skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier?

Actually, its to make machine-parsing of meaning easier so that information can be extracted from email and presented through other UIs (particularly, Google Search and Google Now.) Surfacing and facilitating responses to calls-to-action in the Gmail UI is important, but the big motivation is, I think, found in the two pages in the "Cross Google Experience" section of the documentation for the Schemas in Gmail feature [1][2].

[1] Answers in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search
[2] Google Now: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now
> Did any one care when people used RC helicopters in the same way?

Interestingly, the incentives have changed. A camera-rigged RC helicopter used to be expensive. Flying without permission and risking collision or the wrath of a property owner had a greater potential penalty.

Also, there was a larger barrier to entry for the hobby. Different sort of people...

> These drones are classic hacker territory

Part of the problem here: the AOLers have arrived.
This is an opportunity for foundering companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to differentiate themselves in a positive way and raise the bar for everyone.

Apple already did this with their stores and Genius Bars. Buying an Apple device comes with the extra peace-of-mind of knowing that you can call someone or take your device to a nearby store if you're having trouble.

Another similar story is the domain registrar Hover. They specifically set themselves up as the anti-GoDaddy and it seems to be a winning strategy.
From digital diapers to public toilets, are we over-connected?
Now that's a tough one. Follow the rules when the rule is (in this case) wrong.
The Google Analytics JavaScript is hosted on google-analytics.com, as is the Google Analytics pixel.

Google Analytics cookies are first-party cookies, so are tied to the domain of the website you're on, not Google.

Google Analytics data, unless manipulated to be otherwise by the end user with a manual customization, is not systematically tied to personalized Google+ traffic information. There's never been any evidence otherwise, and honestly, the burden of proof is typically on the accuser when making these kinds of accusations, so, really, I flip the question to you and ask what evidence do you have for this accusation besides insinuation and conspiratorial instinct?
Mark 1 FORTH Computer
Creating simple tasks app with Backbone.js and Slim micro framework (part 2)
I think you meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3065619.
Interesting find.
hyperdex says they have multi-server transaction while you still have single server (according to the comments on the blog post)
I would just like a recap of the story for a layman. You know the sort of thing one would do to explain a computer system to his mother. The sort of thing Brian Greene does to explain string theory to the masses.
I'm currently in the Phoenix area where there is a budding tech scene! Just say'in :)
Would be great if you can provide a simple playground app to let people try it out. It can be as simple as a github page that loads the lastest .js file into a script tag.
Apple's guidelines only cover purchasing digital content. You may use outside payment methods to purchase physical goods or services used outside of your application. For example this is how Uber, Hailo, Airbnb, Hotel Tonight, and Task Rabbit all manage to take payments in their current iOS applications.

(Disclosure, I work for Braintree)
I'm reading this one, and it is pretty good (It is just a month old, I think)

http://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Revolutionary-Approach-Succe...
Sony SmartWatch Review: Maybe the Worst Thing Sony Has Ever Made
I've achieved a sort of standing desk meta-nirvana: I have a setup which is almost optimal in 3 positions, with only a 1 second transition time between them, thanks to the Swopper stool. Either I'm standing, or standing/leaning against the stool, or sitting directly down on the stool. The only adjustment I do is to move my stool closer or farther by about 1.5' with my foot. When I'm leaning against the stool, I'm short enough (5'4") that when it's set at maximum height, it's perfectly serviceable as a work stool. But when I sit down on it, it compresses so that my arms are level with the desk, and my feet can rest comfortably on the base. Otherwise, I'm in a standing/near standing position using my laptop on a stand. Things are optimized well enough, I find myself shifting positions without thinking about it. (Actually, I work in 4 positions. My bed is nearby, and sometimes I lie down to think.)
Show HN: My seven minute workout timer evening project
Sneak peak at early decisions at HAI
...Compared to MongoDB, which is referred to in the very next sentence.
Bless you.

The thing that makes me crazy about database engines is the "60% the time, it works every time" phenomenon, wherein things are magically fast until they are magically slow.

Then the discussion goes seamlessly from "don't worry your pretty head, just build your app" to "of course you have to really understand <proprietary, opaque, uncontrollable internal technology hidden by abstractions>." With no recognition that these are basically contradictory messages.

If you can really hide the complexity so it almost never matters, great. But here, where you couldn't, I think you made the right choice by exposing it.
A primer for fundraising on Angel List
I would tend to see the self-interest on the part of the conference organizers in what Schwern is describing: Better to solve a problem before the conference than at the conference.

I remember YAPC 2001 so fondly in good part because the community there was so kind and good natured, in addition to all the clever stuff. YAPC at that time was significantly a "bake it yourself" conference, and people pulled together to make it the best they could.

