skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually exactly Google's strategy. The Siri-competitive voice search in Jelly Bean is really just an interface to Google search, which has been extended to answer a lot of the same basic questions that Siri can handle (for example, it manages "how old is david beckham" just fine). This means you should be able to get the exact same results by just typing the query into your laptop's Google search box.
I'm almost certain this must have been a communication issue within Samsung. Someone got it in their head that this group was hired to promote their product and told subordinates to deal with the group.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
focus on popular niches, but not overdid ones (ex: games). Some have a lot of opportunities.
Compare with the sort-of ethics statement The Register used to produce.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01/22/register_tariff/

"Integrity — we've heard of it."
This is a human trafficking story.

Clearly this is not remotely as horrific as the usual connotations, but the structure of bait-and-switch coercion is very similar.
No sources, no comment from any company or organization.

This is the kind of work you'd expect from the sun, trash paper.
Interesting, from the comments:

> As a Cheil member, I want to express my deeply sorry to make you feel that way. We’ll try to do our best not to make any inconvenience around this matter. And I promise that your comments will be reflected to upgrade and elaborate our Moilers program. I hope you to keep in touch with us and show your opinion at any time. Whatever it is, it will be welcomed

From Wikipedia:

>Cheil Worldwide Inc., is a global marketing and communications company headquartered in Seoul, South Korea.[1] It is South Korea's largest advertising agency and was ranked 16th in the world by Advertising Age in 2006... Internationally, Cheil has carried out communications campaigns for Samsung Electronics, including the “Imagine” branding campaign spanning 80 countries. It also provides marketing support for Samsung’s role as a Worldwide Olympic Partner

Overaggressive third party marketing company? I wonder how Samsung will respond to this article and other feedback.
This is the ugly side of "new media"--the big companies are able to push around the little people who lack the support of their own big companies.
Submitting Your Website to Search Engines
Why?
I think it is great that Bruce Willis brings attention to the topic. My father gave me his record collection. He was able to do so, because he owned it. Will current/next generations be able to do the same?
I really do wonder what Watson could add. We always plant corn as close to May 1st as possible as that is what the generations that came long before me determined was best for the conditions here. Neighbours have tried deviating from that date, but the results have always been poor.

Now if Watson could accurately tell me when to sell my corn to maximize profit, that would be pretty awesome.
I wholeheartedly agree that Apple's innovative in getting technology to actually work in a user friendly way and combining them with excellent design but is that process patent worthy is the real question at hand.

For example, how different is the homescreen of the iPhone from this? http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI...
Compared to that, Windows Phone with Metro is much more innovative.

Another problem is that many people attribute things to being invented by Apple because they first hear of it from Apple(and because they don't use non Apple products). For example, I remember when Apple introduced hybrid graphics with a way to switch between the integrated Intel gpu and a discrete Nvidia/ATI GPU. Sony had that working before Apple, but a LOT of folks thought it was Apple that innovated it. Perhaps Apple added more polish to it, but they certainly were wrong.

Polishing and going the last mile is very tough(see OEMs with half baked software and hardware) but does it deserve patent protection? Apple innovated and got awarded with becoming the most valuable company in the world with more than 100 billion dollars in the bank with which they can invest further in innovation instead of indulging in petty patent extortion over petty things like the bounceback effect or linking phone numbers in emails to the dialer.
Agreed. I'm reminded of point 3 in the Android guide to good UI messages, a little gem of technical writing style:
http://developer.android.com/design/style/writing.html
Switching between minified and non-minified css and js files in WordPress
Let's take a common case: I have a motherboard sound device which I use 95% of the time, and I have a USB camera that has a built-in microphone.

When I go to settings in Google Hangout, it asks me which device I want to use. ALSA presents the interfaces. I choose whatever combination I want -- mic from the camera, headphone out through the mobo -- and it works.
As I understand the book is not out yet, so I still have to see these "cast-iron" analyses. Surely it would be interesting to have a look.

The problem that I see here is that by removing all social and cultural context we will lose some genetic information as well. It is very hard to measure influence of genetics on social or cultural outcomes, but it definitely does exist.
One interesting point is he brought up Einstein's invention of relativity. Notice that in the scientific community, humanity has been building upon previous work for centuries with no copyright or patent protection, and nothing more than honor, citation, and shame against plagiarists.

The fundamental defense made by many is that without patent protection for software, people would not put much effort into innovating.

1) If you look at science, open source, fashion, food, and other areas where humans continually build on culture, you see plenty of continued innovation without insane legal protection.

