skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bussard was a genius who couldn't get funding. Less than a year before he died of cancer, he asked Google for a paltry sum to continue his research, shortly after the government cut him off. I have wondered why Google didn't jump on this. Do you know? And now, ironically, the Navy, the very entity which tossed him out, has not only picked up his research, but has apparently gone all quiet about the results.

Here's the video of his excellent (and, in retrospect, sad) presentation at Google. I say "sad" because it shows an intellectual giant, nearly on his deathbed, practically begging an Internet giant, for what was really the tiny amount he needed to continue with what had become his life's work. Anyway, it's an intense, fast-paced, insightful, and (likely) final public look into his mind, his work, and his character.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU (Should Google Go Nuclear?)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8 (archive copy)

UPDATE: I found a good paper covering the above talk. It's a 25-page PDF, of less than 2MB, with color photos and charts from the video.

http://askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/Should%20Google%20Go%20Nuc...
Fighter planes are very different than any other craft "driven" by people. They are so fast and so strong that if you give the stick a good yank while flying one, the forces involved will kill you (unless of course good fly-by-wire software knows your limits and intervenes).

Its not at all far fetched to assume if the plane suddenly rolled at its maximum rate that it would pull the pilot's spine apart.
Note to everyone: it's career week at MIT.

Usually, a Silicon Valley investor at MIT during career week is trying to help their portfolio find staff. Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and more are here for that purpose, but that doesn't seem to be this event's goal. Can you clarify?
The problem isn't merely bad directions. It simply DOESN'T WORK. The defectiveness of this application is so profound that it stands to embarrass Apple quite a bit. For example, see how the sign in the screen grab says "6.1 miles"? Well, that never changes. You can drive and drive all day, and that 6.1 will not decrement.

And see how it says "for U.S. 101"? Well after you turn onto the 101, it will still say that. It never moves on to the next step of your trip.

It also doesn't recalculate if you deviate from the route. It also lets you drive right off the map, and doesn't scroll to keep your position in view.

Just incredible.
The level of fragmentation of display targets is approaching Android levels. The whole point of retina being a straight linear doubling of pixels was that you only had two device form factors to worry about: iPhone and iPad. Now you have to worry about iPhone, tall iPhone, iPad and, soon, mini-iPad (same aspect, but different physical/touch target size).
Totally agree, never lie to anyone about what you are doing. In fact, I agree that letting them know at the right time and doing so in a way they know you are giving them 100% while you are in the office does ease the transition later.

Also second the attorney, accountant advice. I would add to that find another person that is further along in the process, or an exec, or other mentor you can ping for questions ideas. And when it comes to any attorney, question what they tell you, don't think just because they have the JD they know what is best for your business. I have found most respect that I ask lots of questions. And I also found it helps to have different attorneys that specialize in specific areas of law. i.e. Copyright/Patent is different than general council for everyday stuff.
Except it doesn't really work that way. I'm texting in WhatsApp when I get an email. I open the email from the notification area, read it, hit back, it exits to the home screen and not WhatsApp.

When I already have a home button, why should the back button be used more for home (besides the actions in the app) rather than "up" a level to a previous state like it's supposed to?
1970's dollars are not the same as todays. Further down on the Wikipedia page:

> In 2009, NASA held a symposium on project costs which presented an estimate of the Apollo program costs in 2005 dollars as roughly $170 billion.
You obviously didn't try to navigate a route.
A big issue is document security...you will have to convince companies to trust you with confidential documents.
For some reason no one has remarked on one of my biggest problems with Jelly Bean - that Google no longer lets you opt-out of being tracked. There are two location services, which used to be called coarse (uses names of nearby Wifi networks and such) and fine (GPS). Google now won't let you use coarse without also opting in to having your location sent to Google at all times, whether you are using any application or not. So, for example, Google Maps doesn't work unless you opt in to being tracked at all times. Google Now doesn't work at all unless you opt-in to being tracked at all times. Etc.

