skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, he seems to be mixing up a bunch of stuff here.

His rant about HFT seems misplaced : The market rules allow for robotic trades that whittle the bid-ask spread down to wafer-thin margins. Investors generally benefit from the greater liquidity and lower transaction spreads - compared to the situation before the minimum price increment was set so low.

But he may have a (related) point when he complains that the bid-ask spread is now determined by machines (and is driven to zero) : Previously, stockbroking/marketmaking was a much more cozy operation, since there was a minimum spread that gave the occupation a base-line profitability. That's gone now. What's also been swept away is the research function that market-making (sellside) firms once provided as part of the service. There's less margin trading a single share, so there's much less incentive to try and get clients to trade those shares with you : Much better to get them to trade more exotic products...

Also, regulations have stopped sell-side research people getting paid for the investment banking (money raising) part of the business. Previously, research people would follow a wide universe of stocks, and then use that as a wedge to get the (lucrative) investment banking business for their firm - think of it as salary for stock recommendations, bonus for banking. Now the cross-pollination thing is illegal, and what's basically happened is that any half-decent stock analyst gets hired away from the sellside firm by hedge-funds (where they can get paid doing what they love).

Another element (the regulation FD, and Sarbanes-Oxley) part increase the cost of being a listed company for the companies themselves. RegFD means that they have to tell investors any news simultaneously (on the face of it a good thing, since it makes it clear that inside-information, or front-runnable information/whispers are a no-no). However the way it is implemented makes it a lawyer-infested process to release any information. Walking past a CFO in the street and asking "How's it going?" now results in "You need to speak to my Investor Relations department". And that transition now means that information is less timely and less comprehensive information (since the IR people are incentivized to be cautious, rather than help investors understand the underlying business).

Sarb-Ox was also regulation founded on good intentions : The Board/CEO has to represent that the investor communications are full and fair (my understanding) - with the downside of going to jail. The downsides are two-fold (1) the most secure way of communicating for a CEO is to say "Here are the audited financials, I'm not saying a word more", and (2) the people that this was intended to prevent from scamming the public are largely unaffected (since they live in a world of scamming and lying anyway : what does an extra law against it matter?)

Anyway : The basic (IMHO correct) ideas revolve around the unintended consequences of new regulations [that are almost always devised to tackle the last catastrophe rather than anticipate the next ones]. The rant about HFT seemed out-of-place.
Important information is missing here, you age, gender, and race. (I am not asking you to provide this information, I'm suggesting people see medical advise before arbitrarily starting a supplement)

Your skin's pigment density is an important aspect of how you handle sunlight. Your ability to process these chemicals is a function of all three, lifestyle, and other health factors.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/715417
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D
A nit: Hardware isn't just industrial design. Apple manages to squeeze a lot more performance out of the same components as others, because they do design in an integrated, interdependent way, rather than modular. This gives less flexibility to customize/mix-and-swap, but better performance (for whatever you want to optimize: speed, weight, size, power consumption etc). This was extremely important in the early days of the iPhone, but now that components have improved so dramatically, we are nearing the point where there's performance to spare, and it needn't be optimized.
The upshot is that "iOS on an Android" with the same specs
wouldn't have performed as well. It would have been less smooth, less responsive etc. So that, at least then, hardware was crucial for the experience.

The same was true for the iPod and especially Woz's Apple computer. It's still true for the iPad. I believe it will be true for Apple's next product category, because (hopefully) they'll continue to move to the edge of what is possible - where optimization is absolutely essential to be the first to get over that edge.

tl;dr hardware matters.
"Why use Node.js if you don't want to see the difference between blocking and non-blocking code?"

This is a persistent fallacy in the Node community, but there is nothing that requires a "sleep(1000)" in a language to block all execution in other contexts in that language. That is a weakness of your chosen base language, not an immutable truth. Better languages have been doing this for many years now.

I actually sort of agree with you, but you've got it backwards; if you're going to program in a reasonable paradigm instead of manually chopping your code up to suit a weak language and weak runtime, why not use a language actually meant to do this? "Fibers" (as they are termed here) are the right way to go, but they should be designed in from the beginning, not layered on the fourth or fifth layer of the code. You'll never really be able to get them right up there, because they belong much lower.
That would really be something. Sadly, I think there was barely a sufficient market for a deeply geeky coffee table book on the Mac's creation. I'm sure the market for an even more deeply geeky look at the development of a modern microkernel-based OS is even smaller.
Interesting, I couldn't have disagreed more with the initial choice. I love Linux and appreciate Android, but I drool over iPhone 4/4s and I love my MBP. I'm surprised that people still fawn over OS X as much as they do, frankly. Especially as it becomes increasingly annoying to use as a development machine (at least personally).
Ask HN: Working with GPS Cord to find distance and clusters.
I have been tasked with a rather interesting project, in an area where I don't really have much experience.

