation Publishes On Kindle
As entertaining as this is, I'm fairly certain that impersonating a GCHQ worker could land you in some serious hot water....
How I Maxed Out My Dropbox Referral Bonus Space With AdWords (Spending Just $5)
Opera already does this with Opera Link.

http://my.opera.com/operalink/blog/2011/05/03/security-of-sy...
Skipping the "Global Warming" argument all together the Earth very much in a cold spell in the palaeontological sense[0]. It has been much, much warmer for very long periods of time and really only slightly colder. We're far closer to another ice age than we are to the long term average temperature of the planet, let alone its normal maximum temperature. Generally, the warmer periods have given rise to large ecological growth. Maybe human's won't like it, but consider the amount of diversity that would exist with a near rain forest climate across nearly the entire earth.

Note: the horizontal scale is VERY awkward
[0]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/All...
I think the same, it seems that text is too small. Also I don't like 'generic engineer Charlie' vs 'teamworking python engineer Anthony' - no info in this particular part of graphic, just noise taking up half of a box. I'm not sure if those pie charts are a good idea either - it seems that they are rather discouraged (there was a post on HN few months ago discussing it), and making them half-a-pie-charts make them even more confusing.
Boys Over Flowers
I agree. It's difficult for me to understand how people work without being able to do fermi calculations.

And this is speaking as someone who is absolutely terrible at mental math.
? what's your point, so there's a file that it stores on your hard drive. That's obvious. The passwords in that file are still cyphertext encrypted with your master password. Using "strings" doesn't give you anything that you can use to log in.

You need to pick a good password, but there's only 1 to remember (hence the name).

Did they store them in actual, real plaintext at one point? If so, that's not how it works now.
Fair enough, I haven't tried Android on a more recent device so my experience is certainly out of date. But when there are this many people saying there's a problem, surely it would make sense - especially for a fundamentally data-driven company like Google - to do some user studies and quantify it? I haven't heard of any such studies though; do you (or anyone else) know of any?
Dermalog
If you're wrong in that train of thought, that makes two of us. I just landed my 2nd new job this year, and both new jobs were in .Net development(the first one was a 6-month consulting gig that just ended last week). I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
Planet mass is usually a parameter that we have, even though it does not influence the position of the habitable zone (so Mars is out).

The simplest calculation does not involve an atmosphere and just looks at radiative balance from black body radiation and is probably the kind of calculation they're talking about in the article. For getting the real temperature many parameters play a role and most are not available, so they just use a first guess for the habitable zone.

An atmosphere will change this radiation balance, with absorptive gases and aerosols blocking radiation (both in- and outgoing) and by distributing the heat more evenly. Atmospheres can be detected if the planet's orbit is good, and it is possible to get an idea about the composition (mainly water, methane and CO2 so far), as well as see changes which are probably due to weather. The method used is to look at the center star's light that travelled through the atmosphere of the planet when it traverses; it's also possible to look at the atmosphere's reflection when the planet is almost behind the star. I can go find some spectra if you're interested.

Another important parameter in the equations is albedo ("ability to reflect radiation"). Warmth left from the planet's creation and radioactive decay as well as gravitational effects from other bodies (eg the effect Jupiter has on it's moons) are the other possible energy sources. Geological activity of bigger planets could lead to aurora and allow detection that way, but the instrumentation is not up for that yet..

In our solar system, some moons are considered candidates for life, being covered with a thick layer of ice and possibly containing water underneath and they're not in what is considered the habitable zone of the system. The concept is more of a guideline at this point, really, and also only looks at water (arguably the best candidate for life, but not the only one).

</rant>
In case you want more information about anything in particular I can find some papers or overviews.
There are big assumptions. Preference for lag or artifacts is subjective (for example, the checkerboard drives me nuts; I prefer occasional shutter). Users will chalk up the checkerboard to device too, as they never seen anything similar on any other device.
Things tend to look like that when you take the most damning possible statement out of tens of thousands of documents that you received in discovery!
Most of these people (and I'm probably in the demographic, though I haven't yet made the leap to VoIP-only) probably would prefer to "stick to e-mail". But the world still forces us to have telephones. Why should we be forced to pay for voice plans we rarely (and grudgingly) use, and subsidize all you bluetooth-adorned yackers in the process?
Oh, I understand all of this well.

