skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Key Pieces of history in the Siri vs Google Voice Search

- Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project called CALO which was primarily designed to help the military handle information in the form of MS Office documents/Outlook email. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-appl...

- CALO was an almost 10 year project run out of SRI but executed primarily at Stanford,Berekley and the University of Washington. Many PhD's and post docs on the west coast in Machine Learning cut their teeth on some element of CALO. It's influence is pervasive throughout the Valley.

- Apple does not have in-house voice recognition technology and instead licences technology from Nuance.

- Nuance is essentially a holding company for all the commercial voice recognition technology from the 90's and 00's except what MSFT picked up from the TellMe acquisition and what Google developed under Mike Cohen.

- Mike Cohen is a Nuance co-founder who nurtured voice recognition tech at Google for many years before leaving in 2011 but Google's current voice recognition technology is largely the result of research products he ran.(http://9to5google.com/2012/05/23/manager-of-speech-technolog...)

To Summarize. Siri and Google Voice search share a common lineage. Google is better position to improve the technology because they are not relying an existing vendor and acquisitions for key pieces of technology but instead they have been gestating internal groups specializing in both semantics and voice to text internally for many years.
Same with Windows Defender.
For the command line inclined, I stumbled upon a gem the other day

http://superuser.com/a/483464

describes a function sleep_until , which will wait until a certain time to execute following commands. It's great for ad-hoc delayed execution.
These can be very hard things to do when you're depressed. It helps if you have someone motivating you. I'm on my way out of a pretty serious slump and the same things have helped me as this article has described. I've been surrounded by positive family members, I've been on a generic of Lexapro, I've been running/jogging/fast-walking two miles a day and I've been reminding myself that I didn't feel this way a year ago and that in a year I might feel completely better again.

Anyone who's ever been depressed knows that even on a good day, just thinking about your depression can evoke panic and sadness and a "relapse". I'm using the Seinfeld calendar system. I try to keep up a streak of good days and use that to motivate and reassure me. (Frankly, the fact that I even clicked on this topic and wrote a comment means I'm feeling better. I had to skim and mentally skip over much of HN during the weeks after Aaron's suicide. :( )
On the iPad? Try entering your username in all lower case. On the Web, I dunno.
Six months with Meteor: Why the future of the web is real-time
Dan Brown is one of the most popular writers on Earth.
I'm snowed in and working from home right now, but I know I'd get twice as much done in the office and I feel a lot more connected to the product when I'm in the office.

Maybe if I worked at home more often I'd have a more stable set-up here with better (multiple + larger) monitors and a workspace I can think in, but as it is, any days I work from home I feel like I'm running about 60%.

On the other hand, 2.5hours less commute means longer working for less stress.
My brother’s life, unraveled
I think that, like the taboo topic mentioned in the title, the key to success for each person is individual moderation. A little bit of X works for some, a lot works better for others, and maybe not doing X at all is the amount you need. For me it's probably 80 home / 20 office for personal happiness and work life balance.
Most people argue that people who work from home are more productive, because of the lack of interruptions and surrounding distractions. Of course, for that productivity boost to be maintained, you also need to resist the temptations of HN, cat gifs, and daytime TV.
What on earth is going on here? 🔴҈҈҈҈̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚҉̚
Google, you are a company that makes billions of dolars and I'm nobody to tell you what to do buy maybe you should add this to your CSS:

.st, a {
display: inline-block;
overflow: hidden;
}

Hacker news should do the same thing but with .title, .comment and .comhead
The comparisons are not meant to be parallel. Try looking in context of the parent comment.
I just tried to read it, and had to quit when it started spouting all the pseudo religious advice as fact, and as a replacement for scientific inquiry.

But that's just my opinion.
Siri isn't about voice search. It's about voice-initiated tasks. Sometimes that's search, but sometimes it's a reminder, or a calendar appointment, etc. The innovation is in that distinction and in the context awareness. [1] And that truly is innovation. Regardless of where it came from. If/As Siri is expanded, it's going to become a Big Deal.

And Google's going to deliver something similar. Something beyond literal transcription and voice search, because what Siri presents really is an innovative improvement.

And as to the question of Apple buying Siri vs developing it -- where does that argument end? How could we possibly apply it fairly and objectively? Shall we wave off all of Android as Google's innovation, simply because Google bought it? How many improvements and integrations would it take to (dis)qualify an innovation as being fairly creditable to the current owner? How could we even know what the new owner 'created' vs what these acquired firms had in development at the time of purchase? Does Apple's SoC line count or not count, given they bought PA Semi, but we have no idea what they did pre- or post-acquisition? How in the world is anyone outside capable of knowing? It's essentially impossible for an outside party to fairly apply in a comparison between two companies.

