skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think so -- there were other places doing this, too. The most interesting "in the wild" use of wearable computing was of course from UC Santa Cruz -- the Eudaemons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons) who built a roulette-defeating computer. Apparently Claude Shannon and Edward Thorp built something similar in 1960 too.

I worked for Steve Mann (I was an undergrad research assistant; more a learning experience than actually doing anything useful beyond sysadminning), who mainly did "painting with light" and other digital photography things, using his WearComp platform as a tool (he'd been developing it since the early 1980s). He also wore a 5W radio transmitter on his head (to get 56Kbps data back in the late 1990s). He's now at U of Toronto. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann)

Thad Starner (now at GA Tech) and Lenny Foner were probably doing the most useful general wearable computing work at the time. There were one-handed chording keyboards ("HandyKey Twiddler", the new version is http://www.handykey.com/), PC104 based embedded computers (now you'd just use a cellphone), and probably the top display device was from MicroOptics -- there was another headmount display which was cheaper but not as good, and it fully occluded one eye. Stuff ran linux, and it wasn't too hard to bring up QVGA X11 or an 80x24 console.

The thing I wanted to build, given the tech at the time, was a purely auditory wearable computer. Even in 2012, displays are kind of inadequate, but we have had viable portable audio sources (headphones) for decades. Combine that with sensors and some kind of ubiquitous camera (either mounted on the person, or just using environmental cameras as inputs), and you could do something pretty good.
Look around in any industry you want. How would you define competition, if nothing but very similar products to the original product of that type in that particular market?

This video describes very well how inventions get created and then evolve for the benefit of everyone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg
Yes they are: bayesian neural networks can model stochastic logic gates, and are used for pattern recognition.
Multi-touch technologies have a long history
Install WordPress on Linux in 5 Seconds
Pre-iPhone, they were also demoing devices that did not look quite so much like Blackberry clones:

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...
This is why native Windows is so impractical. No normalization. Before you know it, your disk is full and the server is down.
The Small Business Accelerator Entrepreneur Boot Camp | MY EDUCTION
The difference between lucky people and unlucky ones is that the lucky ones were able to recognize opportunity better. I've seen some research on this, but don't have a link handy.
Thanks for posting my article. Quick update, someone did more benchmarks with different versions of Ruby and adding MongoMapper: https://gist.github.com/1894055
> Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple

That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM).

Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface. I'm not even sure that's a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.
From a marketing and CRM perspective, the messages are identical: "Here is a simple and cheap routine maintenance behavior that will prevent a catastrophic repair bill: X".

In the ICE case, X is "maintain a minimum oil level while the engine is running." In the Tesla case, it's "maintain a minimum battery level, even during storage."

Given that the underlying drivetrain technologies actually are worlds-of-difference apart from each other, that strikes me as a pretty minimal difference in terms of routine maintenance. Unless it's somehow difficult to understand or costly to implement, we should assume Tesla customers aren't f'ing morons and go about our business.
Inbound.org: How To Build A Passionate Online Community – with Rand Fishkin
I have heard of this before and was rather excited to see further developments. But am I reading this right? The stochastic processor is 70x slower than a conventional processor. The only reason they achieve 3x faster is due to "parallel" processing? The details are vague, but does the speedup have anything to do with the fact that the processor is non-deterministic?
Taking the hassle out of organising group events
www.groupiser.com, the group organiser, allows you to vote on WHAT you want to do, WHERE you want to do it and WHEN you want to do it... Take a look, let us know your thoughts and spread the word through a Tweet or a Like! Easily organise your events and share those memories in a private space. It's organising made social!
I've been driving for 6 years now and I have never ran out of gas. Is this really so uncommon that you can safely say that at some point or another most of us have run out of gas?

I keep an eye on my odometer and on the gas gauge and know when it is time to get gas. My car doesn't have a low fuel light warning so paying attention is definitely required.
> Goofing around in Erlang

FTFY ;) but seriously, why is Erlang any different than Lisp?
You can't reproduce a dev/staging environment with the same traffic pattern, user behavior, and request load as to a production environment. Google bots won't crawl your dev/staging environment and you won't know its impact until you see it. DDOS attack won't happen in your dev/staging environment. Click fault won't happen on dev/staging.

Developers probably shouldn't have root privilege on production but they need to have read access at the very least. They also should have write and deployment privilege on a few production machines for testing and experiment. Whatever mess they made there should be counted under acceptable loss.
November 2007 isn't exactly pre-iPhone?
I agree with both of your examples, but the post being responded to involved the replacement of programmers. Until we can come up with a conveniently numeric way of specifying, analyzing, and solving computational problems in the general case, I don't think I need to fear being replaced.