I just think it is totally, absolutely and completely wrong.

I think that the "risk-averse" nature of corporate IT doesn't serve business, it holds it back.

Things like "custom ERP extensions" are excuses. If a business builds it's own software, then it should expect to maintain it.

(WRT the anti-virus thing: yes, I understand this. I also know how this really works in 95% of businesses - the vendor sends a new virus definition file, and IT rolls it out to the business when they get in the next day. In another 4.9% of businesses someone will load the definitions on a SOE desktop, check it reboots and then roll it out. It is only in that 0.1% of businesses (if that!) where IT actually adds any value to the virus definition rollout process at all. In all other cases they remove value by holding back updates until that are run through the "IT process")
I can do the former, but the latter seems to be broken at present. Might be because I'm in using a dev build with multiple flags enabled ATM though.
What is obvious to you is not obvious to everyone on HN. And by the way what conclusion would you come to if the domain was registered 3 months or 3 years ago?
Apple and Their Quirky Design Decisions
Motivational Speaker
Bank of America SMS doesn't work with GV numbers. I know .. I've tried it multiple times :(
I'm a medical doctor and I'll never forget what one of our respected (and elderly) liver specialists said when asked what he would do regarding a patient with a liver cancer with a particularly poor prognosis. During a roundtable discussion, various younger doctors came up with lengthy suggestions and lots of different chemotherapy regimens, tests, etc. When it was this doctor's turn to speak, he said: "Well, if I were to put myself in that man's shoes, I would go to the store, buy a case of fine liquor and drink myself happy for the next few weeks until I'm gone."

He had seen enough "therapies" to know enough when to forgo them.
U.S. Agents Launder Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels
Do you delete all your e-mails or do you leave your work e-mails on your work machine? If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company. An e-mail that goes out to more than one person is virtually guaranteed to be around years later where it might haunt you.
Television is one market where I hope Apple shakes things up.

Right now TV is a mess. DVRs are a band-aid to a broken system. Having a HTPC is nice, but it is too complicated.

If Apple could do to TV what it did to music, it would be great. Though I think content providers will be more skeptical after seeing what iTunes did to the music industry.

I find it hard to believe anybody would be willing to pay 2x for an Apple television set though. I think they are going to have to be cost competitive.
You're right in general but starting in iOS4:

"Drawing to a graphics context in UIKit is now thread-safe."
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/General...

Some things won't work (notably UIWebView which also gets used in UITextView) but you actually can build a view in a NSOperation.
I think the hinting on this font is broken in Chrome for some reason.
I'm surprised it took this long for a law firm to jump on this. This looks like a big payday for a few sharks and pennies for us.
I use rails a lot and I don't know much about the methodology used, but some of my non-rails coworkers have said that they view a lot of rails guys as prima donnas. The DHH "fuck you" slide and Zed Shaw's massive flameout probably contribute to that perception too.

Given that another big influence was ability to be a team-player then I can see how ruby guys are perceived lower on the list.
Vitiligo Treatments...
You learn language by listening to others. If a lot of your friends say "thingie" in regular conversation, you will too. It's how language adapts and evolves.

Remember, language is just a more refined form of making random noises. (Also, think about how easy it is to remember the lyrics songs you've listened to over and over again. The imitation part of your brain is very strong.)
addPtr : Address (size : Nat) -> (x : Fin size) -> Address (size - x)

(the :: above should have been a single colon)
Reads as:

"addPtr" is a value of the following type:

Function from two args: "Address (size : Nat)" and "(x : Fin size)" to result "Address (size - x)"

"Address (size : Nat)" is the "Address" type applied to one Natural number parameter named "size" (indicating the allocation size the value of that Address points at).

(x : Fin size) means it takes an "x" of type "Fin size". The "Fin param" type is a type that can hold a natural number 0..param-1. The resulting Address has a smaller size it points at.
You can't run IE6 on a modern version of Windows. You can run it in a VM, which is Microsoft's "approved" approach (they provide old version of browsers for this kind of thing)

Most people don't understand the "old IE6 app" issue - it actually applies to a very, very small number of apps. It isn't that these apps don't display in other browsers because of bad HTML - it is because they use weird IE6 only technologies. Microsoft came up with some very strange things over the years (look at Data Islands: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms76...), and fixing these apps isn't just HTML tweaking. Of course, if you still have a Data Island app around these days your IT department should be fired...
Silkscreen reads the PSD directly, so you don't need a second monitor.

