skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like you might be insane ... Is this correct?
In Sweden, the Swedish national public TV has simply defined that any computer, be that one without a graphic card or software, is an TV.

So the stats are going up up and up!
No: the linked article requires that further questions split the previous groups each in half. The first question must split the group in half, the second question must split those two groups in half, and so on. When we hit the last bit, the final question is splitting groups of 2 people into the last bit, and each person has been assigned a unique number.

In this manner, 33 bits is enough, and the birthday problem is avoided. The page mentions all this.
PDF: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/8393...
Until recently I was working for a big software company (40k+ employees), where we were also using Outlook as the main communication tool (+ Lync recently).

The interesting thing was, that each person has found an own solution to the massive amount of information you need to keep and look up later. There were of course wikis, portals and stuff but most of the people always kept the most relevant information in their inboxes.

This would manifest in:
- Folders with "Dummy"-Mails, used for storing notes
- Actually using the notes function
- 4 or 5 level deep folder hierarchies of mails
- "Complex" categories on mails for finding information

I have no insight into the processes at Yahoo, but I suspect at least some of the things work similar over there. The problem is, migrating these kind of (mostly unstructured) information is painful and could take weeks - provided the new mail system would even support such an abuse.. If there is no alternative in place, the next step would possibly be One Note, or worse Notepad.

I also think Microsoft missed a huge opportunity by not positioning Outlook as more than a e-mail tool but a shared information system. I even worked in a team for a few month, which developed a "Mail Publish" solution, where you've got a button in your Outlook which would upload your mail to a server and index it, so the whole team could get to the information..

(disclaimer: my startup depends on Outlook, but this is less relevant to this specific problem)
If you begin playing Go, you will find that strategic complexity go well beyond most people's ability to calculate so simple mostly applies only to the rules.

Anyway, I think games wind-up being hard to program when one is allowed many moves each turn. Go allows hundreds of potential moves and it is not easy to prune the tree or estimate the relative situations. I remember Shogi being described as similarly hard - I think the re-played captured pieces might be what makes the tree explode.
It almost seems too early to reminisce about this stuff. My first computers were a TRS-80 clone and a Commodore 64, but this is the era in which I really started to get into computers: the Solaris and NeXT ads in Byte and PC Magazine, with impressive looking screenshots of a busy computer; the Mac IIfx briefly taking the clock speed crown at a whopping 40 MHz; wondering if I'd take an Amiga or a Mac to college, then settling on a 486SX from Gateway.

In college I really wanted to like OS/2 2.0 (and later 2.1), but driver problems with the Diamond video card were a constant problem. (If only we'd sprung for the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro!) I had a copy of DeScribe; later sold it to someone through the ISCA BBS.

My impression at the time was that Microsoft executed so much better than its competitors, offsetting its weaker Office products with a better UI, which in turn gave you a reason to run Windows. I later attributed its success much more to its ruthless business practices.

This article brings the focus on the strategic vision: betting big on clones; belatedly embracing the Internet; hammering away at PDAs and tablets, yet losing big to the iPod, iPhone, et al. Sometimes we predict the future, and sometimes we make it.
I use Bootstrap exclusively, but I've played with Foundation (back on version 3). But honestly, I can't see what the difference in the frameworks are. Do you have a reference comparing them so that I could see what I'm missing?
As someone else mentions, this doesn't work, as the birthday problem[1] applies here.

You need to ensure collisions won't happen; SHA512 does not to that. (The probability of a collision in 512 bits is near impossible; in 33 bits, much less so.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Yes 512 KB sorry, I wanted to "fix" your 256 remark, ended up mistyping MB instead of KB. My first computer used tapes.

You also needed to load the Workbench and related libraries from floppy, so ROM firmware alone wasn't enough.
Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.
There was a serious change in the nature of TV after the late 90's.

Just after TV realized that O.J. Simpson, and Amy Fisher, and Nancy Kerrigan could feed a news cycle for months, if not years, TV lost a lot of charm. It was the popularity of the O.J. Simpson case that spawned the Court TV channel.

Right around the time when the constantly scrolling, but nigh-unreadable news ticker showed up on all of the news channels, TV mutated into this hideous disease that vomited itself into my living room.

Somewhere amidst the election ads and the telephone ads, the Big Pharma ads came along, with Montel Williams and Rikki Lake and Jerry Springer, and then Realty TV exploded for beyond the already intolerable spectacle of MTV's The Real World. Vapid scummy channels like E! spewed forth with shallow, narcissistic tabloid hopelessness. MTV itself devolved into TRL and Britney Spears and then 9/11 and Iraq blew all the gaskets open.

