skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How do you spell "blah blah blah"?

Any way you want. And that's official. :)

Remember that dictionaries neither define words correctly nor list correct spellings -- dictionaries dispassionately describe how people use and spell words. To see whether this is true, look up the word "literally":

Dictionary.com: literally:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/literally

1. in the literal or strict sense: What does the word mean literally?

4. in effect; in substance; very nearly; virtually.

How can both definitions be authoritative? -- they contradict each other.

Another dictionary, Merriam Webster, defines literally:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually <took the remark literally> <was literally insane>

2 : in effect : virtually <will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice — Norman Cousins>

Same problem -- two definitions of the same word, but that flatly contradict each other.

Conclusion? Dictionaries do not prescribe, they describe. Their sole purpose is to report how people use words.

So spell "blah blah blah" any way you like. The only issue is whether your reader understands you.
Summation of the multiples 3 or 5 from 1-999
> For any living system that has had sufficient time to adapt to its environment, it can generally be assumed that the system has reached a local optimum for that environment

Really? Think about humans, in our current environment, can you not think of any adaptations to our bodies that would improve us as a species? If in 100 million years our environment doesn't change at all (hypothetical) will we not evolve any more?
so you are supposed to rebuy everything you bought on itunes?

and this is reasonable?
Sadly the control shift to Lenovo full time was indeed a regression. IIRC IBM ThinkPad engineering division in Japan is part of Lenovo, they're probably tied to stupid constraints and market decisions. I thought it was fixed by now...

The <60 era had a lot of great features in terms of human interface, if I could retrofit a x200 mobo in a x40 shell I would. I'm not demanding in terms of speed but consumption, heat, virtualisation .. hard to ignore.

About LCD panels, it sks hard, so hard sometimes I use my crap sony tv as a monitor to have decent contrast/color. Anything is better than the default panel.

I've said that before but there's a little market for pre-lenovo quality laptops. Everybody complains about laptops nowadays, if someone release a single good model he'll get a lot of silver.
I've been having to turn down work. For a while I was able to schedule it for later times as it comes in, but once I have at least 3 months booked into the future, I won't take on any more. A fair amount is ongoing work acting as a part-time dev on a project. I don't do much in the way of short "build me a website" projects

Also want to say that as valuable or even more than building referrals through clients you've worked for is building up a network of other dev contractors you've worked with. Much of my work is a job someone else lands and then needs to bring in additional help, or a job they turn down for lack of availability. And likewise, I do the same for others I know.
I scanned through Youtube but it does not look like that one made it out of the Googleplex, sorry.
Ultimately this is a religious issue. The frothing anti-Apple hordes will never admit that Apple innovated and will always see Apple as in the wrong because, well, Apple is evil. These people then jump through logical hoops to justify their contortions. The simple truth is that Samsung copied from Apple wholesale. I for one hope the damages get tripled, not because Apple needs the money but because Samsung contributes precisely nothing of value to the market. They are like the idiot kid in class who tries to get ahead by copying the smart kid's work verbatim. Samsung are plagiarists and thieves.
Making a Google+ To RSS converter
> The managers' job is to take cleverness out of our jobs, not because they're assholes or don't trust us (usually not the case) but because if our work relied on our cleverness or creativity, then they wouldn't be doing their jobs, which is to deliver business value reliably.

Great point. Or as Daniel Geer et al put it[1] (discussing security, but applicable in general): "The central enemy of reliability is complexity. Complex systems tend to not be entirely understood by anyone. If no one can understand more than a fraction of a complex system, then, no one can predict all the ways that system could be compromised by an attacker. Prevention of insecure operating modes in complex systems is difficult to do well and impossible to do cheaply: The defender has to counter all possible attacks; the attacker only has to find one unblocked means of attack. As complexity grows, it becomes ever more natural to simply assert that a system or a product is secure as it becomes less and less possible to actually provide security in the face of complexity."

[1] http://cryptome.org/cyberinsecurity.htm
I used touch on the Treo all of the time, pre-apple, and didn't do too much with a stylus. There was nothing about PalmOS that was desktop based, so your "invariably" statement is a lie.

You can't patent a screen size.
FameTube is Attracting Thousands of Visitors Daily
I'd agree with you if the turnstiles and parking barriers were added solely to track employee movement.