TIMTOWTDI. IMO, the way to keep the community going is to embrace this rather than to separate into partisanship and/or class. I'm long separated from the community and so don't know the details. I guess I'm a bit sad that a) A Code of Conduct is needed, these days, and b) An apparent demonstration of that need is not being addressed.
I find this whole case very interesting (maybe I am wrong but I don't see the difference between MEGA and dropbox or Google Drive), but I too found the New Zealand push back to be eye opening and refreshing as well. As a US citizen, reading about the paramilitary assault style arrest, I figured there would be the typical international outrage - that the US/FBI is pulling the strings of foreign governments.

I never once gave consideration to the notion that governments using helicopters and military style weapons in an arrest, would offend the sensibilities of ordinary citizenry. NZ's condemnation of the military style assault and the actual apologies from NZ officials was the most eye opening. This made me realize how engrained and accepted these types of operations are in the US (at least for me personally), even for non-violent crimes - a local example that comes to mind was the military style extraction of Elian Gonzalez.

There is even a phrase used among lawyers that you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride, meaning you will be arrested guilty or not, the time to make your case is not during the arrest but in a court of law...I used to laugh about this phrase, now it disgusts me.
Yeah, I felt smart until I read this. Now I know how all those "business people" feel in meetings with their devs.
Money IS everything
I am a bit confused as to what this does.

Does it allow me to chat over someone's WiFi network with another client running this software?

Something else?
I have hit a "tragic" bug of Google+ and I don't even have Google+. It is this one:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chat/tA22alXeQ...

I found out that my elderly mother for the last couple of days could not message me via Google's chat. And I couldn't message her. It was very odd. Eventually after a day of messing with it I noticed that her status was "blocked on Google+".

The kicker is, I never signed up for Google+ and neither signed her up for Google+. Nothing was fixed for days. The only work-around I found was to ... surpise... create a Google+ account. And lo and behold, my mother and other small group of friends ended up in the list of Google+ blocked list. Apparently Google+ block list also overrides regular block lists from other services and does it silently.

Of course I created the stupid Google+ account, unblocked the contacts then immediately deleted it. But it certainly left with a nasty taste in my mouth. It almost seems like a sneaky attempt to make me sign up for Google+.

I kept hearing of stories about people's accounts being locked and them losing their email, contacts, and other data and always thought it was just odd random incidents, now I am starting to get worried. It seems Google is become more aggressive and cavalier with my profile and my data.

(yes, yes, I know I am not paying for it, it is free and I am not a customer, I am the product being sold to their real customers -- the ad buyers).
QC is hard because it requires that the qbits be entangled with each other, but not interacting at all with the rest of the universe. This is comparable to trying to eat rice without a fork, or chopsticks, or allowing air to touch the rice. QC is very, very hard. It is entirely possible we won't see useful QC machines for decades, or even centuries.

D-Wave has attracted scepticism because in the many press releases they've issued over the last 14 years, they have repeatedly claimed to have made breakthroughs in quantum computing that would be perhaps 200 years before their time, if they weren't lying. Like a Chinese manufacturer saying they'll be selling an $11 phone next spring that has petabytes of ram, and can run a simulation of a human brain in real time, which the phone uses for accurate voice transcription.

D-Wave have finally, finally demonstrated a machine with a working qbit system. But the qbits are strongly coupled to the environment, and the machine runs many times slower than a classical electronic computer, even in the fake benchmarking problem that is the only thing the D-Wave machine can solve.

It is an important step on the road to usable quantum computing. It is not a general-purpose quantum computer. It can't be used for prime factorization, for instance.
A good idea is just as important as its execution.

I know the author is going for a massive exaggeration with the statement "Ideas are worth nothing" but it's simply not true.
I love this idea of having a computing system that might not work as advertised but still produce the right results in a repeatable manner. When the ESA had a computing system that did not work as advertised, they blew up the GNP of an african country and went straight to the textbooks.
I'd rather have had them take their time to get it right than rush it out the door to be first-to-market.
French arab revolt? As a french I'm quite shocked to see it named like that. There has been a lot of violence, it's true, but it wasn't closed at all to a revolt. I knew some medias as Fox News exagerated the facts but I was hoping most people would be better informed.
The homicide rate is not too low. For example, my state Kerala which has the highest recorded crime rate (read mostly petty) in India, has a homicide rate of 1.09 - Much less than Iceland even with 100x population.
I haven't connected my phone to my computer for years so that won't really work for me, but yeah you could go that way.
there are two types of people in this world, those who can tolerate the red badges on their apps and those who cant
This is simply nonsensical. Even the applications you listed don't just "do one thing". Vim and emacs have a trillion features each. Git has way more features than some other versioning systems. When does "one thing" turn into multiple things? Within the context of the thread - when did gmail stop doing one thing? When they added filters? When they added all of the labs features? With this current announcement? Do one thing and do it well is great but defining the scope of the one thing is not something to be taken trivially.
That's something that makes me afraid to invest more time in learning Go language.