With every celebrity fearing for their pathetic career, at the very premise of disagreeing with a "Wartime President", that very chilling effect of self censorship attenuated all intelligence on TV.

The internet, meanwhile, was uncensored, unfiltered virgin wilderness to explore. Hard core pornography and gore sites were immediately available, and you didn't have to skulk around the adult section of the video store for Faces Of Death or Debbie Does Dallas. You also didn't have to pay extra to get a glipse of tits or hear some curse words on HBO. TV knows this, and has grown even creepier still, in an attempt to compete with the total lack of boundries found on the internet, to the point where it feels disturbingly questionable that Cialis ads are directly juxtaposed with Honey Boo Boo episodes.

The rationale for Court TV finally died about a decade and a half after the O.J. Simpson case, and by then it had transformed itself into a dumping ground for re-runs of To Catch A Predator and COPS, and then rebranded as TRU TV, and now also includes shows about repo men harassing irresponsible poor people.

At these times scales of ten to fifteen years for a complete life cycle of a trend like the one caused by O.J. Simpson, I shudder to think what TV will be like when the 9/11, Iraq War, Fox News trend cycle wraps up. The current trend feels like it still needs about ten more years to fully play itself out.
Around 1989 I traded my Amiga 500 for an IBM AT clone running DOS. Each was worth around AUD$1000 at the time. It felt like I was going back in time 10 years - a mono screen and no mouse. The reason was that I needed it for uni.study purposes (Turbo pascal, Turbo C++, etc.) ...
Apple buys motion sensor maker PrimeSense
Is there any evidence that becoming good at chess improves any mental aspects or is it just a hard game that you can brag about being able to play?
Soundrop, is now also on Deezer
Drowning Kiribati
I tend to use Clojure on a day-to-day basis. The functionality that OOP groups into classes is separated out into individual tools in Clojure, so you have a tool for inheritance, a tool for polymorphism, and so forth.

When you use the tools of OOP separately, you start to appreciate how little you actually need them. A program in a functional programming language will use very little mutation. Polymorphism is a little more common, but not by much. Inheritance is practically never useful - I've only seen one case where it's ever been used outside a OOP language. I have yet to find a case where I'd need all three tools simultaneously.

Encapsulation is also something that seems to have far more disadvantages than advantages. It sounds like a nice idea, hiding your data structures behind an API that doesn't need to change, except in practice it doesn't save much refactoring, and you lose all the benefits with working with data.
I was going to watch the video on that website but it got pulled from YouTube.

...seriously?
That analogy is flawed. A human assistant probably wouldn't store every information about you forever. It usually is a single person, not a megacorp. You would pay the assistant as you already stated - the motivation of the assistant to provide services are clear and well understood.

I agree with the GP, this scares me. I am interested in this technology, but won't hand over the required information. A 'personal' life tracking/assistant service would be useful..
Now depending in the type of programming, you may need to preserve state, which can be quite challenging in a purely functional environment.

What makes you say that?
You're probably making some unwarranted assumptions here. I think George Bush did a lot of things because he felt they were the right thing to do even though they hurt him politically. Everybody says that's what they want in a politician, but nobody really wants that.
Would be great to talk to you more, based on your previous questions/posts, but no contact info listed. I have some of the same questions that you've had.
They won't abandon Google Now, but i do see the advantage of Google Now as an open format..
Agreed, Atari ST and Amiga especially never caught on much with businesses ... they were definitely seen as games machines, even though their capabilities were certainly on par with the IBM clones.
If I am, it's because of the secret signals cable TV has been broadcasting directly into my brain.
'Google Now' as an open format
Wouldn't that lift innovation in the mobile search / spoken area?

What would you want to see happening?
you mean MS-DOS. Caldera and others had their own version of DOS and MS went out of their way to make sure no one used it.
Indeed, you can, but then you have a very exact requirement on exactly how the interpreter is implemented which can never be optimized, and any disagreement between implementations can cause a world ending consensus failure.

By not having looping or recursion script naturally gets an operation limit by virtue of having a size limit, and this is _relatively_ easy to get right between implementations. (Though, so far several of the alt implementations have gotten it wrong).
Maybe I'm a contrarian or I see lot of this here on HN for what it is but I find these comments funny and ironic. How do you find time to comment HN with all ths living to do?
Apple buys Israeli motion sensor maker
thank you - yes.
Interesting article overall, but:

"it is inconceivable that Baidu would permit the acceptance of Bitcoins without first clearing the matter with Beijing authorities"

It do not seem to be what suggested Kaiser Kuo http://qr.ae/GsjwK and it should be noted that Baidu is a bunch of small sized teams competing each other fiercly. Accepting Bitcoin could very well be decided locally, and the risk would be localized.