Now, a lot of modern webdev, on the other hand...

nextBigThing = WebBizFactory.createNewSite(ecommerceSingelton.getInstance().createNewMerchantAccount(), socialMediaFlywheel.getInstance().createSocialAdaptor(SocialAdapter.TWITTER), AWS.getInstance().getKVStoreFlavorOfWeek());
Very similar to "The secret to Raising Smart Kids" from Scientifc America in 2007, bookmarked, but seems behind a pay wall now:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...
I agree. Apple had a lot of great ideas for their phone, and sooner or later someone would've copied them to be able to compete in the same type of market, and then build on that platform. In turn Apple ended up copying some of the later ideas from their competitors, too.

It's how progress happens. Too bad people are so quick to blame others with "stealing" when this happens.
Sounds like you're putting the cart before the horse. How are you identifying 'the very best' but by their successes? The argument is that you need both to 'succeed'. So, sure, if you only look at the ones that were both hard-working/relentless/growth-oriented AND lucky, then boy howdy does it look like luck isn't a factor.
Show HN: Connect Twitter & Facebook through sharing
People attribute almost everything to luck to feel better about their own lack of success. Luck plays a minor role. Intelligence and tenacity are much more important. If luck was the main factor nearly all successful programmers would come from China or India since they have the most entrants in the "lottery" for successful programmers.
Well Remember ...

Apple "advocates" always said: apple invented the gui, apple invented mp3 players, apple makes the fastest PC, apple's not the "big brother" company, etc. etc. Every claim usually turns out false. The Rep for "reality distortion field" has firm basis in trugth.

We can't always take Apple's claims at face value. This article just exposed, once again, another pro-Apple fallacy: that they own mini-tablet-phones and everyone stole the idea from them.

nonsense.
Or even just having big clear warnings in the manuals, and then pointing to those warnings when this comes up.
Blah blah. Trotting out this tired old chestnut again? Yes, things might have been very different. If they'd done it early enough, Apple could have been a tired, clueless license-humper like Microsoft. They could have won the market share wars and never produced another great product. Or, since Microsoft would have done their copycat anyway, they might have lost the market share wars and still never produced a great product. Not an alternative history I want to live in.
I chuckled at the obvious satire. However, I have heard of 'sysadmins' that are complaining with less humour in their voices. The 'pure sysadmin' role is alive and strong. Those being forced out by devops are either not very good or the organization's culture is at odds with what a true sysadmin is expected to do for them.

Also, in before, "Lol, Windows admin". I cringed when I saw a registry reference.
I preferred the hummingbird :( Maybe we need to sign a petition to bring it back.

Great software though, I purchased it back when it was $29.99 and I'm glad I did it makes making HTML5 animations extremely easy.
Question: are users still limited to following 5K people on Google+?

Also, to have a person in your "creepers" circle, you necessarily need to 'follow' them on Google+. Is this not a poor design choice?
True, but independent contractors like this are a target market just like any other. Look at any successful software developer in the US and you'll find that they pay a couple of hundred to one or two thousand in SaaS services each year.
> We're talking November 12 2007

iPhone was announced January 2007 and released June 2007. That's hardly pre-iPhone.
They're doing fine these days!

(we got Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they got Detroit and Pittsburgh... fair trade)
Ask HN: VOIP suggestions for e-commerce site?
We're an e-commerce company with a small-sized call center looking to replace our traditional Nortel PBX phone system with a VOIP solution.

I was wondering if anyone had any positive experiences with certain companies or any key features/issues to watch out for. Ideally we'd like to integrate it with our order management system via an API too.

Any suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated!
Google+ = G+
The Proust index
Why publishers should give away ebooks
This is an instance of the Fence Fallacy:

http://minx.cc/?post=320257
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People don’t care about scoops, they care about trust
Klout: Soon Your Online Reputation May be More Important Than Money
> That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone.

Which phones?
LinkedIn is Disrupting the Corporate Recruiting Market
Show HN: WHOIS for Facebook
If your admins don't understand the code and crash things - that's an organizational problem that can be corrected.

Giving developers admin access isn't the answer.

I've seen both sides - where admins didn't undersatnd the environment well enough or the application in it and broke it, and where developers didn't understand the system well enough and pushed out code releases that broke things. Neither situation should exist if things are set up correctly.

Things should be automated and documented. You need systems knowledge as part of your development process.... it's not enough just to throw a PHP guy at something..... everything needs to be architected in a way everyone understands.

Several very important standards require that developers do not have access to production (PCI comes to mind if I'm not mistaken).
Art formed by carving books with surgical tools
So does that mean that you've done a survey of all the companies in your portfolio, and classified them by whether they are interested in IPO or acquisition (or no liquidity event at all)? And then have you attached a current valuation to each of these companies - what's that valuation based on in the absence of a liquidity event?