The selective application of that qualifying logic winds up looking like nothing more than making excuses for whatever doesn't fit our preconceived positions.

[1] Being able to refine/adjust a command without restating the entire thing: e.g. the whole example of "make an appointment for 1 tomorrow" "here's your appointment, shall I create it" "wait, make that 2". To say nothing of the detection of things like scheduling conflicts in the first place, where the conversational context-awareness truly shines. i.e. It's not just simple input, it's an 'intelligent' exchange in the pursuit of the task.
Near Albany, here. Wednesday nights don't work for me, but glad to see there's some more startup and technology events happening in the Capital Region.

Troy seems to be the place where a lot of the area startups are focused, with some more in Saratoga and Albany. There were also a few coworking spaces trying to open up in the area, haven't heard much news on them for a year or so.

If you get an email list setup for future events let me know! matthias [at] 2helixtech
Great Post!I must absolutely read this Zen and the Art ...

Also, I have never played tennis but I read the book 'The inner game of Tennis' (W. Timothy Gallwey) and it was a very enlightening experience for me.
It seems some of these books somehow use the subject matter purely as a parable or metaphor that is so powerful, and they shine a light on a very core aspect of being.
I recommend the 'inner game of tennis' to anyone , even if you never hit a single ball in your life ...
Ask HN: Hash#path_exists? method [ruby]
Hi guys, i just write this method: http://gist.github.com/mrThe/5143746

Why?
Becouse i can write BaseController method like this:

def check_params!(path, exception = "Not enough params")
raise exception unless params.deep_symbolize_keys.path_exists?(path)
end

And use it like this in needed controller action:

check_params!({:user => [:email]}, "No email")

instead of

raise "No email" unless params[:user] && params[:user][:email]

What do you think about this? Is it good idea?

/related to Ruby On Rails, i write some RESTful api app and every time will check input params.
The argument has very little to do with drugs. It barely even has anything to do with working from home.

You may find that you have other personal preferences in addition to maximizing shareholder value.
The Verizon plan is actually listed incorrectly. If you have a smartphone you have to pay an extra $40 for "line access", which brings Verizon to a whopping $100/mo.
The most useful parts of Siri for me are time and location-based reminders, locating friends, and alerting me when a friend goes somewhere. All of this was in Apple's version of Siri, and as far as I know isn't duplicated by tossing text into Google.
SSL on HN no longer supports RC4 ciphers, see BEAST Attack and the full report on

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=news.ycombina...
I don't get what's supposed to happen. To me it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/CMwdLNg.png
It's kind of what I expected, but all the comments here are actually debating the Are you more productive? question, and the point of the post is that I really don't care anymore.

Try examining the other part of the equation: Are you happier? If the answer is no, then WFH probably isn't for you. But, if the answer is yes, perhaps productivity isn't so important?
The issue here seems pretty unrelated to whether or not it's a troll plaintiff.
Chip Heals Self After Blast From Frickin' Laser
If I'm not mistaken, Verizon charges you that $60 + $40 for each phone. So for just a solo user, it'd be $100.
Very cool use of transitions, one of the many fields where d3 really rocks.
However, I've always wondered if word trees are really usefull... Sure it makes nice things with the Luther King speech or extract from the Bible.
if you want to sync music with the phone it's a disaster.

This was indeed an Achilles heal of Android three years ago. Now it is a complete non-issue for the majority of users, and iTunes is becoming as much an albatross as a benefit.
Retrieving Data From localStorage
How to produce a downloadable file from the data you store in localStorage.
JavaScript Unit Testing on Steroids
I've learned a lot from the NLTK library, but unfortunately NLTK is terribly slow. Nevertheless, it is a fantastic place for beginners to start with text processing and learn from as the documentation is superb. However eventually one may want to start digging into the NLTK source to rewrite necessary functions using multiprocessing if they plan to process any "big" textual datasets.
My finding with D3 is that it chooses to give you power at the expense of ease. So you can do almost anything, but very little is simple. For most of it, you pretty much have to make all the shapes yourself with SVG, then use D3 to tie their dimensions and location to the data. So you have to know SVG from the get go. That's not a problem. It's a little weird with what it considers CSS stying vs node properties, but is otherwise straightforward enough. As long as you go into learning D3 with this in mind, and don't come at it as equivalent to other user friendly graphing libraries, it's amazing.
An infographic that's 'responsive' using Responsive Design
It does - thank you! I reinvest the (little) money I get from those into... you guessed it. More books. I started reviewing them here:

http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/

And where appropriate, like on this thread, I mention them here - but only the good ones, which certainly aren't all of them. So I think you do get a little bit back from your click - thanks!
You may not care but your employer might.
Making cloud computing more efficient
Never worked with XCode, but I can't understand why anyone would like Eclipse. It might be powerful but it's also buggy, slow and complicated.