Even if the higher instances in Baidu or higher have heard of it, they probably won't have endorsed it officially and will be able to say they didn't know.

I would be extremely surprised if the Chinese government would be very open-minded with bitcoins and would suspect an hidden agenda behind. Why? Because from all what we know of Bitcoin and its use, it allows bypassing a lot of controls, and even threaten directly the life and blood of any government on Earth: the taxes.
All the kids are already switching to WeChat, Vine, Flickr and others.

With the mobile number as identifier, mobile is the next Facebook.
yawn. I was hoping for something with a little bit more kick.

for example:

If you enter a room, identify the tallest and shortest people, the number of exits, their dimensions, and utilize any reflective surfaces to make this possible without dying.

It seems an analyst is a paper-pusher.
Where is the disintermediation?

All this talk of "products" seems to miss the root problem with these social networks - they aren't networks. They are centralized databases that are designed that way not for the benefit of the users but as means of simplifying the profit model. Because they all share that same inherent design, they will all share the same fate.

The next generation in social networks will be something that is actually a network, until then all that's really going on is "rearranging deckchairs on the titanic."
Sue, but is thus any word than everyone that wants to be a YouTube celebrity?
Knuth: Announcing the first Art of Computer Programming eBook
I would argue the social networks as a whole operate more like a network than a tv show. The features are the shows, the users provide the episodes.

The challenge is to get the right features sho that the users provide the content that keeps their friends and connections coming back.
An excellent book that studies that is The Future Was Here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-e...
a primer on mvc

ill just give a easy to understand (?) example

MVC Model View Controller

Model: this is a data model [access pattern]

models/users.code:
class User {
function getUsers() {
$db->fetchAll("SELECT * FROM USERS LEFT JOIN CRAZYTABLE ON CRAZYSTUFf = 1")
}
}

Controller: Handles application logic

controllers/userlist.code
requires('models/user.code')
function showUsers() {
$users = User::getUsers()
$usernames = []
foreach($users as $row)
$usernames[] = $row['name']

renderView('views/userpage.html', $usernames)
return
}

View: Display logic, ideally as simple as possible
Could be a html template or a windows form
Purists say you should do all data validation and preperation in the controller

views/userpage.html
<div id=myuserlist>
<h1>Our users</h1>
<ul>
{{ foreach $users as $user }}
<li>{{ $user }}</li>
{{ endforeach }}
</ul>
</div>

Now you understand MVC! =)
I can't believe I didn't know "O.K. Google" trigger until today..
6 things I learned for software localization
How Money Moves Around The Banking System
> There will always be enough entertainment to meet the demand of viewers.

This seems likely, but the idea that it will be cheaper than cable is pretty specious. The reason you can get TV programming so cheap for just the cost of a Roku and Netflix is because hidden in that content is the millions of dollars that already came from traditional TV.
Direct link to PDF: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/8393...

I never know whether it's allowed to tell people they're dead...
Interesting read. This part really brought the current Windows 8 push by Microsoft to mind.

"These machines were meant to wrestle control of the PC industry away from the clone makers, but they were also meant to subtly push people back toward a world where PCs were the servants and mainframes were the masters. They were never allowed to be too fast or run a proper operating system that would take advantage of the 32-bit computing power available with the 386 chip. In trying to do two contradictory things at once, they failed at both."

Not quite the same situation, but they have many similarities.
"Version 3.0 was going to up the graphical ante with an exciting new 3D beveled design (which had first appeared with OS/2 1.2)"

I think it was Next computers who got first on this.
A sufficiently large pet rock would obviously require some heavy lifting.
> And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.

...and education, and government, and academia. Apple was a pretty safe bet in the 80s (The Mac IIfx was designed to government specs and was the fastest desktop PC around). They only really started to lose market after Windows 95.
All of you that lift of YouTube as some foil against "the big bad evil brainwashing junk" that is mainstream media ... seem naive to me. Have you actually seen what is on YouTube? Really?
Is this the image optimisation thing in your profile? I'd hold-off until January. Your audience is likely to be web professionals who'll actually have holidays and won't be checking news.

Sponsor the HTML5 newsletter in January perhaps (http://html5weekly.com/archive/114.html)? (I'm not affiliated, I just think it's a good source of news.)
From the article

A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set
number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the
scanner beeped."

"We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we
might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.

Really reminded me of this : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Welcome to the future.
How to improve your Command Line Skills and be more productive
It does allow for a certain margin of error, though:

http://i.imgur.com/lXBEZqX.png
You&#39;re Doing It Wrong
How to add numbers (part 2)
Don't see what 'radical' change there is to move to another social site. Besides my grandparents are using it so it's not cool.
Show HN: Coder Read, collect HN top news about programming everyday
The U.S. is different, though, because our government was created by the people, and we claim that its powers were delegated to it by us. In the U.S., the buck ultimately stops with us, the citizens.
As soon as you provide financial incentive, then things get skewed.