Can you share the % splits? Would be a really interesting (and yet still anonymous) snapshot of the portfolio companies' intents in the aggregate...
Indeed. Remember the Palm Pilot? Those things eventually ended up quite advanced; I remember buying one in Japan in 2002 with a camera, keyboard, swiveling screen, and so on. The only difference was that it didn't have a 3G radio.

Ah, here we are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg

The iPhone is a fine product. The ground it broke was making people want a PDA, not actually inventing the PDA.
My takeaway is that the Tesla Roadster is a very expensive toy at this point. There are some electric charging stations now at my work (I can only assume they would work with the Roadster, haven't look into it), but it really sounds to me like the early adopters are going to be paying out the nose for electric for a few more years.

I have a Civic Hyprid, which is pretty underwhelming, but functions pretty much like a regular car. If I don't end up giving it to my step-daughter, I almost assuredly will keep it until the more efficient electric vehicles are as reliable.
Plus those large companies have a major challenge of not only trying to keep those innovative employees that they acquire, but to keep those employees innovating within a very different environment. There is a serious lack of managers in the world that can pull this off.

The moment the golden handcuffs are off, there will be flight back to creating a startup in most instances. This means that the big companies can only remain competitive by throwing money at the problem.
I-banker here. I deal with similar situations on fairly regular basis.

Couple of tips:

- NDA is useless. Sign it but don't expect them to adhere to it. Even if they don't, it's extremely difficult to prove a breach (they likely won't be disclosing it to others anyway, just using it against you).

- Ask them how they plan to price your assets - is it based on your financials, your technology, your customers, etc. This may disqualify them right away: e.g. they tell you is that they only look for revenue growth while you think your technology is the most important part of the company.

- Have them give you a formal presentation on their company and where they see your firm fitting in. This really serves 3 purposes:
a) allows you to see how they are approaching the market and whether they've thought this through or if it's a fly-by. If this is a random "let's see if we can buy this cheap" situation, they'll likely be reluctant to spend quality time with you;
b) you will learn what their pain points are, which will give you leverage later, if the acquisition progresses;
c) probably most important, you will spend time together and will start to get a sense on whether you can trust them. Establishing a beginning of a professional relationship goes a long way for you (e.g. sometimes you just know if the other person is a charlatan or if they are a straight shooter) and for them (they start developing a level of trust and are not as suspicious you'll trick THEM)

- after the initial meeting, share your concerns and ask them for suggestions on what they would do if they were in your shoes

There's more, feel free to reach out to me directly if you'd like.
IAmA Angel Investor, Entrepreneur, Accelerator Founder AMA
The author points a finger at police for leering over an attractive woman's photos -- then needlessly posts bikini photos.

The photos add no substantive content to the story; they're just there for gawking at.

The ostensible point of this article is that the law enforcement database should be more tightly controlled. But there's a more basic point that is missed: if you're going to wag a finger at a bunch of photo-gawkers, you shouldn't simultaneously encourage (and profit from) such gawking.
Austin Sarner Interview - Designing and Developing for the Mac
The fake chemical compound Isaac Asimov invented to punk science writers
I don't agree with this. Lets flip it the other way round and compare it with technology today. Lots of research labs have made AR Goggles and they've been featured in lots of movies / sci-fi. But lets say the google goggles are a hit and Apple starts making goggles, I believe Google can rightfully claim that Apple "copied" them.
Arguing that closures are great because they let you replace for loops is like saying the iPhone is great because it has a better texting interface than a Nokia 3310: it's entirely missing the point.

What makes closures is that it opens up a whole new way of coding. Two things specifically make this possible: that they can be treated as data[1], and that they can capture local variables.

Closures is, for example, what makes the entire premise of OS X's Grand Central Dispatch framework possible. You can create a closure, and seamlessly execute it in a background thread, on a different core. You can build complex queues and dependencies of operations and use all cores in parallel, while keeping a very simple interface to the whole system.

Here's an example pulled from my toying around in Ruby, trying to implement a machine learning algorithm.

thetas = gradient_descent 0.1, 10 do |theta0, theta1|
J theta0, theta1, training_set
end

This code uses a gradient_descent function, and passes it a closure to find the values of theta0 and theta1 which minimize the function. It will automatically figure out how many arguments to minimize, based on the closure's `arity`. The closure captures the `training_set` variable and uses the arguments to call cost function `J`. This would not have been possible, or nearly as easy, without closures. Peruse the entire <60lines code at [2].

Closures open up a whole new world of possibilities.