In prior versions of Android, being tracked 24/7/365 was a separate checkbox you could opt out of while retaining full location functionality when you desired it, e.g. for Google Maps. No longer.

No one in the press seems to have picked up on this unadvertised feature change of Jelly Bean.
Gruber is a great writer but a terrible reviewer. His recent writing completely lacks any balance. It's obvious that he loves Apple and doesn't give a fair review. I don't have any issue with people liking Apple products but I don't understand why Hacker News upvotes his one-sided blog posts so highly.
It's not nearly as bad as Android, if only because new display profiles mostly obsolete the old ones -- there's a clear progression. The mini-iPad, however, may be the first device to break this rule.
No I suspect you are the minority. Streetview is nice but hardly critical.

And transit integration is important ONLY for those in the US but poorly implemented/not existent in the rest of the world. Most public transport providers I've seen have had their own dedicated apps for transit for years now.
Funny, I've bought every iPhone to date except this one. In fact, I went out and bought a Galaxy Nexus instead. I did it because Apple's fascination with perfecting form and design has somehow morphed into this inability to innovate.

The primary reason I switched was that one day, I opened up my home screen and realized it hasn't changed in 5 years. We still open apps one at a time, each app allotted a sort of pseudo background API that allows minimal functionality. And God those apps are pretty. And the FPS is amazing. And the fluidity of the experience is breathtaking... but at the end of the day, my device is about acquiring information. I want to know when my train is coming, I want to save map info when I don't have a connection, I want to know that when I leave for work and hit the subway, Pocket auto downloaded all those articles I saved for later.

Apple still maintains the best hardware, hands down. It's not even comparable. But it's irrelevant if the apps that reside on that phone are completely crippled by a draconian sense of design and control. If the phone has a "workstation tower processor" inside it, why the hell can't they let up and let the thing actually PROCESS more information?

I'll miss the beauty of it, that's for sure, but unless Apple gets its act together with background processing and figuring out how to actually do cloud anything right, I'm moving to Google.
Ask HN: What site has the best design right now?
Black iPhone 5: a beautiful design failure
Personally, I'm disappointed. The thing is, I know I'm totally wrong because the iphone 5 is such a beautiful beast and probably the best smartphone out there.

Still, what I liked the most about the iphone, and the ipad, and the macbook, was how innovative it was. Everything was new. New concepts, new icon, new look and feel.. a whole refreshing new feeling.

I feel like the iphone5 is mostly a simple hardware update. I.e every now and then, I'll switch my old memory for a new one 2x faster. It's not innovative or original.. it's just faster memory.

So, this is why I'm disappointed. Not because the iphone5 is not good (it's great!). It just didn't satisfied my WOW factor.
I think if you read in between the lines you can understand the generally underwhelmed reaction to the iPhone 5. There isn't anything on the iPhone 5 that feels like a step forward for mobile computing. The biggest change is the change in screen size, which is awkward and driven by keeping up with consumer expectation.
You forgot about commercialization of fusion ;)
and hyperloop...
and in his case we would additionally have permanent space colony, on Moon, Mars, deep space and one to be created in Venus ;)
For being a review of the iPhone 5, notice that it is only focused on the hardware. There is no talk of iOS 6 at all.

And personally, I think that iOS 6 is a disappointment and no one wants to admit it. The hardware is eclipsing the software.
> Where are those going to appear, and how will people access them?

One would assume the iOS simulator will allow you to pick the taller aspect ratio on boot.
Here's an insightful comment from the blog page, about cpu and memory usage:

I downloaded patricks fork and got 4300r/s with maxprocs 1 with the go version, out the box.

Recompiling and running with gomaxprocs=100, i got 4400r/s.

mvn deploy and running auth-1.0.jar on JDK 1.7 on my box similarly peaked out at 3100r/s.

It's worth noting though, that I was using patricks httperf bench.sh modification, and it appears that httperf was cpu bound in both cases, with the kernel and postres taking about half a core between them.