What if after investing my time in learning Go, one day I'll see Google blog post saying:

"Go lang project at Google is shutting down, we will no longer develop that. But don't worry we decided to donate that project to Apache Software Foundation! It is now called Apache Go. Look for in ASF incubator, just next to Apache Wave (formerly known as Google Wave".
Static analysis aids in finding common errors earlier in the development process.

Also, what does reverse compatibility have to do with ease of parsing?
Fair. I updated the post.

UPDATE: Edited again per the info in this thread; Google Analytics does track Google+
> Hackers tend to overestimate the importance of things like this and not take into account those in flyover country or people who aren't aware of things like this.

"Flyover country" is full of hackers, but in any case, you seem to be completely ignoring Newegg's core demographic.

> Yet many companies led by responsible legal teams and management also settle and move on. This is not clear cut by any means.

You might even say most. Which is precisely why this is so interesting.

I find it disturbing to pursue this line of thought of seriously questioning whether fighting and winning against a patent troll is irresponsible leadership in a company. Doing so plays right into the patent trolls hands. So what if the bean counters can't figure a better ROI than simply settling every time? There are gray areas in business and I think it's incredibly harmful to question whether shareholder interests are being maximally served every time a company does something that might be mistaken for altruism. Should we also denounce any company that goes beyond EPA standards or donates to charity beyond what tax law would dictate optimal?
IFTT: do the humane thing. add github as a channel.
because every coder, hacker, engineer's life revolves around github - it is for each and every one of us that we need an abundance of productivity tools to increase our effectiveness, and maximize time available for hackernews, minecraft, big bang theory, browsing tumblr chicks, stack overflow, checkio, 4chan, and above all, more time to spend on github.
> currently SMS is the only open standard for instant messaging

XMPP is an open standard (through IETF RFCs and related standards) for messaging and presence whose motivating use case was instant messaging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
Icelandic Anti-Incest App
And America was safe until the British showed up.
Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have thrown in income equality. I meant to emphasize that most of the people live in similarly sparse environments. It's not like we have remote farmers and people who live their whole lives in a city who never meet the likes of each other.
I'm iJustine AMA
The Nexus Q is what you get when you try to channel your inner Steve Jobs and allow him to get carried away.
The Portland Press | Crowd Supply
Go is not a service, it is a language and runtime with open-source implementations. If Go is worthwhile, it will survive even Google shutting down. I don't see why you would find Go under Apache to be bad news.
Someone will ask how many Bitcoins this computer can mine any minute now!
What about JS?
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've answered all the questions that have an answer. The rest just seem to be rants.
Boston is less than 2 hours' drive from New Hampshire and has plenty of violence.

I think New Hampshire's cities are small and just don't really have ghettos the way most large American cities do. The violence happens in bigger cities that are pretty nearby, but happen to be outside NH's borders. Southern NH is kind of like an extended suburb of Boston.
"it’s an identity system that follows you everywhere"

Yeah, that really sounds like a good thing...
Actually NH has a substantial tourist industry. Mainly for fall foliage and lots of accessible day-trip mountain hiking.
From their official blog:
"What does this mean in practice? The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience."

http://googleblog.blogspot.se/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-p...
I'm in the same boat, maybe I am just not familiar enough with this kind of software but I can't tell, do you have to have the SSID/Key to connect or does this piggy-back on it somehow?
You can expect it to feed Google Now [1] and Google Search [2]. That's a rather major part of the point.

[1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now
[2] https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search
A really long time ago when I was in grad school playing with genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, I implemented something that seems awfully similar to quantum adiabatic annealing. It worked as follows:

1. Assign all states of each variable equal probability.

2. Sample the living crap out of the search space with some sort of energy function for every possible configuration, scoring the discrete values of the variables of each individual sample by Boltzmann weighting of the energy function.

3. Every so often update the weights for selecting each variables potential values using the accumulated scores for each variable generated during step 2.

4. Repeat steps 2 through 3 until each variable converges to a single state.

I never published anything but I learned three things from this process.

