skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like how there was an extremely long silence, and then suddenly there was one little talk, which had to be posted online, and then that talk mentioned another idea which had to be posted online, and during that talk you said "um" too much, which required another post online. I like it because it almost makes me think that you're next going to blog about how you are blogging too much and really need to stop blogging. :P

To be fair, I think we also got 3 updates in January? So I imagine it's more a function of available time than momentum.
Understanding the audience, as you suggest, is not, in my experience, what makes for a good speaker.

I've spoken in front of audiences - large and small - more times than I can remember. Some of my talks tanked. Badly.

Most go really, really well. And the difference between the tankers and the good ones is one thing - a belief in what I'm saying.

It can (and often has been) an openly hostile audience (I've had people unexpectedly sit in just because I was "the guy from Microsoft", and that presented them with a rare opportunity to heckle). And most times I win those over as easily as the ones that are open to what I have to say to begin with.

And it's quite simply that when you believe in your message, when you just know you're right/your approach is right/your message has integrity, that you appear authentic.

And authenticity is very compelling, as a speaker.
A reasonable dividend (1% per yr) leaves more options open for a big acquisition in the future if they want, eg Sony, or Comcast, or Netflix (they can afford all three if they want). I highly doubt they'll blow the whole load in one shot.
Don't you think their iBooks publisher and textbook efforts will do this at much lower cost?
Solar is probably the best option for electronics but, battery weight may become an issue...

This is an awesome idea for a repeater network.
Its done in many countries.

Just wait until they get their boat...

;-)
Wow, I hadn't looked at that in a while -- they have a good number of providers now.

It's still English-focused, but seems superior to most of the rest of the free courses. It looks like they just do video, so it would be nice if they did exams, problem sets, etc. too.
This isn't true. There are notebooks that have the slot inside but not the mSATA support.
See if you can find a special on a thinkpad x220 if you don't want to go the air route. Unlike the air, you can max it out at 8GB of RAM and it comes with full voltage processors rather than ULV processors like in the MBA.

I was running gentoo on my x220 (have since gone to a T420 on mostly for the higher resolution screen) and getting 11 hours battery from the 9-cell. Also would recommend the IPS option, though they've had some quality control issues with those screens. I had problems with mine and Lenovo replaced it, no questions asked. One of the best screens I have seen on a laptop. For the wireless, I found the intel 6205 to work best with gentoo. The hardware on the thinkpads is generally really Linux friendly.

It's worth noting that there's an impending ivy bridge refresh. I'm thinking an x230 might come out in the next few months.
As opposed to hacking free phone calls from the phone company?
In some ways I wish you were right, but I think anti-competition watch dogs may not approve of them buying Intel.
It's a great thing to do with your own cash; it's not a good thing to do with someone else's cash. Apple's cash belongs to shareholders, not to Tim Cook or the board.
Or, you put the decoy server in the sky, get lots of free publicity, ... while burying the real server out of sight.

I'd consider using free space optics instead or radio.
That's simply how people are paid in the finance industry. Let's say you make $300,000 a year. A bank will pay you $200,000 a year, and in a good year, give you a $200,000 bonus. But in a bad year, they'll "only" give you $75,000. So that $37 billion could easily be "everyone made less than their target salary" rather than "the executives gave themselves $37 billion".

Personally, I think the system is stupid: you have to pay me for my labor even if its misused and you make no money off it. But other people see the $$$ in good times, and the system continues. I now negotiate assuming my bonus will be 0, which is pretty much what I saw when I worked in finance anyway. (Bonuses were allocated based on a "has threatened to quit" basis; since I was always happy, I was never a problem that needed to be solved with money. When I did threaten to quit, they could no longer afford to match the counter offers. Or rather, chose not to.)
That's more than they can afford, at least without substantial equity in the deal.
Or they can simply keep making money with LTE / G4 without any investments?
Things I can think about:

- low level memory management

- faster execution (in most cases)

- cache line optimization

- avoiding language implementation magic
Then there would be a lot more different crowd on HN, more people trying to monetize on their posts.

This would get in the way of innovation.
Buying a cell carrier, movie studio, or music label would only alienate other partners. Apple's other acquisitions were software, to compliment their hardware business.
> iCloud.

ICloud sells devices—it's a tech spec, in a way. It's beneficial to nearly all of their users (invisible backups, Find My iPhone/iPad/Mac, etc).