Using wrk, by contrast, spun main (the go program) up to 2.5 cores, and 6000r/s. Java under wrk lit all cores for a time, then hit `Exception in thread "async-log-appender-0" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space` `Caused by: ! org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: FATAL: sorry, too many clients already`

A bit more investigation and tuning later, using 10 clients `wrk -c 10 -r 100000 -t 4 -H 'Authorization: basic apikey_value' http://localhost:8080/authenticate` Java was spinning out 10kr/s. Go was limited to 6kr/s. It's worth noting some more details however: Go only ever spun up two postgres forks, whereas java spun up 10. There's scope for optimization there. Go used 8mb of ram, whereas java was sitting on 130mb after a few runs. The Java version, cranking out at 10kr/s was maxing the kernel out on one core, so that's probably approaching the practical limit for single machine tests.

I suspect putting a load balancer in front of a couple of instances of the go program would allow you to totally smash the java performance, given that it lit 2 cores at 6kr/s, and java lit 8 at 10kr/s. The memory usage tradeoff is significant - JVM sitting at 130mb and Go sitting at 8mb. Clearly everyone needs to draw their own conclusions on this, for their own purposes. The JVM solution is carrying a stats server, a ton of other tooling and so on. The Go system has some - pprof was included, but it's limited by comparison. Arguably gdb and so on can actually be of real use in the Go case, but that's also an exercise for the reader.

Interesting any which way you look at it. There are a lot of other interesting side effects (that need working out) in both programs as evidenced by this simple testing. Postgres also needs some tuning if you really want to slam this with anything remotely resembling a real world scale test.

My tests were done on OSX 10.8 12B19 on a 2.3GHz i7 wiht 8GB of DDR3 at 1333MHz, an intel 510 SSD, totally untuned postgres. The machine is a Macbook from whatever year that is.

Here's wrk, for anyone looking for it: https://github.com/wg/wrk
He's biased, but he DOES cater to his audience (who are also potentially biased). I was really curious to hear what he thought about the enlarged screen, for example, because I suspect his views and opinions closely align with my own.
It literally sickens me.
Yes, that's obviously impractical. But there are people who have that knowledge, having worked with the various candidates. If you can come up with a reliable way of getting that information out of their heads and into your database it would be hugely valuable. I recognize (and mentioned) that it's not a trivial problem.
What kind of codepath causes systems to die when crossing the date line? Shouldn't all times be in UTC, and certainly any change of timezone is a display-only issue? What would be the point of using local timezones for any "systems" type stuff?
>Pocket auto downloaded all those articles I saved for later.

Good point, I have no idea why don't they just push to iOS devices on my account.
This here is my favorite. http://stackoverflow.com/a/6066102/3461
Perhaps Google should charge $5 or $10 or even more for turn by turn. Good turn by turn GPS + traffic updates is a killer app for many phone users.
What would constitute a "step forward for mobile computing"? For me, it'd be having the computing power of MacBook Pro on an iPhone. For example, I would hook up—or more likely, wirelessly connect—this hypothetical iPhone to a desktop monitor and run OS X. Arguably, this is 3-5 years down the line and only if Apple pursues this line of thinking.
> If the phone has a "workstation tower processor" inside it, why the hell can't they let up and let the thing actually PROCESS more information?

Because of power. It may have "workstation tower processing" power, but it's not hooked up to a wall socket. Power consumption is the gigantic bugaboo that plagues mobile devices, and that (in my opinion) justifies Apple's policies about background processing on iOS.
Well, to be fair, Gruber is writing a love story here, not really an unbiased review. So, no, he doesn't blow away the other reviews, (As an unbiased review, Mossberg's is pretty good) but, for us lovers of all things Apple, his is the review we look for to give us that dopamine rush of reinforced sense of self worth from using Apple products.

I've been hitting refresh every five minutes on daringfireball since 7:00.