I don't know if that was the case at Yahoo, though, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were originally meant for something more useful, like making sure there were enough parking spaces open for Yahoo employees.
You need more classical resources to model a qubit in generality. This is because a qubit can be in the "0" state, the "1" state, or in any superposition between them. For a single qubit, you can describe an arbitrary superposition by two angles [1], each of which is a continuous real number. While you can't extract both of these parameters from a single measurement, a classical computer has to know both angles to simulate that qubit. Thus, it's more like that you need two floats to simulate a single qubit.

When you have more than one qubit, the requirements get much worse, as you can have superpositions over all of the possible classical states. When you work through the math, you find that you need a vector of 2^n - 1 complex floats to model a register of n qubits in full generality. Going from a classical bit to a classical trit does nothing to help with that exponential scaling.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere
3rd one is easy to work around. generating bindings is easy.
You would end up with very little light gathering capacity. The number of photons exposing each pixel would be only the ones emitted from the source that managed to strike the pixel directly. The same as a pinhole camera.

The thing about a lens it is lets you grab a relatively huge area of light and sort it all out so the right bits go to the right pixels.

I already did arithmetic once today (erroneously as it has transpired), so I'll pass on this, but although a metric dumptruck load of photons fly off ov things, when you are 10 meters away, and have an image element the size of a CMOS pixel, there aren't a lot of photons per second to let you sort out 256 levels of intensity without random noise.
Yet oddly they didn't mention the innovativeness of the rounded corners and rectangular shape.
Maybe not a putdown, but it's silly to view Apple's defining characteristic as their ability to assemble a device from available parts.

If that ability is what makes them successful, then their rival phone manufacturers should be even more successful since they often use faster processors and bigger screens and more RAM than Apple.
I agree with second part being a pitfall, but re: ask someone/anyone, let me illustrate why this is problematic.

A friend of mine was starting a subscription ecommerce site targeted at women (clothing & makeup primarily). She asked me about pricing (I'm a guy) I used all my "knowledge" to offer up my thoughts on price and then she asked "would your wife or sister use it at that price?" and I couldn't say. At that moment, it became apparent to both of us that although my pricing logic seemed ok in a theoretical, consulting-esque way, I was actually a pretty useless windbag in this circumstance.

I fear asking non-customers just risks getting at very wrong pricing - garbage in, garbage out. And also risks you missing out on great product feedback as well.
Many of us still use a slider phone with a keyboard. Yet those have been found infringing of Apple's illegitimate patents.
I concur with Robin. Best bet is a working website with publicly viewable code. You could show others online the code first, to get ideas on how to improve it. Every good developer continuously learns, to improve.
This article was fun, I like imagining myself with an agent and some awesome Diva dressing room.
However, sorry, but I have to rant a tiny little bit. We need to stop using the "ever try to explain it to your mom" trope. My mother understands what I do at work a whole lot better then my dad. If I was mother, I would clearly understand what you do at work. The very fact of being a mom does not preclude you from high level technical knowledge. In addition, the statement encourages the idea that since only women can be moms, and moms don't understand tech, women don't understand tech. That is what you are implying to all of your readers when you utilize this cliche. It's lazy writing, and I would request that you try harder to overcome that initial pull of the go-to stereotypes and cliches that paint women in a non-technical light. Thank you.
It sounds like your problem is with the law, not Apple.
It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it.

I'd never say "all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.
You are the one suffering with self-importance by virtue of your disregard for the opinions of experienced engineers.
You are basically saying the iPhone was of higher quality- things worked better. This is true, but you can't patent quality.
The jury can only decide based on the facts before it. NO PRIOR ART was presented to them. They argued about how that seemed weird. Then they decided that the discussion, which could serve no purpose anyway because they still wouldn't be able to decide based on prior art they were never given, was taking too long. So they moved on.
What I am not questioning is it's considered valid under law according to this case in the United States and abstracting yourself from the view of hating or not hating patent law - that's the test here.

It is irrelevant what a group of people can come up with 1 sec past the filing date, even on the other side of the world - the test is, given the available knowledge at the time of filing the patent and relevant to a person who is skilled in the art of the current available knowledge - would they be able to replicate the features detailed in the invention specification (essentially off my head).

In this case - it was ruled no. Despite all the prior art presented to the jury, despite all the previous evidence and so on and so on - it was considered wilfull infringement and a lot of the evidence presented showed that Samsung basically said "this feature of Apples is cool! lets copy that" ... which is pretty striking to lay-persons not skilled in law as jurors and tends to heavily weigh in their mind. And again, patent law considers - in some detail - that blends can in fact be new inventions. Patent law in the United States is very different to the rest of the world however and that has to be considered in this - the tests in Europe are much stricter and that's why many software patents aren't available there.