Twitter, not so much.
Well, it depends what you're writing. One of the horrible things about early fiction is that the writers usually insert their own interpretations of how characters talk -- including stuttering and "ums" and whatnot. Thankfully much of this is wasted on fanfic, where you know what the author was trying to emulate -- but usually it's a distraction. Great characters can get by without habits written into their dialogue.
Panasonic's Let's Note line of laptops (sold as "business rugged" Toughbooks in the U.S.) has what I'd call a great trackpad, preferable to anything I've ever used, including the Apple trackpads (except for the things you can't do with it because you're running Windows).
Well, they could always use some of that cash to buy the anti-competition watch dogs too ;)
You never think in words?
I would agree and would elaborate that the major weaknesses of C are a combination of build system issues and an overly weak type system.

It wasn't realistic to have the whole compile process done in memory in the early 70's, and OS virtual memory wasn't realistic either; but we've long surpassed those concerns, and that means that all the thinking about the program namespace, modules, linking, pre-processing, etc. is worth re-evaluating.

As well, we can do better static checking now, without including any notion of GC; in an imperative execution model, leakage of memory, handles, processes etc. remains orthogonal to type safety. C has heavily bottlenecked program control logic from the beginning - a callstack, looping constructs, etc. - and allowing some equivalents to exist in its data structures would make user code tremendously more reliable.

These changes, often paired with some more attention to concurrency, show up in all the newer system language designs - D, Go, Rust, Clay, BitC, etc.
Anyone who tries building a better C (for example Go) seems to end up going "too far", and as well as fixing the things you mention, ends up adding garbage collection, and various other things which are not suitable for very low level systems programming.

I teach C, and I would love a "cleaner C" mode, which just got rid of lots of the bizareeness of C, several of which you mention. The fact that many compilers will warn with '-Wall' about code which is clearly incorrect, but due to the rules of C they cannot simply reject, is irritating.
Intel's market cap is about twice their cash reserves, isn't it?
Not sure why I am being downvoted here. Is this working on IE9 for other people? Or am I being downvoted for testing something under IE?
But still, really?

All I see is Obama's top team being very cozy with the big banks, and the Republicans would let BofA institute gas chambers as long as it was "free market". Where's 'the government wanting to break them up' in that?
What you're saying and what I'm saying are not mutually exclusive. Authenticity should always be a goal. Belief in one's own words, likewise, is a solid precondition to success. All of these things are factors in success, as is knowing the audience. It's possible to make a successful speech without achieving any or all of these factors, but achieving them makes success much more likely. It makes the delivery of the speech less of a dice roll.

I didn't mean to suggest a reductionism in favor of one factor over all others; I was simply replying to a statement in the grandparent comment about the relationship between audience and speaker. (Also, I'm not suggesting that one should pander to his audience).
Bloom: 28,000 Potted Flowers Installed at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center
It absolutely has to be the living room. And domination of the laptop market.

http://www.alexmuir.com/2011/12/apple-must-build-a-console/
Speaking of X230, it's worth noting that you might be able to get 1600x900 in the next version. Other laptops are offering higher resolutions, including 1080p in 11-12" in one ASUS ultrabook, and there's at least one 12.1" 1600x900 panel floating around. So that's another reason to wait.
Dividend, book it. Major shareholders are probably getting antsy about it.

Just an example, if they paid out $50bn in a one time divvy, Fidelity would get around $2.6 billion.
What Will Apple do With its Cash Tomorrow? Here's What we Think
Well, maybe not a monorail, but I feel compelled once again to point out that Apple could afford to build its own space station: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_space_station#Pro...
Airspace classes in the United States:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace_class_(United_States)
I don't know. Getting something in orbit isn't too expensive, but there is only a few people who do it, and there is a big legislative bottleneck. Easy to compute trajectories and everything makes orbits easy to track, and hard to put up. Whereas trying to float many serves in the atmosphere, that sounds much more interesting and exciting to me. Dealing with wind currents is much more complicated than having to control an orbit trajectory anyways.
Inventing the personal computer is what I'd call hacking "the system". Pandering to institutional investors...well I don't know what I'd call it exactly, but it certainly wouldn't be "thinking different".

It would seem like a corruption or mockery of the ideals of the company that effectively invented the personal computer market and was anti-authoritarian in so many ways for so long.
Google says it’s making search engine smarter
Especially when you consider the investment Apple has already made into web services that side-step the cellular establishment (iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud, Push Notifications, App Store, etc). They don't need cell towers, everything works on Wi-Fi.
Speech synthesis for Asterisk using Microsoft Translator
AGI script for the Asterisk open source PBX which allows you to use Microsoft's Translator voice synthesis engine to render text to speech.
Actually, Woz did do stuff like this in the past. He used to hack the phone lines to get free calls, and other stuff like that:

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/168957,rsa-2010-woz-revea...
Are you suggesting that Apple is undervalued and therefore would be a great longterm vehicle for your parent's pension?
Why I'm building Nilai - A simple bookmarking service
So it's a $1 advertising fee? Are I guaranteed that the posting will appear? Do I get a refund if it isn't, and if not, what does HN do if I take the issue to the credit card company? Do I get a discount for many posts? Will HN take foreign credit cards? How does HN pay foreign people? Is there sales tax or any other tax to worry about? How does the infrastructure change to handle credit card processing?