Note - I think his is the most well written of all the writeups so far. He put a lot of effort into this essay. I wish he did more like these, though I realize it must take a lot out of him.

He also demonstrates a bit of useful insight/balance here, that you wouldn't expect from what should be a purely apple-biased review, e.g. from the section on displays "Apple has a lead here, which is interesting, because they buy these displays from companies like LG."
I'm not sure if you're right about this change but it doesn't really matter. Cops are all over location data from cell towers, the phone companies don't even require subpoenas to give them access to it. And there's absolutely no way to opt out of it except by not using a cell phone.
You know, after disbelieving what I said about A/B testing only to find out that I was right, you might have adjusted your expectations of me. I've written formal proofs before. I have published papers in mathematics. I know what's involved. Please spare me the lecture.

In this case none of the three possibilities that you stated are correct. I have an algorithm about which the following statement is true:

Suppose that users arrive according to a Poisson process. Suppose further that the random reward function of putting them in to different versions is variable but satisfies the following properties:

1. There is a static upper bound on the expected value of each version.

2. There is a static upper bound on the variance of each version.

3. The cumulative distribution of the reward function is integrable. (We don't even need continuity!)

4. One of the versions at all times has an expected return that is at least epsilon greater than all other versions

Then I have a MAB algorithm which achieves logarithmic regret in the long run. It is only worse by a constant factor than MAB algorithms for the case with fixed returns. That factor is likely to be somewhere in the neighborhood of sqrt(2), but I can't guarantee that.

Those are limit statements, but you can get more concrete bounds in the finite case. In principle it should be possible to derive an explicit formula - you tell me the bounds on expected value and variance for the versions, and the size of epsilon, and I can put an explicit bound on the odds that the best version is winning after N observations.

The principle behind the proof is exactly what it was for the A/B test case. The assumption of Poisson processes allows us to subselect equal samples from the versions for the purposes of statistical inference, and make provable statistical statements about how the behavior of the statistical sample allows us to make inferences about which version is best, even though actual conversion behavior is constantly changing.
I'm surprised by the screen size change, too; it has the drawback of reduced thumbability, but without seriously increasing readability.

Because my Japanese iPhone 4S can't do tethering, and iOS maps/navigation is horrible, I just deal with carrying a Galaxy Nexus as well.

The tradeoff is really simple; the iPhone lets you access the whole screen with your thumb, while the Nexus lets you see more usable info with your eyes.

I found that I tended to pull out the Galaxy to read things (articles, this website, etc), even though the screen isn't as high-quality. Just because it is bigger.

With the iPhone 5, it seems Apple traded away the thumb-awesome but just adding 176 pixels to the top doesn't get you much more reading-awesome.
Disclaimer: Android user.

Every time I'm up to get a new phone I come this close to switching to iPhone. My wife has one, and I've switched to Macs. But there are certain utilitarian functions that keep me on Android.

As of the last two design revs, though, I also have an aesthetic aversion to the iPhone. Gruber describes the jewelry or fine watch-like quality very well. But I don't wear jewelry or fine watches. (Ok, I wear a wedding ring, but it's a plain band.)

Maybe I'm just a philistine, but there's something about old original Motorola Droids that are at this point beaten up and worn that have a really nice aged, aesthetic weight to them.

It's a sentiment similar to the one Khoi Vinh lays out here: http://www.subtraction.com/2007/07/16/designed-det but not quite, because I think smart phones become obsolete too quickly for 'designed deterioration' to be realistic.

Maybe it's more that I don't want to feel that precious about these objects. I like to be able to not have to worry that much about taking care of my phone, to be able to toss it around without worrying about damage.

Or maybe it's just an emotional, class-based aversion to luxury goods because I grew up in working class conditions.
Exactly. His writing is way too sweet on Apple. I ordered the new iPhone and when I got to the end at the part where I'm supposed to buy it just because it says "iPhone" on the back, I was nearing the point of gagging.

The rationalizing of why they would switch from 3.5" to 4" when they always make the right choices was particularly a low point for me, also. I guess I knew what I was getting myself into when I clicked the link, though.