1. It worked like gangbusters to find the space surrounding global optima of reasonably complex functions

2. It worked like crap to refine really good solutions into really great solutions.

3. It was horribly dependent on the underlying representation of the variables (i.e. if you mapped the input variables to a spin glass, it was just awful)

That and I suspect somebody already has a fancy name for exactly what I did back then...
> Early in the development of RethinkDB, we made the design decision to be extremely conservative about durability and safety of users's data.

I'm glad that the Rethink engineers are taking this approach to development instead of "let's win all the benchmarks!" Overall, it's apparent that they are really thinking through the consequences of their decisions and the tradeoffs in database systems, and that they want to build something that will last instead of something that will just become popular in the short term.
In this case, however, it's better to be perfectly predictable as always fighting trolls.

Consider the game tree, as seen by the Troll considering whether to attack Company X:

[1.1] troll's payoff = 0
/
/ no
/
(1) Troll: attack Company X?
\
\
\ yes [1.2.1] troll's payoff = +10
\ /
\ / settle
\ /
(1.2) X: fight or settle?
\
\
\ fight [1.2.2.1] troll's payoff = -5
\ /
\ / drop
\ /
(1.2.2) Troll: fight or drop suit?
\
\
\ fight [1.2.2.2.1] troll's payoff = +100
\ /
\ / Troll wins
\ /
(1.2.2.2) Nature: Troll wins or loses?
\
\ Troll loses
\
[1.2.2.2.2] troll's payoff = -1000

The Troll's business model is predicated on the belief that, for almost all values of X, Company X will decide to settle, should the Troll attack. Therefore, the choice from the Troll's perspective is between outcomes [1.1] with a payoff of 0 and [1.2.1] with a payoff of +10. Strategically, the Troll chooses the +10 and attacks.

But if a Company X can credibly destroy its option to settle, the Troll's expected payoffs for attacking X change to [1.2.2.1] = -5, [1.2.2.2.1] = +100, and [1.2.2.2.2] = -1000, with the +100 payoff being unlikely (because, if it were likely, the Troll's business model wouldn't be to troll). So the most likely payoffs in the Troll's estimation are either -5 (ouch) or -1000 (OUCH!).

Therefore, the Troll's best choice becomes not to attack Company X. That choice has a payoff of 0, but it's greater than the expected payoff should they fight.
Things that show you icons in the status bar usually have battery consequences. Maps while tracking your location, Bluetooth, device orientation change things, etc.
But there is poor to no evidence that adding more qubits scales linearly or exponentially or worse case at all and what we have is a probability of entanglement across a group of qubits

Maybe
There is a logical fallacy in what you've said. It absolutely is true that there are times when input parameters can be a factor of 10k in performance. It is also absolutely true that applications can have thousands of distinct query signatures.

What DOES NOT follow is that most of those distinct query signatures are very important to the application. A few are. But most are not. However volunteering to add the wrong one can take the application down.

Having developers manually plan every single query is not the right choice.

I agree. However the many applications successfully built on MySQL demonstrate that for a lot of people, crappy but consistent planning is good enough. At least then people can know where the problems are, and fix them.
It's not always about memory. With my (current iOS, but not current hardware) iPhone, it's about battery life - for whatever reason, applications that use the camera dramatically drop battery power even if the app isn't "active".

It shouldn't be that way, but it is, and the only way I have to control it is to go manually quit certain applications when I'm done with them.
http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/deaths/Homicdx.asp

Top chart is just Michigan. Go to the bottom to get the latest numbers. White homicide rate: 3.4, black: 18.2.

Youth numbers:

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/stats_at...

It is bullshit though, I'll give you that.
I'm not sure what you think is pure gold here - the statement is correct. When dealing with big data, joins are the first thing to go as you need to shard your data. Whether RethinkDB will really solve joins across sharded data is up in the air though - ultimately you still need to do filtering per shard and then reduce the result somewhere - and doing filtering across two attributes means you are going to be doing a lot of data transfer, but RethinkDB is about the only database I've seen really making progress in this area.
OK, so the problem D-Wave has itself defined can be run faster on classical machinery. Does this also hold true for other problems run on the D-Wave?
I always laugh a little when I hear a professional use the term "troll." It really reminds of video games. Tra la la la.

Excerpt from the article: "There are fewer trolls for us to fight."
The basic point is that people in Japan aren't scared of the police, and in fact the police are often thought of as being kind of wimpy and ineffective; most people consider them "those guys you ask for directions when you're lost." Their relationship with the general public is hugely different than that of American police.

So while the Japanese justice system may have some bad habits, that is not an explanation for very low Japanese crime rates.
That would be a major crime.
Buy a bike, bike commute to work, date the guy at the bike shop (he will be fit and can fix your bike).