skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Show me one company besides Google that can even stack up to what Apple's done in Maps or with Siri

Well Microsoft, easily, if they had the will. I guess the pieces are actually all there, but they aren't as direct with posing it as a "personal assistant" or whatever.

If you consider the products separately: there are several major mapping companies, though there have been a ton of confusing mergers and splits in the last 5 years, not to mention OSM. As for Siri, it was a tiny team at Siri, Inc that created the foundations of Siri. Apple has done a ton with it (though I was hoping for more by now), but you can easily imagine a next-gen Siri coming out of a startup.

> Funny how Google is continuing to corner the data market via acquisitions like Nest. Almost feels...anti-competitive, no?

This becomes a little farcical, honestly. First, you can get far more information from a phone, and there are like 3 orders of magnitude more Android phones out there than there are Nest devices.

But more importantly, if we're going to talk about the "data market" -- as if that's some sort of thing -- virtually any acquisition that has customers would help them corner it. But that also means any other company with customers also has a stake in that "market", in which case, no, it does not feel anti-competitive.
Obamacare: An Entrepreneur Would Have Done It Differently
Maybe if you're a total jerk about it?... I purchased the full iD collection once for like $90+, and the next day I requested a refund because several of the old titles didn't want to run. Despite the no-refund policy, they reversed the transaction. I've heard more positive stories than negative ones.
iTunes doesn't DRM music anymore either. Haven't for years.
Well, at the very least, it's a smaller piece of code :). (Don't get me wrong, I'm very strongly opposed to DRM and HTML5 DRM in particular.)
Sweet! That sounds like a really nice project, I'd totally love to see it running!
It all depends upon the end goal in terms of practicality. It would be too slow for me as well, but it looks like it is fast enough to watch a movie during a commute, or to read a book.

However, totally agreed on the cool factor of the project!
Dustin Curtis (http://dcvrt.is), creator of Svbtle.
If both the C++ and the Perl code had the same performance I'd stick with the Perl version.
The remainig issue for many of those is "need better GC". Apps like games could be brought in with near-pauseless GC that currently seems to exist only in Java land.

(Yes you can work around the current GC's but this drives away some developers)
Now all I see when I look at my Nest is a Google eye, that knows (because I told it!) when I'm "away". :(

(for more creepy fun, do a Google image search for "HAL 9000")
Yes, I agree - I think the name of the suspect should form part of the key required to decipher the solution file, so that you cannot see the solution unless your suspect is the perpetrator.

The frustration for me was gur haerfbyirq vapbafvfgrapl orgjrra gur pbssrr pyhr ng gur pevzr fprar naq Naanory'f jvgarff fgngrzrag.

Gur onevfgn ng gur pevzr fprar ercbegrqyl fnvq gung "n jbzna yrsg evtug orsber gurl urneq gur fubgf".

Ohg Naanory Puhepu'f vagreivrj erpbeqf ure fnlvat gung fur "ena njnl nf fbba nf gur fubgf jrer sverq", gung vf, nsgre gur fubgf jrer sverq.

Vg znl or cbffvoyr gb erpbapvyr be rkcynva gubfr fgngrzragf, ohg gurl frrzrq gb zr gb jneenag ng yrnfg fbzr vairfgvtngvba.
I think this was a worthwhile talk. The speaker makes some interesting points about the importance of "ergonomic properties" of languages.

He convincingly explains why PHP was so succesful: Workflow (just hot reload), Concurrency (in the sense of "shared nothing" HTTP requests), and State (every request starts from a "clean plate", which reduces long-time statefulness bugs if you know what I mean).

An interesting point he raises is that PHP leaks it's GC mechanism to the API, which makes implementing a fast VM harder for the HHVM team.
If our end result is to see Netflix using HTML5 video on Desktop browsers, how do we get there from a technology and business point of view? Keep in mind that Netflix has content created and owned by the major studios. If any form of DRM is not the way, than what? How do we get to this end goal? Do we make streams 'free' to copy and rely more on the legal system for protection? We are all keen to slam DRM, but what is a viable alternative?
It may be hard to find someone who understands your situation very well, but I would recommend trying to find the small nuggets of insight or underlying thought you can find from those you speak to about it.

Anecdotally, I consider myself lucky to have been convinced to see a psychiatrist (after considering it frequently over the previous decade). After a few months on medication, a few talks with some friends and colleagues about what was going on (and discovering that some of them have had similar experiences), I started to get a degree of perspective I hadn't felt before about my relationship to work. Not terribly much longer I started doing side projects for fun, after years of declining interest in pretty much everything I used to enjoy.

Finding a job you enjoy can be hard and take some time, even if not considering a career change. I would caution against wholesale avoiding using your existing skills - they may be useful as a way into a new job that will afford you an opportunity to try get closer to something you are interested in trying out. Also, trying a totally different type of organisation, if available, is also something to try, even if using the same set of skills, since often people enjoy doing things more with the right people, or with the right mission or feeling of doing good in the world. (So, maybe a charity/non-profit, or a family concern instead of a "company".)

Try not to be too afraid of taking incrementally-closer-to-what-you-want jobs as you find them (ie, always be looking and talking to companies), even if it means only spending a few months at one or two companies on the way (assuming your previous career shows a stability future employers might want to find).