For context - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...
The LG Prada was so bad you had to use 2px scrollbars with your thumb to scroll down a list, like a contact list. It was like using Windows XP on earlier touch devices. I don't think making something like the Prada in 2008 would have helped Samsung's case in any way, because it had none of the things that made the iPhone great, none of the features people copied from the iPhone.

The LG Prada was a complete failure, because your old, classic feature phones like those in clamshell form were MORE usable with their keyboards than the Prada and its really bad touchscreen and bad software. I wanted to go back to a regular phone real fast when I made the mistake of buying a Prada. Not quite the same experience that people have when they buy an iPhone.
One factor that increases housing prices is that people are competing on houses near good schools, because of the importance of education.

But education might become less dependent on geography(by using remote ed tech) or in some scenarios(better AI) much less important, which will indirectly reduce housing costs.

Another option is a growing availability of remote jobs and better remote social lives( remote telepresence and video conferencing, access to great and varied food through sous-vide, generally better digital experiences) might also decrease the demand for city life.
I have been using my Singapore account in China for more than a year. So far everything is OK.
http://vaporjs.com/ is way better, and was here first.
Turing machine in Lego (no mindstorm). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W08poVdPTGo

Not that I'm a fan of Apple, but putting things together nicely is pretty damn valuable and innovative.
People don't own ideas, they are granted temporary monopoly on real innovations to encourage their disclosure so that they, in the short term, and society, in the long term, can profit. The question isn't "first" the question is "obvious". I would argue with gestures already established and real touch screens a group of designers would quickly come up with a latch (horizontal stroke), a door handle (curving stroke), a safe padlock/rotary phone (circular motion) and general patterns (nine dots, some pattern dragging across them) rather easily. Spreading the fingers or the hand to zoom was already in minority report (2002). Double taps to do something different is already in the double clicking of the mouse.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.
Palm devices used a stylus and had text input via a special language at the bottom of the screen. How is this remotely related to the Samsung/Apple patent issues at hand?
Sounds like a fantastic movie. Something M. Night might have done while he was still cool.
You should have gotten heysuper.com by now! That's a great name.
But that's not what the patents were for that were at issue in this case. They did it better, that's why they won in the marketplace. Now that other competitors are catching up in quality, they are turning to the illegitimate patents they were awarded to abuse the world legal system to go after them.
Obviousness here is being talked about with regards to "patents". It is highly possible to create a new good design without creating new inventions.

That Nokia, RIM and others could not do it does not necessarily imply that Apple had some really unique inventions that enabled it to do so. (That Apple claims to be so is a different thing. That Samsung willfully copied their design elements is also a different thing.)
My advice to a good programmer who wants to be great is to spend as much time with great programmers as possible. Consider an apprenticeship program, or create your own apprenticeship with mentors, conferences, tons of practice, and tons of reading. If you're already good, everything you need to be great is accessible and cheap, you simply need to focus your efforts and work hard at learning to be great.
You wouldn't even need to put a bunch of geniuses in a room together for an afternoon. All you would have to do is get a team to watch any episode of Star Trek:TNG and create something like the slates the Enterprise crew used.

But the thing is, if the hardware components and UI skills existed, why wasn't anyone able to do it in the past?

I think the answer is that on the manufacturer side, nobody cared about end-users, and the nature of the business was that the carriers dictated a lot about what went into a phone.

So with the iPhone, here comes Apple, managing to get a carrier to play Apple's game, and saying "take our phone and its UX or leave it".

So sure, you might have been able to get a bunch of geniuses to come up with such a phone, but you probably would have had no ability to get it on the market successfully, because you wouldn't have been able to get any carrier buy-in without the clout of a company that has sold millions upon millions of portable media devices like Apple.

Until Apple came around, phone manufacturers treated the carriers as the customers, not the end-users. So if you take it that context, I doubt that something like the iPhone was at all obvious to the HTCs, Samsungs and RIMs of the world.
I don't come from a CS background but rather my education was in computer engineering, mostly of the hardware and low-level systems programming variety. The majority of what I actually do for work is entirely self-taught.

I find that having a background in the lower-level aspects of computing does help a lot. The situation where I've seen people who know mostly software falter is when debugging problems that involve system interactions. My belief is that being able to construct a mental model of what's happening from top to bottom is crucial in solving some problems and people who can't do it eventually resort to just trying random things until something works.