Also we support previewing iOS Home Screen icons on a fake Home Screen.
I tend to not bookmark such comments, in fact they tend to get flagged and buried. There is no easy way to search for them either.

Except for this thread (not saying it qualifies, but it probably does in your estimation), can you point to other posts were women were being "monstered" for no reason? Although candidates for those are easier to search for because they have the word "female" in the title. Incidentally all the posts I remember that deal with women in IT are written by women.
Yes. The 2,000 decks are already printed. I have sold 300 decks. But that's one-on-one and word-of-mouth. And the reason I have come up with this proposition is because, I know when people play this game they will like it.
We've GOT to get public key cryptography in the hands of the masses. My current favorite strategy is to get them all using some distributed social network that uses PK and also integrates with everything, but I don't know how feasible it is.

Any other ideas?
What is this bullshit? Looking for a job? Convince me you know what you're talking about. Show me something I didn't know and convince me it's worth knowing. Demonstrate you know big 'O' notation (and maybe tell me how little 'o' and \omega are different). Draw me a binary search tree. Show me how a skip list works. Fill in a multithreaded producer / consumer skeleton and get it correct, then make it fast. Explain how UTF-8 works from first principles (i.e. what's wrong with ASCII? How would you fix it? Now how do you optimise the answer?)

I don't give a crap if you know $TRENDY_WEB_LANG. We don't write anything in either Python or Ruby, and likely never will.
What is the difference between criticizing a group and being prejudiced towards a group?

There is a difference.
http://www.mothersdaycelebration.com/mother-in-different-lan...

" The slight smacking movement of the lips made in uttering an m-sound is similar to the lip movement required to suck a nipple."

http://www.billcasselman.com/wording_room/mother.htm
Customers are not entitled to updates unconditionally.

The missing ability to cut a new paid version of the same app is an oddity of the iOS App Store. Some app versions should have limited free upgrade lives. You should feel dirty upgrading from GoodReader 2010 to GoodReader 2012 without contributing to the extra years of development.

Apple could add the feature, but they would have to stop blatant abuses (like AdBlock saying there's a new version every day). A simple version EOL of 12 months with a 6-week-back free upgrade period would be sufficient. In the Updates tab, your [Update] button gets replaced with a [Purchase Latest Version] button. Problem solved.
I don't know what to make of this. I see no actual data (or even a link to it). I don't know if they corrected for other variables and having "python" on your LI profile is predictive or just correlative.

I think I have actually lost knowledge instead of gaining it after reading this infographic.
While I agree with the statement that lighter is not equivalent to deadlier, it's a straw man to compare a 50 year old car (That doesn't even have seatbelts!) against a modern car. The trivial come-back is "think of how safe a car we could make with modern engineering if it weighed as much as a '59 bel-air"
How to Discover Your Passion
HERE THE BEST SHORT STORIES
I came here to post this myself.

Language is an adaptive system: a term emerges with some small skerrick of insight, is rapidly applied to everything, is diluted and then loses its semantic potency. Then it happens again with a new term.
Except that all UI stuff is done in the applications main thread ...
I was using the new theme in beta for months just fine without issue until they recently launched the new design. IMO, the left navigation is the worst part of the new design, which was not present in the old beta theme. Everyone says it's possible, but I still can't figure out how to show all my labels. I also have Google Docs in my left menu, but that is now hidden in a secondary menu (the ellipsis). This means that I can't simultaneously access my gtalk and gdocs list. I have the screen real estate for it—why is it modal?!
> they don't report streaming data

What do you mean? How did you arrive at this conclusion?

Whether they are obligated to "report streaming data" is up to their contract, not ethics.
My spouse is also a doctor, and she also went through a life threatening illness. For several days her odds were poor, but full recovery was one of the options. She pulled it through and was lucky. We have had this conversation as well, and her answer is unequivocal: do let me go.
20 years after we get stats showing that auto-driving vehicles are safer than human-driven ones. Though from what some pilots tell me, we could move to unmanned planes within a few years, and keep pilots as essentially babysitters.