Besides that I'll just repeat what was that here and what's said in pretty much every discussion mentioning Eclipse: IntelliJ Idea.
This is really intuitive! I never even knew my car had this port. If only they could support Android sooner, I'd preorder right now.
Show HN: We made an app to monetize Facebook Pages
Other, viable (and possibly clean) solutions: Solar electric. Solar thermal. Thorium.

Not every source of energy _must_ involve burning stuff and releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the
local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of
using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on
roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.

These are all ways that you can spend money to help people, and as someone who is rich (globally speaking) this is a good approach. But if you care about how far your giving goes [1] then you can do better via carefully evaluated charities like GiveDirectly [2] or the AMF [3].

[1] and you should: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...

[2] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-dir...

[3] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF
Something I wondered once: If one were to have a go at sanitizing Unicode input (e.g., for a forum), what would be a sensible limit on the number of diacritics to allow, without interfering with languages that need them?
If you really want to be picky about that sort of thing, Android wasn't even a pseudo-Blackberry OS-looking, D-Pad-controlled OS when Google bought it.

In other words, anything notable about Android today was created at Google, from the kernel up to the UI to the frameworks to all the little features all these Android "switchers" are raving about.
You're probably more productive since - during your downtime - at home you're doing something that makes you feel better vs. at work doing something you don't really care about. When you return to your "work" activity, you're probably better able to focus. Plus, while doing housework, you might mull over whatever you were stuck on and come up with a solution.
So why does RedHat seem to get a pass with GNUists when they do similar things, such as with writing systemd instead of patching upstart?
I am an Android user, and I complain about the autocorrect (and keyboard) frequently. Maybe the iPhone would be the same for me, but others appear to breeze through typing on the iPhone, while I encounter a constant stream of backing up to fix typos, etc.

And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? Is that too much to ask? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.
France Refers Skype to Prosecutors
Ars Technica did a series recently on things that Android should borrow from iOS and things that iOS should borrow from Android:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/five-features-ios-shoul...
Are there any RTS games which could be used to play out Red vs. Blue? Seems like Iran paid attention, and they've been developing doctrine and hardware based on Millenium Challenge. If I were the US, I would be developing weapons and tactics against Van Riper's. (Like stealth drones that can target motorcycle messengers.)
You mean cigarette smoke?

Yes, I live in NYC.
I wish you good luck with your business. I offer a free NLP API as a web service (kbsportal.com, written from scratch in Clojure) that unfortunately gets little use.

There are very good open source NLP libraries like Stanford NLP, OpenNLP, and NLTK. I think the opportunity for business might be in building custom language models for customers based whatever domains they deal with (e.g., medicine, housing, real estate, etc.)
"Windows and OS X are years ahead"

Really? How?

Not sure I've seen it, but then I haven't used OSX since snow-leopard. Genuinely interested in what you think I might be missing out on.
Try now? I was previously loading some datasets directly from Many Eyes, but I'm using my own copies now to relieve load on their servers.
I read it first when I was in my early 20s. I seem to re-read it about every 5 years. Though some of the language is dated, I find the philosophical musing important enough to take the time to refresh in my mind. Finally, the "me" that I bring to the book is different every time I pick it up for the next re-reading...which is to say, I find that I relate to the text differently over time.
> And some of the android phones (like the flagship nexus 4) don't support transfer via USB?

What? I have the Nexus 4 here and I'm 99% sure I transfered files over USB in the 1h before I installed a custom ROM. Additionally I've never heard that complaint before.
Same here. Crashes in Chrome. I wonder if that could be exploited...
I'm still not sure about that, I still tend to equate native apps to native apps as you traditionally saw them on desktop or laptop computers when considering downloading them.

People love hoarding things, and downloading them with the "I'm going to be super efficient with this new tool!" thinking when in fact they barely even touch it after having downloaded it. My brother's iphone now has I think 6 full pages of apps... and I'm pretty sure a lot of times he spends more time searching for the app he's looking for than he would have to spend simply opening up chrome and typing in the URL.

I'm also worried that if you give these companies access to your phone by going native they're going to continue getting sneakier and sneakier to try to get your attention in artful ways to ultimately sell you stuff (or sell your information to others). The power lies with the user if he sets the boundaries, and indeed, I believe he would be best served by making the decision of keeping the web on the web.

My question is: how can we make the web experience better, so it can meet the native experience headway? How much time will it take to get there until the web experience is truly comparable or better than the native experience?
Wow, and here I was considering switching to Verizon to save $10/mo. Fixed.
With their planned "helicopter like inaccuracy", could they just land it on a barge out in the middle of the Atlantic instead?
It’s not really, if nearly all of your income is in the top income bracket getting taxed at that rate. And if most of your income isn’t in the top bracket, why earn that income at all if at least 91% is going to be stolen from you and the marginal return is so low?
BitTorrent Live is a powerful new web-based live streaming technology.
Amazing history, thanks!

Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project

Interesting example of how a substantial innovation (like Siri) yet again does not come from a private company, but from a R&D or such funded project without a short-term capitalist adgenda. Also I'd bet that this fact is largely unknown; this I'd understand is also characteristic. -- No wonder we're having problems getting public funding for "actual" new tech.
Strategy pattern in Javascript
http://sokolmichael.com/posts/2013-03-08-strategy-design-pattern-in-javascript
Aren't RFID small in terms of storage size? How many bits could each RFID store?

Also, they tend to be mostly passive, so it's just a big string that you present to the computer, rather than a decent challenge / response.

The C/R is what makes the article interesting, and it's what's holding me back from buying a Yubikey. (Which does a convoluted form of C/R, but on Windows.)
So basically its just a QuakeCon?
You are right, this project has _zero_ dependency on any other external JavaScript code. Those are native AngularJS directives.
Syncing works pretty well with MediaMonkey [1] though I'm not sure what part of it's syncing features are in the free version.

[1] http://www.mediamonkey.com/
This is what it looks like for me: http://i.imgur.com/ppMYz6c.png
I hope that nodejs debian maintainers will package it into sid soon. v0.8 was never there.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=692312
Whoa! First time I've heard of using ligatures to render meaningful text as icons. That's a pretty cool hack!

Probably not fit for mainstream use though - hard to maintain, especially if you factor in i18n...
YC Startup 500friends Adds $5M for Social Loyalty Platform
"What can we do next to screw up Linux?"
this is the biggest misconception when it comes to clinical depression... that you can or did beat it. You can never or will never beat clinical depression, only suppress it. Beating something is finite and means that it can never happen again. The author gives great advice in the article about what steps he did to suppress this bout of depression, though if he doesn't stay the course chances are it will come back. The scary thing about clinical depression is, even if you continue to do the things that worked in the past to suppress it, it can still come back.

The one piece of advice that he doesn't give (or he might have and i'm just not catching it) is realizing that you have to listen to the people around you when they tell you that you look depressed. At that point, you need to get help immediately so you don't fall further down the hole.

btw... I'm not a doctor or anything. Let's just say that I have extensive experience with clinical depression and bipolar disorder.
The kernel doesn't have a stable ABI, don't expect Canonical to get stable ABI's for Mir. And the fact it is meant to use SurfaceFlinger drivers gives two degrees of instability to contend with, because if Google changes SF at all and demands revised drivers, those changes have to make their way to Mir to use any revisions.
More Privacy Perils: Facebook Data Is Greater Than The Sum Of Your Likes
I'll share my dirty secret with you - if I'm really worn out during the day at work, I've done a 15 minute nap in my car. At some point I realize that I'm not being productive at all and would space out anyway at my desk, better to kill 15 minutes and come back refreshed.

YMMV depending on your parking location. I park in underground parking that makes for a comfortable nap. Just make sure not to park in front of the elevator, haha.
I thought the article was going to be about how it's easier said than done, but usually works out fine...
Keeping employees happy isn’t rocket science
Here in Startup Land, nobody’s doing it for the money and the glory isn’t certain. So how is a founder expected to keep morale, her or his most important asset, intact?
We call it non-destructive editing in the audio world. I believe Aviary attempted what you're suggesting with Peacock, now Nodewerk [1].

[1] http://nodewerk.com/
Using Bitcoin is like paying for goods with shares of company stock... stock that can be broken down into almost arbitrarily small subunits... and which are immune to SEC regulation.

There's nothing wrong with the bitcoin economy - it's just very different than anything that's ever existed before. If it were just like fiat money, there'd be little use for it and no economy to speak of.
What if you're depressed because you're afraid of death?

(I wouldn't say I'm depressed -- not in the clinical sense anyway; but I do spend what I imagine is an abnormal amount of time thinking about it because of mother's passing away when I was younger).
This article is garbage. It can be boiled down to one sentence: "if working from home makes me happy at the cost of productivity, forcing me to come into the office just because it's more productive is the moral equivalent of requiring me to take Adderall."

To which the appropriate response is: "bullshit". Requiring someone to take physically harmful and addictive drugs is not even remotely in the same galaxy as requiring them to come into the office. Maybe instead of working today, I'd be happier staying home and reading novels and playing with the cat. You don't get paid to be happy though, you get paid to be productive.
Calm down, guys. As stated on her site, these are purely experimental. This page has also been up for a few years at this point.