2) The amount of effort pales in comparison to the monopoly granted. You could make the argument for say, pharmaceuticals, that if it takes 10 years from lab through human trials and hundreds of millions of dollars, that a 2-decade long protection period might be needed. But there is no FDA for software, and Apple actually spends far less on R&D than other companies, and with $100 billion in the bank, you can't claim that haven't gotten an incredibly good return in their investment.

Therefore, it is insane to grant 20 year protection to Apple for stuff like pinch gestures. 2 years maybe. But 20? It's absurd.
No, the gate has been closed about two years ago. Solaris is not open source anymore. The illumos guys forked the last available version of the code and push it forward independently.
Ubuntu has initatives to let you just buy a computer with Linux preinstalled too!

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/
This story seems very strange to me. As you say, why would Samsung do this? In what universe do the events described in the article sound like the actions of a rational company?

The whole story is entirely one-sided and to be honest if it sounds too crazy to be true, I suspect it probably is too crazy to be true.
> I assume you're talking about Linux driver issues. But since we're talking about OSX vs Linux here, it's only fair to note that Linux supports a much greater variety of hardware than OSX.

I'll take supporting a limited set of hardware very well over supporting tons of hardware often in a mediocre at best fashion. I'm not just talking about video cards either, over the years I've had "fun" with everything from SATA controllers to sound chips that were 'supported' under linux.
I have some USB speakers I'm fond of, and PulseAudio was indeed the only way they ever worked right for me on Linux.
How is it making money? With ads?
Seriously? Sounds like a half-baked reimplementation of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore to me ...

The post he refers to is more than 2 years old, things may have changed.
A confused and zombified Bruce Willis was found in a Cupertino air conditioning duct late last night, in possession of a portable hard drive and a bad hangover.
> "Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative?"

No one's saying that. All that is said is it's not entirely Apple's doing. In this case it was Synaptics.
> support for the 2D version is gone in favor of a slower 3D version forced on all users

Remember when they updated iOS on an early generation iPhone model and it became unusuably slow?

But in general they simply won't update older hardware. You have that choice with Ubuntu, too.
> ease of clustering and sharding, developer friendliness, JSON support, tool support etc.

Which RDBMS do you have in mind ?
This is absurd. I wish I could vote the article out of existence.
> The Linux desktop has been wildly successful! Hobbyists have been using it since the 1990s. Yahoo! was built using the linux desktop. Much of Facebook was, too. People in web dev and tech support use it as their workstation OS.

While true, look around at younger companies, OS X has taken over a very large segment of the web dev crowd and I don't see any signs of that changing, especially with the almost mandatory nature of using OSX for iOS development.
Please don't ever post anything from The Sun. It's a worthless, sensationalist pit pandering in majority to festering idiots who live vicariously through a bizarre mix of celebrities and "real-life-tragedies".

[Edit - This is, perhaps, an extreme view, and The Sun is in no way alone in using this modus operandi. However, as a Brit I feel an impulsive need to warn those who didn't grow up with The Sun!]
Apply in Tokyo - A Ruby tool for memcached
This is called a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore. I think the author is understating the price, though. There's a lot of existing software you could reuse if your data was stored in more conventional relations, and "manually enforce consistency" is a pipe dream. Your code has expectations about your data, so in the abstract you do still have a schema, and not writing it down merely prevents any tools from helping you keep your data sane over time. I've seen Notes databases decay to the point that not even the dev team could explain how a document got into its contradictory state nor how the apps should (much less currently would) handle it. The few people diligent enough to do completely correct work without a checkable schema, aren't the people who would be tempted to try.
Why corporate strategy needs to change with the cloud
Getting Your Product Into the Habit Zone
I would have agreed with you a few months back, but after seing the airdrop of Curiosity unto the surface of Mars, I have assumed a stance of quiet fascination. Looks solvable to me.
This is a thin wrapper around a good, but two year old, High Scalability post:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/17/7-lessons-learned-...

which was discussed on HN recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467077

and on HN long ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1354542

EDIT: Fixed "long ago" vs "recently". Thanks, sync.
From what I've seen of both (and having used Backbone professionally), while backbone has more documentation on the web, the problem is it's a very flexible framework and it doesn't force much upon the developer, which is great. However, it does mean that a lot of tutorials talk in different paradigms.

As a .NET guy, I'd go for Knockout. I also like what I'm seeing with Angular.
Os Apartamentos Mais Caros do Mundo - Opus Hong Kong
Affiliate Marketing Resources
Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation.

But is it patentable?
http://www.gnucash.org/ has scheme(guile) and python scripting, in addition to being open source
> You're right, my statement was too broad, but I submit that it is still correct for health insurance ...

It's correct because the present system is set up that way. But this doesn't mean it must be that way, or that insurance requires a large pool of clients with the same policy and coverage. That's a coincidence.