I was given the address of 10,000 customers and reverse geocoded (GPS Cordinates) them but now i am interested in finding clusters of customers. I really have no clue how to start other than to visually plot them on google maps api and search visually.

They are all in 1 city so they will be pretty condensed anyway but there will be clusters. How would i go about program-matically finding these clusters. I have done some google searches and nothing has really turned up.

Thanks for any help.
Complex carbohydrates and fiber rich foods won't spike your blood sugar (and subsequently your insulin levels), so you can last for longer without eating more food.
Can you give more technical details, I don't really understand at all how iOS would run worse on a similarly spec'd phone? I can understand how hardware component design would affect the physical build, but I don't see how it makes the processor or memory faster.
Cool that you mentioned Subversion. It looked great but it was a way too ambitious project for the limited resources of Introversion's team. And there was somehow a lack of consistency between the heist concept and the need to have this huge procedural city out there. But they had a bunch of great ideas altogether - maybe worth several games, not only one.
It's pretty clear from the second-to-last paragraph that Gruber understands that Jobs was a fallible human being. The criticisms in this post revolve around Isaacson's handling of technical accuracy, and Isaacson's repeated implication that design and engineering are two adversarial ideas.
What this whole line of stories has forced me to think more about than I had in the past is the question: "Why do these companies even exist? Why'd they even create the app they created?". Take Path ... what's its purpose? Are they developing it because they want to give people a better way of sharing photos with their friends? What's in it for them? Why would they even care? Furthermore, why does that information even matter? Ultimately, the only answer I keep coming back to is that the only reason these companies exist is to collect information, and re-purpose that information in the form of intelligent advertising, or other revenue-generation relationships they have with partner companies that find value in knowing as much about someone as possible in order to generate some portion of their overall revenue by using that information to their advantage. Same goes for FB, or any other social service.

I guess I'm just deflated in that while some aspects of these services enrich my life in some way by exposing me to information I might not otherwise have easy access to ... their primary reason for existence seems misguided from the start. A service built just to advance the quest towards personal or shared wealth feels unnecessarily shallow to me when the ingredients used to generate that wealth are of such a personal nature.
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You are getting it in the reverse order. People who make it to IITs are driven; they do well in every field not just IT. Most Indian coders are in it just for the money, they hardly have concept of basic business or functional concept to do better and the sad part is they don't want to learn. You need to love what you do excel.
And the likelihood that you'll match somebody got a lot smaller. Names have different spellings, phone numbers have different spellings (to say nothing of different numbers), people have multiple emails. You can't canonicalize some of these either.
Starbucks' expansion was interestingly "clumpy". Not surprising, I guess, when you realize they have to deal with the same supply chain issues as anyone else in a similar space. They didn't open a freestanding store in Tulsa until 2002, years after seemingly every other corner in Manhattan had one.
I know quite a few people who run Windows on MacBooks as their primary OS. Of course, the different mac clones that run the OS on generic hardware were pretty successful too (before being shut down by Apple's legal department).
Thoughts On The Correlation Between Academic and Workplace Performance
Occupy the Romantic-Industrial-Complex
The entire article is Gruber hand-picking Jobs quotes that serve his vision of Jobs, and discounting the quotes that Isaacson picked -- or holding them as misunderstandings/misinterpretations -- because they don't conform with Gruber's opinion. Gruber has commented on Isaacson's book numerous times with incredible disdain (because, Gruber thinks, it misrepresents Jobs), so this is just a continuation of that theme.
It would not run worse. The stuttering nature of Android is because of the software architecture decisions that were made early in development. The same is true with iOS. iOS places much higher priority on rendering and handling user input which is why it always appears so smooth.
It's hard to dispute the excellent hardware Apple makes, but quite easy to do that to their software. My MBP dual-boots into Ubuntu so I can actually do my work and the 4S would make a great Android phone, though it still wouldn't be my choice due to its small screen.

What it really comes down to is that their software is too opinionated. At every turn I get frustrated by one inanity or another until I give up and just use something that works without requiring mental contortions on my part.
Solid program! Got to participate in the Lightspeed fellowship during my undergrad at Stanford. The Lightspeed team is fun and extremely helpful. Being our first venture that we tried starting, I think it was the best platform for us to give the start-up world a try. We met some great mentors and peers that we've continued to stay close with.