[1]: Most languages cannot serialize a closure, though. Lisp is pretty unique there.
[2]: https://gist.github.com/48a7006e138460b65173
@shingen, Your profile says nothing about you, yet I have this urge to know more. You have an email or something?

mine is username + gmail.
The description on the page reminded me about how nervous systems might compute. Neural firing is stochastic on small time scales. People fight over whether the fine timing between spikes is important for computation, but largely it seems rates of firing are important.

But, we know that the nervous system has coincidence detectors - basically AND gates for spikes.

This article got me excited because I never thought of coincidence detectors as performing multiplication - an operation very hard to thing about in neural circuitry terms.
Apple "advocates" rarely, if ever, say those things.

Apple made the GUI, MP3 players, etc. usable for the general public.
Breaking news: Men look at pretty woman's photo!
Why is it that fully discharging a Li ion battery ruins it for all time? I have experienced this with my MacBook too. Closed it at 1% and forgot about it for two weeks. Battery was a paperweight when I returned.
I thought 'we' as a tech community had moved passed this. It's been dragged through the mud time and time again.
To speak to the first first question, I believe the answer to be in the affirmative. To speak to your second point/question; honestly, I was thinking the same thing. Creepers circle? Why not just "un-follow"?
Except that looks nothing like the iPhone, while most smartphones now look a heck of a lot like an iPhone.
Oh dear, I just realized I dropped a sentence while I was composing this comment and now it's too late to edit. The beginning of it should read, "Yes you can. Cut out a long rectangular strip of paper. Run a sharpie..."
Where are the seminal annoucements being made today? HN? Reddit? It can't still be Usenet, right?
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The typography web design is an extremely challenging task since it involves a lot of creativity and sensibility. Typography is the form of writing on any surface.
it gets worse, my work browser (ff 3.6.24 w/various filters and proxies between me and the real world) won't even render the warning, so i have to view source to even figure out the ?v=0 trick.
Six Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs
Github in a way solves a lot of these issues of finding the right person because it revolves around the work (i.e. code) and skills and not the person and position.
So don't use Freenode. EFNet has had invisible, keyed channels since forever.
Even in 2001 there was the "iPaq". ARM processor, etc. Even used a similar name. No 3d chips were widespread yet, lack of white led tech meant the display sucked too much power, compact flash was tiny, had a resistive screen that was somewhat poorly calibrated, etc.
You can mute people who aren't in your circles.
I think speaking to a person is an expensive luxury. Far more of a luxury than a smartphone. Smartphones aren't cheap, but if you could get the ear thing to work, a few hundred random emergency room visits/year could be saved. average cost for one of those visits is about a thousand dollars, so this would literally save a million dollars.

I guess i'm arguing that very soon, everyone will have a smartphone. For a lot of poeple going to the doctor means going to the emergency room. being able to "ask the internet" and get some sort of quick treatment will ultimately help more people and cost less than what we do now. Sure, there is quack medicine, and that's clearly a bad thing. I'd wager there are more people who are sick but do nothing because the cost in time or money or both is just to high. Lowering the barrier to basic care is a good thing.
I'm pretty sure anyone ever burned in a gas-fueled vehicle fire would gladly go back in time to fork over $40k to avoid that experience.

The reason gasoline is dangerous is that it stores a lot of energy. You need a lot of energy to move a heavy car a couple of hundred miles, and keep the occupants comfortable with heat and/or air conditioning. A battery in a Tesla contains a lot of energy. The dangers compared to a tank of gasoline are different, but in either case, the sudden and uncontrolled release of that energy can do a lot of damage.
Bell Labs and Xerox Parc. I wonder what percentage of the contemporary computing experience wasn't invented in either of those places.
Mine didn't have "phone" capabilities, but the Compaq iPAQs resemble the iPhone.

This is pretty close to the one I owned around 2002: http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2002/04/04/comparison_of_six_...
Where I drive, I am frequently 100 miles from the nearest gas station. Plus in small remote areas, gas stations can be out of gas, out of business, or just closed for unknown reasons.
Good point about SQL not having a lock on ACID. CouchDB in particular is very proud of its out-of-the-box ACID compliance.

People sometimes conflate the DB access approach (document vs relational) with the storage approach (transactional vs warehouse). This may be because the NoSQL poster child, MongoDB, at one point defaulted to a non ACID mode of operation. But you can have a relational DB that's not ACID (MySQL 3) and an object DB that is (Couch).

I was surprised so much of the original article focused on ACID as though it were the biggest selling point for an RDBMS. It seems like the biggest win (right now) is the sheer number of things a typical RDMBS does for you -- not just ACID but also data integrity (foreign key constraints), automatic index creation (mostly), and automated schema changes across many records (ALTER TABLE). The cost, of course, is the up-front effort of fitting your data and app to the relational model.