I would go so far as to say that what is required is something that discourages financial gain. Money perverts social relationships. Long before the internet people were saying things like "never lend money to a friend because you won't be friends any more." The green card lawyers were among the first to abuse the net for financial gain and that model of spam has gone on to be an enormous drag on the utility of the net.
It's about time.

I was keen to learn ARM a year or two back and I was absolutely horrified at how dismal the documentation ARM provided was. I had problems even finding an assembler; and what I could find was pay-gated (with a price bracket too high as a personal improvement project). It's crazy that these platforms are toted as the future and yet the entry-level developer experience is by far the worst I have ever come across. Are they selling chips or are they selling manuals? /rant

Hopefully ntdebug continues the series.
I am well aware. I am in this space myself: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=280292.0
Great! Let's encourage drivers who can't afford a car to take out (in effect) a huge loan on an expensive car that they couldn't otherwise obtain, then make their more-affordable repayments conditional on working as a reduced-rights contractor for us. So this is basically indentured service then?
"Kalanick said drivers could expect to save anywhere from $100 to $200 on monthly payments, depending on the make and model of the car they’re buying."

I'm not from the US, so don't have an idea of car ownership costs, but is this that big a deal?
I dislike some of the examples of the "falsehoods programmers believe about time" because they typically aren't falsehoods, and will always hold true within the constraints of your system. Yes, time is a fickle thing that is marred by history, but in building a system, I choose a representation for the data I am storing in it. If I choose to store dates using a Gregorian calendar (because I'm following ISO-8601), then,

> Months have either 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.

Does hold true: months do have 28 to 31 days, by definition. If someone wants my Gregorian date in a different calendar system, then we must convert, but that a display issue. Otherwise, we're comparing apples and oranges, and of course all bets are off.

It's kind of like time: the hour "2 AM" never repeats itself on random politically appointed days, because I have chosen to store timestamps in UTC. If someone wants to see that timestamp in "PST" (or America/Los_Angeles), then that's a display issue that can be accommodated, but it does not suddenly violate the fact that "2 am" never repeats in UTC.

Of course, in real life, people don't know what timezone their date is stored in and things love to break randomly on DST switch-overs or leap days or the ends of leap years.
Yes, no one goes to a movie theatre to see a movie any more. You definitely know what the world is like. Good job not being simplistic and simply assuming the world fits in whatever bias you have ... :)
Advanced iPad Stylus
Ask HN: Why are russian keywords trending in Twitter India?
When no one from india with russian keywords why are the keywords trending in india ?

Keywords like :

#скачать
#ÖğretmenlerMutsuzÇünkü
On page 12: "For some reason (mistake? a tracking attempt?) the account received a tiny amount of 1 Satoshi [...] almost a year later on July 23-rd 2012. Its owner noticed this non-zero balance one year later, and emptied it once more on August 6-th 2013. On September 11-th 2013 he received another tiny transfer of 0.0000091, and on November 18-th 2013 yet another one of 0.00011. On November 20-th he sends the 0.0000091 but the 0.00011 is still there."

Could these be rewards for transaction confirmations? (Probably not since it's not suggested in the paper, and they're the experts and I'm not).
Everyone seems focused on TV shows. I'm not really concerned about TV shows, it's the news I'm interested in.

Granted, the news in TV, radio and most newspapers aren't any good as it stands now, but if we keep moving from TV to on-demand services like Netflix, funding serious news broadcasting will become an issue.

I'm not sure how it works in the US, but in many European countries, like the UK, Germany and Denmark, the public are required to pay for public broadcasting). This in part is suppose to pay for news and journalists... In reality it pays for crappy talentshows.

Still what's the model for serious news broadcasting going to be in the future? The models that seems to "work" is having a rich sheikh pay (Al Jazeera) or government funded (RT.TV / Press TV / France 24). This doesn't give you the best of news, but then again neither does ad funded news live CNN.
I did EE, before switching to CS, and we covered state machines for digital design in some depth, without learning automata theory. So, I don't think it's strictly necessary to know Theory of Computation to be able to model state practically and effectively.
OSTRICH PILLOW LIGHT
Cosmic rays, but yeah, that's solid.
This didn't seem like a daily mail article at all: it was pretty balanced, almost welcoming of a different approach.
I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn't still. Why are humans still doing this work? Surely this can be automated, especially as companies have been working on that idea for well over 20 years, probably more?