skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe this was apparent to everyone using Siri, but today I asked it/her "Who is my girlfriend?"
it replied what is your girlfriends name?
I told it
It then set the alias "Girlfriend" to her and now I can say
"Siri send a message to my girlfriend saying I love you"

which I think is totally awesome. Im late to the Siri party though...
> You should look at performance difference in relevant operations

If you have a link to a Twitter-realistic benchmark I'd be interested see the results.
New "Sauron" Dinosaur Found, Was Big as T. Rex
I've used them both and found rbenv's Just Works factor to be higher for me, personally. There's definitely enough people out there using both tools that neither can be said to be the one that "everybody is already using".
Alright, time to burn some Karma because this isn't realy on topic. It's provoked by a few of the comments on the Engadget page. Easy come, easy go.

It seems like the new iPhone that comes out each year being lighter, thinner, faster with a sharper, brighter screen and better build quality and better software than the previous phone, and every other phone on the planet isn't enough. It's boring. There's a sentiment out there that Apple has to do something radically, magically new that delights us with childlike wonder every year on a consistent production line schedule. If they don't, they're a washed up hasbeen that has betrayed Steve Jobs' legacy.

And no, bringing out devices that are lighter, thinner, faster, etc, etc is not radically new. It's what they did last year, and the year before that, ad nauseam. What did they do for is this month, that nobody has ever done before, is all that counts. Don't give us better. Better is next door to mediocre and only a few steps away from bad. So better might as well be bad. We demand magical!

I honestly don't think I'm straw-manning here. Is that not what the "iPhone 5 is boring" brigade mean? I honestly don't know what to say to that. It's kind of hard to comprehend that grown adults can think about things that way. It mainly seems to affect Apple users too, people who have bought Apple products. It's as though they're disappointed and upset that what they got was only an excellent, high quality product.

Note: I'm not saying Apple haven't made missteps. The iOS 6 release with mapping issues and various other niggles has shown that they're not perfect, but then when were they ever? They've always had their fair share of awkward updates and failed products.
Slax Linux 7.0 packs a KDE live OS into 183MB
He's asking valid questions. I'd ask a succint question: what features can make it more productive to me in comparison with, say, Windows 7 desktop?

> There is no motivation or desire on the part of the developers to sell anything to you,

This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)
Neither of those were top sellers last quarter.
I don't think he actually believes that, but I think his writing style absolutely exudes it. And the fact that he has his own minimalist-styled exclusive blogger network only emphasizes it.

I love the fact that all Svbtle blogs look alike though. Makes it easy to spot and instantly close the tab as being just more privileged valley wankery.
Labeling is a fight about marketing, not science.

I think that's the point...the label will just say GMO, without a scientific explanation of what modifications were made. For example, soybeans can be modified to increase resistance to pesticides or fungal infection, increase production, which may be fine for consumers, but if it is modified to make it taste like a carrot, or to add vitamins, people may object.
The article only states that it's the best selling phone in this quarter. If you're going to add in current and last gen phones, why not do the same for Android? (It probably won't change the numbers all that much, but the point remains).
Microsoft open sources Reactive Extensions
rekonq is not the default KDE browser, and is not shipped with the KDE Software Compilation or KDE Platform.

Instead, it is a valued KDE-community-developed browser available from our "Extragear" repository.

However I will say that even we at KDE are not opposed to configurability in general (especially to the extent listed for GNOME 3 and Unity... as far as I know we don't have a stick up our collective asses regarding the "brand experience").

But we have to maintain patches we accept (e.g. in the case of the task manager). LUCKILY we are quite happy to have even our core components ripped and replaced by something better. E.g. there is Craig Drummond's "Icon Tasks" taskbar available for Plasma (which I use).

As far as SVG themes, that was a 10 steps forward, 1 step back kind of thing... overall the desktop is much improved by having those as an option, even if it makes it more difficult to implement color toning. But if someone were to submit a patch implementing "themed color variations" (so that you as a user could choose the "light" color, "dark" color, etc. and the rest of the theme remains unchanged) then I would be very surprised if that were to be rejected outright.
I believe the major reasons why people were saying "iPhone 5 is boring" is because the iPhone didn't do anything that other manufacturers weren't already doing. iPhone 5 doesn't compete/exist only with other Apple products - it competes with Android and W7. When you tout your latest phone as 'revolutionary' and it's only adding features that have been on other phones for months already, you're gonna get backlash.
It was more of a CDE clone in the late 90s, definitely not as recent as 5 years ago.
Obama's secret weapon is the Ellsworth Toohey effect :-D Basically it isn't his weapon.
Wow, I had forgotten about how disappointed I was when I found out about winmodems. That tempered my fascination with Linux fairly quickly at the time.
Getting Twitter profiles of artists from your last.fm library.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi - Lessons from a Master.
> Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people.