From the standpoint of a large publicly-held corporation, many clients with identical policies, or many clients each with unique personal policies, work internally exactly the same way -- it's all about actuaries assessing risk and setting rates.

> I submit that it is still correct for health insurance, when the goal is (I hope) to get affordable health care for everyone.

Regardless of the business model, if health costs cannot be controlled, insurers will refuse to write the policies. This outcome doesn't depend on the assumptions behind the program -- whether there is a large program with many identically covered clients, or a program in which each client has a unique policy and the capital pool is the corporation's stockholders rather than the policy holders.

In both cases, some circumstances are unworkable. It remains to be seen whether health costs can be meaningfully regulated, in order to make a mandatory health insurance requirement politically acceptable. I sincerely hope so, but I don't control health care costs.
"Another problem is that many people attribute things to being invented by Apple because they first hear of it from Apple(and because they don't use non Apple products)."

What's even worse than that is when people know Apple didn't invent something but still insist that they deserve all of the credit anyway because they "popularized" it. I have seen this argument on a few occasions. wtf?
I do think what Apple does is important, but I don't think profits are really distributed in proportion to contribution, because the final product is an accumulation of work done by different people and companies, but there's no real accounting mechanism to distribute the profits accordingly (patents are a largely failed attempt at one).

The best place to be in business for profitability is to do that last 10-20% that produces a finished product, and Apple is great at that. The worst place is to do the first 50%, basic science which may enable great stuff in 20 or 40 years, but won't do much for your profits today. Hence why much of Silicon Valley is based around mining uncommercialized academic and research-lab work for raw material that can be turned, with additional work, into successful products. I don't think that means the raw material wasn't necessary or important (sometimes even key) to those products, though, so just looking at profits doesn't tell you the story.
I agree with the OP, but the most important part of Jiro's philosophy is his believe that one must choose a craft and dedicate one's life to perfecting it.

If this is the mindset that you take towards your work, you will naturally seek out the best in your field and learn what they do best to incorporate it into your own approach.
ndiswrapper is/was more a function of the hardware vendors not supporting Linux/supporting Linux very badly. Go look at some of the early Linux Realtek drivers for example.
If you're fine with limited hardware just use hardware that is supported by Linux. Every Thinkpad I've used so far worked perfectly out of the box. If you're not sure what to buy just look at the list of Ubuntu certified hardware: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/
MeFi explains startups to people who don't read HN
> The split it caused in the mobile devices (with no drivers available except for Android) is a horror, and like Aaron Seigo called it - Android is the best friend and the worst enemy.

These mobile devices could grow some HDMI and USB ports in a few iterations and becoming stationary.

Tada - there's your Linux desktop.
"the real future"...

The real future is what users like best, not what developers think that users might like. I personally don't like the Wayland approach and I think that competition is fine. Let the "market" decide what's best.
Does your mom snap the photos herself? They're - dare I say - a big part of what makes the site so great.

Top-notch design.
You make being as profitable as Apple sound so easy.
That's called "marketing". It's not really new.
I'm on a single Heroku dyno, which is free.
I'd love some specifics.

Were you passing around objects and mutating them while expecting the existing object to be unchanged? For example:

$o = new MyObject()
$o->important_data = 'clean';
function foo($give_me_o) {
$o->important_data = 'dirty';
}

foo($o);
echo $o; // Need this to say "clean"

Because that, literally, is all that changed. Yes, the implementation changed. But PHP4 syntax (including explicit pass-by-reference and class-named constructors) still works in PHP5. That's not an accident. That was by design. Go back and read the discussions.

Frameworks chose to upgrade because you get MUCH better memory management and cleaner syntax from PHP5. But many, many people run PHP4 code in a PHP5 runtime. It works just fine. Because that example I used above -- while it is totally possible you have code like that, that's in practice pretty rare.
The Paralympics coverage is abysmal by comparison. It's really sad.
Pretty sure that had they gone to the German authorities and explained how Samsung "trafficked" them into the country with an expectation of being provided a ticket home, Samsung Berlin would get a call from German immigration - and promptly pay for the tickets.
yaaaaawn

so what's new

they did other stuff: made things better, connected in new ways, etc.

i still don't like their stuff - for aesthetical reasons

so what

get a life
A failed story but not bad reporting. I learned a lot about marathon races and how are they managed. Only the end is disappointing.
Pistorius beaten by Oliveira, complains about length of opponents blades
If it creates pixel-perfect designs that can be used for implementation, then don't call them mockups, that part was confusing to me.
The article's last point is a little questionable:

> compilers could defer stack usage in favor of a reserved area of program memory for temporary values, that has a very high likelihood of always being in cache.