That's all above the question of 'how much will it improve the site?' and 'will it prevent people from giving good, interesting links?'

There's what, a few hundred new links per day in 'newest'? That's ~$200 minus credit card fees. Is that enough to manage the headache of dealing with the issues surrounding money?

My answer to these is "no." It's not worthwhile. What are the problems you're trying to solve?
Don't be too depressed. I've been programming in some measure since I was ~4, and I'm 23 now. Many of those years were me slowly teaching myself, because I had no mentors.

It's really not about time, it's about projects and people. You learn by doing, not by time spent. Don't worry about it.
And they suck at advertising, and they suck at web services. Why go in deeper?

The thing Twitter has that could be of value is a big library of users with accounts, but Apple already has that. iTunes accounts are (I think) roughly the same size as Twitter, plus all accounts have some payment mechanism on file.
Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?
Just ban the most intrusive bots; Its just going to turn into whack a mole otherwise.
Trust me, I agree with that more than anything. I don't want to see them spend money on anything, really, if they don't need to. More wishful thinking.. :)
If that works for you great but that's not how it worked for me. I didn't have to think "do I love coding?" I just did it from 8th grade onward because it was extremely fun for me.

Similarly for relationships. I've been in love before and I didn't have to ask myself "am I in love" I just knew it "balls to bones" as Neo was told by the Oracle.

I didn't have to just keep doing it at wondering if this was really my thing. It was my thing without thinking.
You would lose all the casual members like me who occasionally have useful things to say -- even more so on Reddit. You thought the Digg redesign was a bad business decision? Implement something like that on Reddit and most of their userbase will vanish overnight.
They're going to acquire every startup they possibly can and then turn into what we all feared.... Skynet
Why do you assume they would necessarily obstruct air traffic space? There are plenty of places that this could be done in existing no-fly or already obstructed zones, could they not?
Their P/E is currently lower than Amazon and Google, and just about even with Oracle. Yeah, I think it's undervalued.
Less than twice, but still substantially more. Apple has $98bn [1] on hand and Intel's market cap is 138.54bn [2]

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-applebre82f...

[2] http://www.google.com/finance?q=intel
A great speech @ Google on a subject directly apropos of pg's start-up spiel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo

Another awesome speech from Google's tech talk series (it takes a little bit of tyrant to pull this off, tho):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
Stock buy backs are used to reduce the number of outstanding shares available - which results in shares increasing in value due to earnings per share now increasing. It is one way to "mask" slowing growth.
Except that no one suggested it was impossible...which leaves one to wonder why you are using ad hominem against an argument that was never made.
It's likely a dividend or a major infrastructure investment. If it were a major user-facing acquisition (such as a carrier or media company) or a new initiative they would have done an event for it.
When I heard Reddit planning to build a low-orbit network, I realized they were going to build the "outernet". This is another stab in the same direction, and I would be surprised if the 2 forces didn't join.

This airborne/orbital network, combined with the "innernet" TOR, will allow for the future of the unregulated internet.

The original internet will become the walled garden that half of humanity wants to live within. Those of us in the other half will have our free innernet and outernet.
Icloud mail is down intermitently after iPad launch
You are assuming that the profits they reported this quarter will be the same next quarters, why?
Build an IDE with tmux and vim
If they're going to make an acquisition of that magnitude, then they should buy a controlling interest in Amazon.
I think you're mixing up cause and effect here. Even if it's true that stock buy backs are frequently undertaken by companies which doubt their future growth potential (I have no idea if this is true), I don't think there's any danger of a buyback from Apple sending this signal. They're in a historically unique position, and whatever their decision, it's not going to be analyzed solely based on the status of other companies who have undertaken similar actions.
Besides putting them in unrestricted areas which I'm sure exist above land, too, can't they just put them in international waters, and use a boat to recharge them in international waters as well?
The Axis of Eval: S, M, L
This can work with an ad profit-sharing model for people who post content (which is how sites like ustream work, as far as I know), but that model doesn't really extend to article aggregators and I highly doubt a user would donate $1 to the community every time he sees an article he likes. An entire newspaper doesn't cost much more than that (nor do I think any balance of cost-to-post vs cost-to-upvote would really work). And you don't want users with deep/generous pockets doing all of the upvoting while the rest of the community is leeching.