The request for smaller, fancier appliances that consume less power will always be there.

Also, the world outside your PC is moving: JIT VMs in the browsers, computationally hard to decode movies, older analogue technologies moving to computers.

There will always be a request for better computers (for various meaning of "better").
Really awesome work.

Saved me about a month of work! You can count me as a customer.
The Age We Made - BBC World Service Documentary
I'm not saying it's always the rule. It depends on the context. If the context is a group of Ruby/Rails devs who are efficiently building applications in exchange for money, and the new(er) tool is one that:

1.) Ends with the same net result for the developer, and
2.) Adds a little bit of complexity on setup and rules around use, then

why switch? I'm perfectly willing to trade up my development tools, but I want a better net gain before I switch.

Perhaps that net gain will be to keep up with a growing number of devs who use it? We'll see.
This is more about slavery than plankton.

Fertile land does not equal Obama votes.
He didn't say he threw them away -- I assumed he returned them
Startups, Start Your Engines – The First Premium .CO Auction For Startups
The trick is to cultivate a list of people who are unreasonable and then just ask them. Here's a place to start: http://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife
GNOME, and Red Hat projects in general, have a long history of pushing things through with dependency nepotism. GNOME was used to push PulseAudio and Network Manager, Network Manager doesn't work without DBus, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit running, PulseAudio strongly suggests installing and enabling Avahi, Gnome Shell doesn't run outside Mutter, udev can only be built along with systemd and journald, GNOME 3 wants you to initialize the system with systemd otherwise some functionality will be broken, GNOME 3 requires GTK3 which breaks themes for any application running in GTK2, Gvfs only works through Nautilus, etc etc etc...

http://people.freebsd.org/~adamw/gnome_kde_deps/
Yup, this is a good example of pseudoscience --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience
:) I mean "everybody is already using" in the context of most dev area, including my own.

Here's how it usually works: We're coasting along with some tool and doing well, then some dev announces that we're ALL WRONG because another tool is better. Sometimes the tool he's announcing is something like git when we're using TFS, and we switch. Other times, say RVM vs. this right now... I just don't see a big gain.
It's crazy, I know, but some students also work.
Linda Sandvik - Making Things Better
Electronic voting machines are stupid, but I don't believe that's an inherent quality. Seemingly whenever electronic voting machines make the news the underlying problem is one of gross laziness or incompetence on the part of the manufacturer. It took me hours to clean my brain off the walls when I heard about the Diebold / McAfee mashup. [1]

Las Vegas slot machines seem like a perfect archetype (to me, anyway). In trying to look up the security measures I remember from an episode of Modern Marvels I instead ended up with an NY Times opinion piece from 2004 [2] drawing the same conclusion as I. Probably (based on admittedly nothing) the measures cited have become more sophisticated and rigorous
in the past 8 years.

Here are some highlights on slot machine security (as of June 2004):

* All machine software past and present are kept on file by the state

* Spot checks, spot checks, spot checks. Random and often.

* State gaming commissions are constantly looking for new ways to manipulate their machines; the article mentions firing a stun gun at a slot machine (best job ever?)

* Six month vetting process for companies and employees wanting produce gambling hardware/software

* User disputing the machine's actions has the right to an immediate investigation

Note: I am absolutely in favor of maintaining a paper trail for decades regardless of the state of digital solutions.

[1]http://xkcd.com/463/

[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/opinion/gambling-on-voting...
I'm considering getting this to replace my Nexus One. However, the lack of an sd slot and LTE really has me hung up. I'd be using it on T-mobile, though, so the LTE probably won't matter for a little while.

I love the community support for Nexus devices and the only disappointment about the Nexus One for me was that I didn't get until it was already out for 6 months.

Thoughts?
I attended and spoke at the last one of these. Would recommend to anyone who's in London and on HN.
I came up with a way to automatically modify your websites outgoing links with an affiliate code, useful for busy forums. Kind of like a lightweight, self run Skimlinks.

http://www.affililink.com

https://github.com/deanbarrow/Affililink

Edit: When I find some time, I'd really like to improve upon this and document it.
Which is odd: it's always been the same server serving the website whichever domain you came through (afaik).
I applied for a job back in my old industry and now working there. I have a wife and 2.5 year old daughter so in the grand scheme of things it was the only real thing I could do. I will save a bit and learn a bit more and do it smarter next time.
Hey, I wanted to solve a similar issue but I chose a different solution. I'm building an iOS app - it's in it's early stages but I've got limited time to work on it which is a shame.