I guess the take-away from this conversation is that it's useful to have knowledge in another related domain, be it computer hardware, low-level programming, physics, computer science, etc., even when you are developing only high-level applications.
The grid based icon system isn't an innvoation, nor is it even a significant part of the iPhone product -- but it's a key part of the trade dress, which explains why Samsung were so keen to appropriate it. It allowed them to market their phone as seemingly substantially similar to the iPhone. It allowed Samsung to imply "this product is basically the same as that iPhone that everyone's raving about". Customers didn't need to think they were buying an Apple product to be misled.
From the article: "No wonder people easily dislike mathematics, who would want to add so many numbers?"

But that's not mathematics, that's arithmetic. This may seem like arid pedantry, except that many people are exposed to this kind of bonehead arithmetic in elementary school and think that's all there is to mathematics. That's a shame, and a correctable error.

Mathematics isn't "2 plus 2 equals 4". Mathematics is Avatar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ

Mathematics is hitting a target on Mars, within a new meters, after eight months of travel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I

Mathematics is beauty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

I wish people could be taught mathematics before arithmetic, not after. But this contradicts centuries of scholastic tradition.
Are you saying there is nothing to patent about the implementation of gestures on your touchscreen, as opposed to hitting widgets like scrollbars ? You couldn't be more wrong.

And people who cite things like the people who did multitouch with an array of cameras obviously don't understand patents. Patents are not about an idea but an implementation. The earlier multitouch stuff had nothing to do with the multitouch on a capacitive screen.
It's weird that Google gets the most flack, because others are doing exactly the same thing, they just suck at it most of the time. Microsoft made the Xbox, competed with Sony, Microsoft made Bing and Bing Maps, becoming a Google competer, also do you remember Soapbox? that would have been a Youtube competer, but it simply didn't gain traction. Also Apple made it's own mapping service, essentially competing with Google.

There are probably a lot more examples here and there. The main thing is that if we call Google evil for stepping in new territories, we might as well call most tech giants evil.
that can also be attributed to not caring. Do CS degrees teach compassion?
I agree that it is similar to a basic task list. For us, the differences are that Trello makes things like values and task assignments easy and clean. It is also a very visual tool, glancing at it can tell you a lot!
I prefer semicolon.js, more secure and reliable :)
https://github.com/madrobby/semicolon.js
>The camera was "meh" and didn't do video, the screen wasn't nearly as nice as the VGA screen on my e800, the OS didn't support 3rd party apps, where was 3G?, etc. etc.

With that you reminded me of the now classic response of Slashdot's Commander Taco when the first iPod was introduced:

"No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame".
The continuous/analog question is interesting enough that there was a physics essay contest on the matter - the winners are at http://fqxi.org/community/essay/winners/2011.1 and they were great reads even for a layman such as myself.
I don't want to stir up bad blood, I'm just making a point so don't kill me =).

Almost every one of those devices has at least 5 buttons (up, down, left, right center). That's not simple at all. One button is simple. The touch screen on the iphone takes those away so only one is needed. It's the reason the iphone got so dominant--it worked.

It's the reason Jobs realized his foray into tableting in the 90s (with development starting in 1987, the first being released in 1993!), the Newton, sucked. He killed it when he realized it wasn't working. The tech wasn't there, when it was, he moved.

I know people hate apple, but they need to look at this objectively. this wasn't apples first rodeo--they helped write the book on the PDA market. They're also not suing palm or Visor or HP. Those companies didn't reiterate. Apple did.

If you wanna hate, hate being judged by a jury of your peers (you probably shouldn't do that), or our current patent system. And drink some tea or something.
Has US ever been in an either or situation? Defence budget in 2010 is $680B, and cost of a moon landing is $18B in 2010 dollars. Given that both are deficit funded, and dollar can be printed at will, is this convincing?
Sunday hacking - get your movie ratings from Flixter
How free apps can make more money than paid apps.
"illegitimate" in some novel sense? Because the courts seem to think otherwise.
It's a dedicated hardware switch. I'd count it.
I've seen cases where people who with degrees in CS have screwed up in equally bad or even worse ways.

Writing software is complicated and it's difficult to remember exactly how every part of a large system is working. Sometimes people forget an important detail and end up write code that performs badly. It's hardly limited to people who don't understand CS theory.
Is there a back story available? I'd be interested in knowing what compelled a developer to abandon Firefox, but this post is nothing more than a rant, lacking both explanation and evidence.