Would definitely recommend to anyone looking to starting a company in Silicon Valley!

Feel free to email me at richardlo@alumni.stanford.edu if you have any questions
So what? It's an incorrect reading of the intended meaning.
Tokyo's fees are not so expensive for public transportation if you have ever been to other cities in Japan. In fact, it is probably the city where you travel a very long distance with a reasonnable fee, something like 1.5 dollar or so. In other Japan cities for the same distance, the fee can double or triple, so Tokyo is rather cheap in that aspect.

The parking space problem is only solved because everyone is using the train to go to work everyday, mostly. If this were to change, they would face major parking space issues, as the innards of the city are not designed to park a great amount of car. The parking space you mentioned is usually the one you reserve in your building when you get a car, but that does not mean there is space available at your destination.

It is quite inefficient to travel in Tokyo altogether. While not too expensive, it takes a lot of time and in the train you cannot seat most of the time because it is overcrowded. I would not pick Tokyo as an example of a city where things work well - it just works, but it's already over-capacity.
I am the founder of http://theicebreak.com

We have built our app ( Icebreak for Couples - http://itunes.apple.com/app/id476063944 ) using Titanium.

When we started building it, Titanium was very very buggy. It has since improved, but still has a lot of really basic stuff that is broken. Their forums have a lot of questions that have been unanswered for over an year.

Our reason for picking Titanium was basically to have an app that is just like a native app on both iPhone and Android without writing the code twice.

We have found out that porting a Titanium app to Android is taking a ton of effort, lot more than we originally thought. I would be curious to hear what the RAVN team has to say regarding their Android version.

Its just not as cross-platform as we thought :(. I would be extremely careful before picking it in the future.

Basically, if you build native apps:

Native App: iPhone=1X, Android=1X. If you want both Android and iPhone: 2X

Titanium App: iPhone=2X,Porting to Android: 0.7X. Total effort: 2.7X

Native Wins.
Come on now, don't be shy :) If you'd like to share anonymously, shoot me a note at patrick@lightbody.net and I'll repost here.
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Two contradictory thoughts about Apple and Path
anyone know of an open source tool that approximates this? i'd love to build something like it at my company. would be used a ton.
That's a reasonable analogy, but I still think the anger should be directed at apple. The way I see it, it's like I told my friend to watch my sandwich for a minute and I come back and someone else is eating it because my friend had handed it to him. I'm going to be mad at my friend; the other guy took advantage of an opportunity to get a free sandwich, which I can hardly blame him for.
Ask HN: Which is a better anti-virus, AVG or MacAfee?
I need your quick response. Thanks!
One marginal example: Rumor has it that the A5 ARM chip used in the iPhone 4S integrated technology from a company named "Audience" to better handle voice recognition for Siri:

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/06/audiences-earsmart-techn...

As time goes by, I'd expect "third party" SoC vendors to offer their customers an ever wider range of custom silicon, but there will likely always be advantages to being the "first party".
> On the web, Twitter informs its members that it stores contacts for up to 18 months, and may use contact information to make “Who To Follow” suggestions.

Twitter is the only one of these services I use, and when I read that line it took me 5 minutes to decide whether to actually uninstall the Twitter client from my phone. I decided to try to get this bad news from the horse's mouth.

https://twitter.com/privacy contains Twitter's privacy policy. Does it actually say what the article claims?

TL;DR: No.

The number '18' occurs exactly once. It is used in this context:

Log Data: Our servers automatically record information ("Log Data") created by your use of the Services. Log Data may include information such as your IP address, browser type, the referring domain, pages visited, your mobile carrier, device and application IDs, and search terms. Other actions, such as interactions with our website, applications and advertisements, may also be included in Log Data. If we haven’t already deleted the Log Data earlier, we will either delete it or remove any common account identifiers, such as your username, full IP address, or email address, after 18 months.

The word 'contact' appears 5 times, in these contexts:

1. If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@twitter.com.

2. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services or to market to you.

3. If you email us, we may keep your message, email address and contact information to respond to your request.

4. If you become aware that your child has provided us with personal information without your consent, please contact us at privacy@twitter.com.

5. Page footer: © 2012 Twitter About Us Contact Blog Status Resources API Business Help Jobs Terms Privacy

The phrase 'address book' appears once, in this context:

Additional Information: You may provide us with additional information to make public, such as a short biography, your location, or a picture. You may customize your account with information such as a cell phone number for the delivery of SMS messages or your address book so that we can help you find Twitter users you know.
also don't forget v8 stack sizes, this isn't erlang, we don't have super light-weight stacks for coros
I think your criticism is of a matter so small that it can barely be seen. Some self-developmental things to learn that will almost never be obsolete in one year (or ten years:)

- Patterns and ideas in languages that you haven't been exposed to before (e.g. continuations, or pattern matching, or actors, or dependent types, or STM, or...)