I've got a few domains that I bought for it which may suit! Drop me a mail if you'd like to exchange ideas, or talk about naming/domains.
> Why would the windows manager be a "brand", rather than the distribution? (Red Hat, Ubuntu).
But GNOME developers are not content with being just a middle man that distributions tear apart to take what they want. That's why they are burning a lot of cycles on making GNOME into an OS by itself.
What is missing from firefox that makes it incompatible with this?
Honestly, I'm a little surprised more people will use their tablets than their smartphones.
So you don't have SFR or an Orange shop near you? I find that hard to believe. They sell the iPhone and the iPad.

Not sure who you are getting your mobile with, but they are the big ones in France.
The author could start to answer the annoyance question by AB testing the plug and looking at reengagement figures and time spent of the two segments. No drop off in time spent or second visits would be a pretty good indication there's no significant annoyance. I think this can be done quite easily with Google Analytics and his AB test library.
Entanglement Could Make Quantum Batteries Almost Perfect
Beginners' Guide To Ubuntu One Personal Cloud
Your question about patents is currently on the second page of "Ask".

Your more recent question about discussion forums is not dead (only resting). Here is the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4754843

Generally, submissions which get no traction disappear down the rankings. Your question about forums sparked no response.

Flagging expedites a submission's fall and your question may have been flagged due to the possibility it would be used to for SEO exercises.
A part which made more sense in the days when you could only read your local newspaper, so you didn't have easy access to the original story.

When the original story is just a click away, a repackager only adds value if he/she expands on the original in some material way -- coming at the story from a different perspective, say, or adding facts or background information that were not present in the original.

This post does none of that. It's a straight-up rewrite of the original, with no new contributions to the story. It makes the same points and even uses the same illustrations as the original. It does cite the original and link to it, but there's nothing in the new piece that would make it a more authoritative version of the story than the old one.

I generally don't oppose people posting links to blogs, but in this case it really does seem like sending people straight to the original post would have been the classier thing to do.
For me personally, the iPhone 5 isn't an option because it has, what I consider to be, big gapping holes that make it unenjoyable for me to use. That I don't own the data I put into apps is a real problem for me. Apple hates the file metaphor but they haven't replaced it with anything else. Apparently they don't see it as a problem, but I do. Another huge problem for me is that if I add a website to the home screen it refreshes every time I open it. This is not the case for tabs in Safari. Just these 2 things is enough for me to keep a 4S for testing but otherwise not using an iPhone as a my daily driver. If these aren't a problem for you then you have nothing to worry about and shouldn't get defensive; the iPhone is just a piece of electronics that you use to get things done, it doesn't need to have its honor defended.
What is so interesting to me is that it passed with 81% support. Seems to be a class example of the "think of the children" argument run amok in that it's impossible to enforce and vague enough to mean that every convicted sex offender is breaking it every day.
And, as Bill Gates is famously quoted, "640K ought to be enough memory for anybody."
I've no idea what the bandwidth caps are like on t-mobile, but the google music streaming service is pretty nice on android, so it's not like you have to fill up the phone SD card with every song you've ever owned.

If you love watching films on your phone (something i never do), I can see the 16GB limit getting annoying though.
Ask HN: I need your advice on marketing and distribution of domcop
Hey guys,

I launched DomCop.com a few months back. I've had lots of great reviews from (paying) customers on the app functionality, but I am having a terrible time reaching out to new customers. I have tried the following channels for distribution.

1. Posting to forums in the seo/domain auction niche - I got most of my customers from here. However, I do not want to spam the forums and therefore this channel becomes very limited.

2. Running banner and text ads on forums - this has surprisingly not been effective on the very forums that customers have converted from regular posts.

3. Google adwords - these are proving to be too costly and are not as effective as forums.

4. Facebook ads - these ads were cheap - but have not been converting.

5. Stumble upon - same as facebook - cheap, but not converting.

I've read on HN that blogging in your niche and contacting other bloggers is a great way of getting good traffic. But, I feel like that would take away the time I could use to add more features (especially ones that current customers have requested for). I am trying to work on SEO as well - but this would take a while before it generates decent amount of organic traffic

Are there any other channels that I am missing out on?

Thank you for your time.

Akash

About DomCop.com - The app provides information on expired domain auctions - verified page rank, SEOmoz and SEMrush data, social stats.
From what I can tell from a broad study of self improvement, the idea of personal character reduces to an abstraction of the training and habits that actually define us.

You can think of it as the difference between "that square way over there is green" and "that square is covered in tiny blue and yellow dots, with some a few reds ones for good measure".

Our brain performs that compression of "myriad behaviors to broad categorization" automatically, by the way, so we have to drum that mental compression with conscious effort.
Link to DomCop - http://www.domcop.com/
The confusion is probably due to the other commentators assuming you knew about Nate's vote share predictions when you didn't.

You don't think you are confusing "the two", since you thought that Nate only had one set of numbers in the first place.