And shockingly, downvotes for calling a spade a spade.
I want to make a point of clarification about something I wrote above. I wrote:

> any FTL drive can be used to make "closed time-like loops", which would allow travelers to meet up with their own past selves.

That should have read "closed causal curves", or perhaps "closed space-like curves". I made the same typo on another occasion or two in this thread.

"Closed time-like curves" do also exist, at least theoretically, and they also let you visit your our own past history, but they do not involve FTL travel. Instead, they are artifacts of General Relativity, in which causality is violated without traveling faster than the speed of light. They typically involve traveling around certain kinds of very massive objects. Another kind involves traveling in a very very large circle at close to the speed of light.
I prefer the Yelp integration, which gives me reasonably reliable ratings, reviews, and hours, to Google's albeit larger dataset. The 3D buildings also pack a strong "wow" punch, though more how flying around satellite view on the first iPad did than in any practical sense.

That said, the map "feel" is still clunky - I don't need 30th St, 31st St, 32nd St, 33rd St, etc. individually labelled and its iconography gets visually crowded.
If the only nice thing you can say about a phone is the camera and how it feels, not to mention devote at least 2 paragraphs to how pedantic Apple is about design and it paints a familiar picture. Apple are losing at their own game, the game they started and now a game that others are finishing for them.

The only great thing about the new iPhone is the fact that the iOS 6 operating system is comes with has an awesome vector maps feature that blows Google Maps out of the water. I'm not prepared to spend $1000 AUD on buying an iPhone 5 when it doesn't offer anything significantly new, where's the NFC chip?
nice really like it... could one do something along the lines of hotel rooms?
This isn't "reviewing", it's spin. There's not much to talk about with this review, and Gruber's talent is for making the boring stuff sound great. So he talks about the color gamut of the display. He fills space with nice-sounding pablum like (yes, this is a direct quote): "Apple boasts during last week’s event that they now measure the precision of the iPhone 5 assembly in microns. A micron is one-millionth of a meter." And he does this repeatedly through a long, winding, elegant post.

That doesn't tell you if it's a better phone than the 4S (or the GSIII, or whatever). All it does is give you a good reason to want it more than the 4S.
as roughly $170 billion.

So multiply by nine then.
Slashdot and others gobbled by Dice
"...Because of this delay and the increased complexity of the jet's third and final software block, Lockheed Martin and the Defense Department have added additional resources to fielding Block III software..."

Adding more people to a delayed software project, now where did I hear that before?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
I have an idea for HN. If there were tags on the links like entertainment it would be easier to see how valuable the content was a at a glance before I clicked. Better still, what if there were tags and the users could vote on the tag relevancy, removing the tag if a certain threshold was passed.
The iphone 5 will sell like crazy given the large number of people approaching their contract expiration with an earlier version of the device. It only makes sense for most to continue to invest in the ecosystem they have already invested. The average joe is not going to take the jump,in my opinion that is.Ideally the phone I really want to upgrade to should have the Android Jelly Bean's UI with iOS' ecosystem (read apps) combined in a Nokia Lumia phone. I would pay a LOT of money for that !!!
I am! Will have an email off to your shortly!
Said Dan Graziano...

"Dan joins the BGR team as the Android Editor, covering all things relating to Google’s premiere operating system. ..."
Are you sure? I was under the impression (CM10 on SIII) that you could opt out of wifi based location services and choose to only use GPS satellites for GMaps.
Many think that intellectual property isn't property. Since it doesn't behave like property and is in fact a government granted monopoly.
Someone did persuade them to shelve Ada... and then they get into this mess ;)

They are unlucky - there is no better alternative in writing this kind of software than Ada [well, there is SPARK but it is subset of Ada with annotations].
Indeed, imagine being able to develop in XCode for iPhone, on an iPhone.
iOS 6 has been out in beta since June so no real need for Gruber to review it now.