If you could manage to build a reddit-style community behind a pay-wall, the pay-wall could be used to generate the 'finder's fee' money for posts and you could allot every customer x number of 'coins' that they could upvote with--needs to be tied to what they pay to prevent scamming. The end product would need to be vastly superior to HN to have a hope at attracting the initial community, but that's basically what Bloomberg machines do for finance, right? I'd easily pay $100/mo if not more for the best hacker news and commentary on the web (you could have the same pay-to-post, get-paid-for-upvotes model for comments to keep them quality).
George Carlin: On technology
"If we're really moving into a many cores future as people suggest, then we should have architectures that give each application a dedicated core. No context switching."

You probably don't want that either because the cost of moving data between cores will be so high from both a performance and a power consumption POV. The days of free coherency between cores will eventually come to an end; you can already see evidence of that in multi-socket Intel and AMD machines (if you try to ignore the NUMA nature of memory, you swamp the link between sockets and perf tanks in a variety of apps).
And the value of Fidelity's Apple stock would go down by $2.6 billion. The $100 billion in cash is currently factored into the share price. Dispurse the cash and the market will discount the share price to match.

Personally I'm hoping for something more interesting than a special dividend. It does seem strange to have the announcement before the trading day begins though. I would think any big announcement would come after the close of trading.

Edit: Clarified that it is Fidelity's Apple stock that would be revalued.
Assuming you're not going on common Internet Wisdom and have some knowledge of this, I'd be interested to know in what ways Obama's top team is cozy with banks. I'm not being facetious--well, maybe a little--but I find this stuff fascinating.
I think NIH does, it is called pub med central. (well, this is not technically public domain; but rather open access)
The only major software company I can fathom Apple buying is Adobe, and even in that case there'd have to be a seismic shift in Apple's strategy.
In Crosswords, It's Man Over Machine, for Now
It seems crazy, given their stock price and recent explosion of ever-higher highs, but I don't think Apple is anywhere near the end of their sustained growth potential. Is MSFT a "safe" bet for a pension fund just because they issue a dividend? In the supposed post-PC world, if MSFT doesn't catch up quick, they have a lot to lose. I guess I just don't believe in anything remaining "safe" over decades just because there is a dividend.
Apple Will Tell Us How It Plans To Use Its $100B In Cash
Isn't this the core spirit of the internet? ARPANET was designed to "emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."

I've heard of remote parts of the world relying on amateur radios to access the internet (citation needed, please). This approach, to me, is simply a more technologically sophisticated. But it's nevertheless beautiful.
Here are some thoughts that came up during a private conversation about Elsevier a few weeks ago...

The question is, why is open access publishing so expensive in many journals? From what I understand, it's because of the need to pay the technical staff (technical editors, sysadmins, etc.) - costs that in traditional publishing are paid by your library (i.e. spread out as a tax across all faculty's grant overheads+taxpayer money). These costs can be driven down by consolidating the journal publishing platforms (i.e. providing a service for people to organize their own journals and a market for technical editors to provide their services to the content editors).

And critically, there needs to be a way to incentivize authors to drive down the total cost of publishing. A big part of the reason big old publishers continue to exist now is that there is an open loop in the incentives: the authors don't bear the costs that they incur to the universities, and there is no direct feedback from the audience that is shut out by this cost. If authors are given an idea of what it really costs to read their article, and the breakdown of who bears that cost, the journals will have to compete on that total cost.

But this will not be very effective until university libraries start breaking down the cost of subscriptions to individual users. So one way to approach this is by providing university libraries with a system to estimate the individual cost of each article view (i.e. crudely, if a subscription costs X and Y users view Z articles, then each user will have incurred some cost that is X/Y on average). Then start discussing what to do about who carries the cost burden from the users who are outliers on top. This is the first step toward closing the incentives loop.

I agree that there are too many journals, but unfortunately there will need to be even more before the ones with the right combinations of cost and editorial structure will win out. Going back to the common platform for publishing and editorial services that I mentioned: the real kicker will come when the platform is integrated with a social network (where nodes can be organizations as well as people). In other words, once you provide an easy and trusted way for editors to write down their web of trust, display that web to others, and act based on it, you will have put online the informal web of trust (reputation) that underlies publishing. This opens really powerful possibilities.

In the meantime, traditional publishers are holding on for dear life and using increasingly desperate tactics (like buying legislation, in Elsevier's case) to hold on to their money funnel. This is holding back science by artificially restricting access to publicly funded research. (And don't get me started on the textbook business... although good things are coming to that because Apple will disrupt it from the bottom.)
Fair play to him for wanting to tackle the issue, but this just seems like an unsolvable problem to me. Until there are cures for spite and bigotry, trolls will exist on the internet.
I believe there are weight limits; you can launch whatever you want into airspace as long as it's under 4 pounds or so - so at least it will remain legal for a while.
Had to look at the date to make sure it isn't April 1st yet.
What's the IRC channel? I suppose this does show one flaw, if it isn't immediately obvious how to access a point of contact.