The other commentators see you using vote share results to question winner probabilities, and assume that you're confusing Nate's winner probabilities with Nate's vote share predictions, since it would make more sense to compare vote share results with the vote share predictions.
Fertile land in the south did definitely correlate with Obama votes, as the article made clear.
And that sweet dramatic unveiling of the desktop, swishing across virtual desktops, funky pager, widgets...

Linux was so much fun and personal those days.
Rollable, foldable e-devices coming
please, won't you stop to publish Ars Technica papers? Probably everyone here is subscribed on Ars.
If you throw out strong-form rationality, why would you believe someone has (a) a perfect model; (b) knows when the 'perfect' is missing; and (c) can fix it back to perfect? Empirical evidence of 'imperfection' should not lead you to conclude 'this is stupid, i am smart'. In this regard, and others, there are pretty big differences in worldview between the Nobel prize winners of 2008 and 2009. [1] And what happened in-between? The financial crisis. Is that a co-incidence? Probably not.

The main point of this thread -- about the price of X being one thing or another -- does not (appear to) need a critique of rationality to explain, however. In that regards, it is superflous. Whether this price is 'belief' or 'manipulation' (ie, strategy), the market would be needing to evidence preferences <accurately> for the prefernces to be revealed. Manipulation in this sense is a variation of strategic preferencing.[2] Again, this is a notion more consistent with <hyper rationality> than its opposite. Whether or not Market A and Market B have the same price is also simply explained by lack of common market participants. A textbook 'inefficiency' may result, but again this is not anywhere near a critique of rationality, proper.

Lastly, thinking orthogonally to the orthodoxy is not 'conservative' its actually 'liberal' but this requires omission of capital letters [3] and some sense of history to understand. Which is the larger point about rhetoric. And closer to my personal worldview.

_________

[1] ie, Krugman vs http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/business/economy/13nobel.h...

[2] preferences are </meta> to orthdox economics, as its practised by keynesian-style interventionists and neo-liberals (er, Conservatives) alike.

[3] Liberal is now a modern brand, not a reference point of clear thinking.
Wow! I still have "rasterman.com" memorized because I'd check in once every year or two for the past decade it feels like, to see how it was going. Something about E17 always seemed cool, but I've never used Linux as my primary desktop so I haven't played around with it much. Congrats to the team!
It does appear to be the case.

What amazes me is with all their infrastructure and libraries was that they never made a word processor from their own framework.
Thanks. Ya i know, my games flopped big time :D
Then I don't know why, but it's always been the same for me, my work internet connects fine, but the wireless internet dongle I use at home is really slow with http://news.ycombinator.com
I have a Galaxy Nexus, and I find I don't miss the SD card at all - if I want the data off of it I use a cable, and photos automatically sync over Dropbox.

If you _need_ more space than it comes with, then you'll want something with an SD card, but otherwise I wouldn't worry about it.

Frankly, at this point I wouldn't have any Android phone that wasn't a Nexus. So when I replace my Galaxy Nexus (another year or so) then I'll be looking to see what the successor to the Nexus 4 is. If I was buying next week I'd definitely get a Nexus 4.
> The ability to tilt desktop widgets at odd angles, mentioned by Linus, is utterly pointless. So the article has it right - they ought to start listening to user input.

I have been a KDE4 user for a few years now, and I didn't even know this was possible. Clearly, the mentioned functionality is there, but does not get in your way (as in, you do not accidentally end up with your widgets all in crooked positions). What is wrong with that?
These girls banded together and built something. Whether it's a rousing success or ends up being a bad idea, there is something positive to be said for their efforts. If you consider the cultural context in which they are operating, they deserve praise for this.

Heck, we praise people who build failed webapps here in the US, in part because it's an exercise in execution. When people build new things, it's great even if it doesn't work out, because who knows what it could lead to?
> but in this case it really does seem like sending people straight to the original post would have been the classier thing to do.

I think the poster has said it was an oversight; that the links to the original article were missed.

In this case it would have been nice to post to the original article, but as you say they're pretty similar.

I think it's much worse when some document is released, and then eight different tech blogs have a minimal but opinionated write up which each get posted to HN, and then people don't reply in the threads but on their own blogs, and then the tech blogs pick up each other's coverage.
The 5 best collaboration tools
Reviews of the 5 best collaboration tools available.
Pretty sure he is more than just a designer. He's the mastermind behind consolekit (now abandoned I guess in favor of logind or some such from systemd).
Galaxy S3 claims top spot in smartphones worldwide
I planned my departure in my head for a long long time but never got any traction with side-projects - which is understandable in hindsight. Then one day I got sat down with the boss and tried to hide the grin from my face as they explained the redundancy package I was being offered (7 months salary).

So, it was planned but I was still pushed in the end - and it was great.