"A reserved area of program memory for temporary values, that has a very high likelihood of always being in cache" -- this is a fair definition of the stack.

> the stack is function-local.

Depends on your definition of "function-local". Yes, variables local to an individual function are stored on the stack, but the stack frames for multiple function calls are adjacent in memory. It's not like entering or exiting a function will always switch to a different cache line. Someone who looks at "disassembly of optimized code in the wild" should be well aware of this.

> For temporaries that don’t need to persist past calls to other functions, some performance could be gained by avoiding cache misses on stack memory that isn’t going to be used after the function returns anyway.

You should be able to achieve this in the current world with aggressive use of scopes to explicitly expire particular locals before the end of a function, or use of inline functions.

It is an idea for a compiler optimization, however: Expire a local variable at the last point it is used in a function. There are a number of subtleties though: The compiler would have to be able to reorder local variables to make sure the expirable ones are at the top of stack when they expire, would have to mark variables for which pointers are taken non-expirable (unless the pointers themselves, or values derived from them, themselves don't escape the function), and would make stack frames more complicated to parse for debuggers and backtrace displays.
User Labor Markup Language
"the food also has to be something special"

"those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price"

First off, there is more to a dinning experience than the quality of the food, so even if the food is the same a price increase can be justified. You could serve me a McDonald's hamburger for 20USD and leave me satisfied with the transaction provided the burger was not all that I was getting... That burger would not be worth 20USD, but that would not necessarily say anything about the worth of the establishment itself.

Regardless, the question is not if the expensive food at high quality restaurants is particularly good, but rather "What is the relationship between quality and price?"

In the case of high class establishments, the food is certainly good and the price is certainly high. Is that a linear relationship though? The 50USD burger is undoubtedly better than many 5USD burgers, but is it 10x better?

Furthermore, does higher quality food always cause the same sort of price inflation? Or is it possible that similarly superb food sold at undoubtedly higher prices at a restaurant without the other things that high class establishments offer would likely be cheaper?

I would even dare state that, to some extent, high price can actually be one of the desirable services that a restaurant can offer. If you happen to be more concerned with appearances than (in the grand scheme of things) a small amount of money, then being expensive for expense's sake can be a feature.
General statements are dangerous. UX is often but not always the most important part of a project. For projects where speed of development or cross platform support trump UX, PhoneGap can be an awesome tool.
The Next Step in Apple's Thermonuclear War Against Android
Unfortunately making a "hit game" is the same as saying he will build the next Google/Facebook/Instagam/blah...

Having been in the games industry for 10 years, then pivoting into something else it sounds like the OP expected his manager to look after (or even care) about his career / life etc.

Doesn`t matter what industry your in, your boss has priorities. Last of which is your career/life but might appear to be on their list so as to keep you producing thus helps their priorities.

(there are ofcourse exceptions but they are rare)
Once you move from storing session data in-memory on the webserver, and add a network call, why not just store the data alongside the users other data in a fast datastore? That could be Redis, Cassandra, whatever.

This isn't babble -- it's honestly a pretty common technique. If your site sees millions of users, storing a session for visitors that aren't logged in is prohibitive and unnecessary. You can store UI customizations and basic memoization in a client-side cookie if you need to.

If you're building something small or basic, then you probably won't have multiple webservers and you can use fast in-memory sessions without concern. This only applies once you need to worry about scale.
Not to argue with your counter example, but another example re; integration. The Richochet from the 1990s was a 28.8 version of a 3/4G usb modem.

But that's not a tethered iPhone, in terms of is overall ambition and functionality. Similarly, the acorn with 8MB RAM, was not an integrated multi-media device (ipod, phone, etc), limited as it was. Let us not forget the power of the sw (youtube app, for example).[1]

Lastly, the innovation (in part on the business side) of the Ap store and ecosystem should not be completely overlooked. There is seamless delivery/monetization etc (not just collections, but outbound to devlepers).

In short, there is alot of originality in how the puzle is put together. Some of it is like the swiss army example. Some of it is in the conceptualiztion of the user experience. Some of it, quite frankly is execution of the physical product (manufacturing details, etc), as I have argued before. (e.g http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435490)

I look at an acorn and a blackberry+phone on the desk. And I look at the iPhone. The latter looks like the victorinox, the other items like tools on the table.

EDIT:
[1] The internet-integration of the acorn aps, i'm not familiar with; e.g. is not full-time connected online unless it had a built-in richochet or whatever. clearly iOS is meant to fully integrate with live information without compromising its mobility.
Why campaign reporters are behind the curve
google doesn't care, the company that I work for does around 15x your monthly revenue and was banned from adsense and getting in contact with google was impossible, as was finding a resolution (other than "re-apply in 6 months").