- All about time-tested tools and protocols or software or media or files or hardware that you work with or on, of which there is no shortage.

- Interesting data structures and algorithms, and related math.

It all feeds into fundamental problem-solving, you can work in a way such that you are learning it as you go along, and it's more than a lifetime's worth.
What you want to look at is k-means clustering. It's a machine learning technique that will abstract to any number of vectors, but it will handle what you're looking for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering
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Gruber makes multiple references to Jobs' faults in that article. He is simply shredding the quotes that Issacson used without actually thinking about what they meant or checking the facts.

What about this article do you think is Gruber twisting Issacson's words?. Every example has a well documented reason on why Issacson is flat out wrong.
Been using Titanium for a little over a year on an app for our company. By all definitions our app is very simple - a login form, tableviews that drill down two levels and webview.

Our customers like the app and it works great, does exactly what it's supposed to do. iPhone development seems to go pretty smoothly. Debugging is fast. On Android it's a nightmare. The emulator is so slow to launch for one thing. It reminds me of developing a site and then when you're all done, testing it on IE6 and, surprise, nothing works! That's been my experience anyway.
This is what puzzles me the most about Jobs fans, such as Gruber: they think Jobs is a genius who just can't get anything wrong, except... when he picked the person to write his biography.
But it's not about the quotes at all, except insofar as the quotes that Isaacson chose leave the reader with an impression that is simply wrong. The Bill Gates quote about the NeXT acquisition stuck out for me, too.

Are you disagreeing with Gruber's thesis that Isaacson really didn't understand the complementary contributions of software to "design"? Why?

I'm typically not a defender of John's, but he seems to me to be on target here.
It's things like bandwidth between components (EDIT and, in general, "fit" between components, and fit with the end-goal rather than with intermediate interfaces). I don't know Apple's internal design details, but they consistently out-perform competitors with higher specs. A good example is the Transformer Prime (quad-core) performing about the same as the iPad 2 (dual-core) - even though the Prime has a higher clock rate.

I think this is the review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5163/asus-eee-pad-transformer-...
While it's true that Apple has its own SoC, this is built from existing components: it's just that the components are packaged together, instead of distributed across a mobo.
Great contribution replax. Systemically, I follow his argument. Please, allow me to study this topic further. In my gut "something" does not feel right regarding his conclusion.
When movie technology first came out, movie makers used it to film plays. I'm glad they didn't take the approach that they should find the best stage performance of each play, film each one, and turn the collection into the standard movie library, and stop there. Fortunately, they soon discovered that movies didn't have to be limited by the constraints on plays.

So many aspects of college-level courses are bound to the institutional needs of colleges. Courses must be taught to several people simultaneously and in sync, must be delivered in semester/quarter/term-long chunks, must be popular enough to support ongoing employment of local faculty & staff, must be taught in a way that allows for objective grading (so, for example, emphasize grammar rules over pronunciation in foreign language, regardless of actual relative importance, because grammar is easier to score "objectively"),and so on.

Right now, these online courses are still basically movies filming plays. These classroom "plays" are the way they are, because that serves the needs of the institutions producing them.

But the most effective way to learn something personally useful probably isn't going to coincide with maximizing an old institution's needs for prestige, profits, politics, and power. I'd like to see these monolithic "degree credentials" broken down to finer-grained "skill credentials" that are available a la carte from competing sources that optimize their approach differently for each specific skill and for learners with different circumstances, with the learning results validated by independent agencies that only care how much you know, not how you learned it, where you learned it, or how long it took.

The last thing I want is a continuation of the "consistent brand and user experience" of today's universities.
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With Android it's like testing 10 versions of IE6 -- every device/OS combo seems to behave differently.

Android development with Titanium was much easier when I started using a real device, but it's still much slower than iOS development.
Thanks for sharing the link. It's one of the finest things about programming I've read. I enjoyed it a lot.
Honestly curious, what was wrong with it and how do you think it could of been improved? – I really enjoyed it, though admittedly I'm a complete fanboy.
Small bit of work here, but I use up to 11, I have one instance as my command and control that uses a messaging queue to send work to the others that are dynamically added as needed up to the self limit of 10 workers.
I am guessing it is for your company intranet? If you are powering it with nginx, you can tack the postgres add-on (https://github.com/FRiCKLE/ngx_postgres/) and go from there.