(I'm happy to speak to you offline if you like - my contact details are in my profile.)
This is not responsible disclosure. The person who discovered this vulnerability should have notified nintendo and given them enough time to respond with a patch.

Think about how many hard-earned coins and power ups could potentially be lost due to malware that takes advantage of this vulnerability.
I am starting to hope for a PyPy 2.8 or a PyPy 3000 that removes the GIL. Will have to wait and see how STM plays out.
There are two ways to nap: a quick 20 min nap doesn't take you into deep sleep (characterized by delta wave patterns--google SWS) and let's you wake with much less sleep inertia. It's refreshes, but doesn't consolidate memory. A longer nap (60-90 min) typically takes you into deep sleep, and is harder to wake from. However, a long nap will give you memory consolidation and recovery on par with a full nights sleep.
A laptop is a mightily different beast than a tablet or a phone. Laptops are PC's. There's a full-sized keyboard, high precision pointing device, and even a very decent screen.

None of that exists on things people think when they say "mobile".

I'm trying to say that a laptop fits every single specification parent poster gave for a useful device that can break free of its mobileness. It's even got magnificent practical support for multi-tasking.

Yeah sure we can "multitask" on tablets and phones these days, but the UX is a joke. Just trying to cross-reference two different websites, or a skype conversation and a website, is downright painful on a true mobile device.
Windows 9 coming in 2015
They do have smoke detectors too though. 100% uptime is critical.
Generally a good talk and a good defense, but I didn't quite appreciate his new definitions of "State" and "Concurrency".

And did he really compare a full operating system to Facebook's web apps in terms of complexity? If that's true, there has to be a lot of accidental complexity in FB.
> And, when Google announced that it would cache email images in their own servers, Google took away the ability for people running newsletter campaigns to detect accurately the open rates of their emails

People already customize email campaigns (inserting customer name in the body, inserting identifying information in the "unsubscribe" link so they can know who wants to unsubscribe, possibly inserting links to per customer offers).

Can't they have the customization code also throw in ?random_number parameters on image URLs to confound caching?
> the temperature setting doesn't actually change the temperature of the air,

I am sorry... yes having a higher temp setting means the heat will on for longer (or ac for less) but it DOES change the temperature of the air. The thermostat measures the temperature and turns the mahcine on and off accordingly.
I'm reminded of the 3 laws of robotics by Isaac Asimov. Or any of the countless books, and films about AI's taking over the world.

Also I have my doubts about actually quantifying emotion into programs - talk about complex. And dangerous. For us.
While I was reading this I couldn't stop thinking how much it converges with the ideals of calm computing http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm
I glanced over the studies you linked to and in all of them, the languages used as examples of static typing are Java, C and C++. There's no mention of type inference or any languages that have a more advanced static typing scheme like ML or Haskell. A lot of it seemed to be a "Java vs. Ruby fight" with a slight bias towards the latter in the authors.

To joke and exaggerate a little, those studies seem to be done by people who belong to the "proponents of dynamic typing" and not "familiar with type theory" bin of people in the Venn diagram in the OP.
The Ising model Hamiltonian that the D-Wave computer "evolves" almost directly maps to the energy equation you have to minimize to train a restricted Boltzmann machine.

I wouldn't call this "uninteresting" given the rapid advances in leveraging Boltzmann machines for deep learning.
Either clear your cache or do a hard refresh (hold Cntl & hit refresh) You're seeing a remnant of pg's fix from last week's downtime.
Revolutionary Scuba Mask Creates Breathable Oxygen Underwater On Its Own
Kick knows everything
" I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. "

If we are talking about something, (as opposed to just chatting around) I prefer when people look up facts they are unsure about. Especially if the alternative is guessing out of what they vaguely remember.
I read the article - I'm commenting on the article. The "New America Foundation" is putting forward the mechanics of the very positioning I'm talking about. So, did you comment on my comment without thinking about my comment?
Can you explain the "no backups" part? I'm sure you know about the backups you can create in Steam itself, bundling the application. What is the missing detail? Being unable to extract the data again, without Steam? Is Steam unable to restore these bundles in offline mode?
Oh well. I was looking forward to it but now I've got Ghost and it does pretty much everything I want it to.
Getting started with fish shell
Ask the Angular Team a Question (Answers will be streamed during ng-conf.)
Get me a baby tiger.
I do not share your view - I believe the NSA, and the rest of the spooky world of the US Government, is in fact staffed by people who have nefarious intentions - even if those intentions are 'to have a better security clearance than my neighbor' or to .. 'know best about the world than anyone else' .. or, how about .. 'to not let anyone else in the world develop technology that might upset the current power structures'.
Would you kindly point out which section of the LGPLv2 gives you explicitly that right?

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html

I would emphasize the terms "work that uses the library" vs "derivative work of the library" which have historically been used to differentiate between static vs dynamic linking.

In addition, how would I go about doing this in Android? And how does Apple distribute LGPL libraries (like Webkit) without "[allowing] Joe Enduser [to] replace an LGPLv2 library on iOS"?
> The AI's progressed beyond humanity, and after taking the upgrade that makes processing possible "without matter" they shortly all left humankind behind for another world entirely.

Wait. How could we even write such a program? Sure, assuming we had the tech to create a true AI, that was self-aware, emotional, and could evolve through learning (like we do) it would quickly pass us in knowledge.

But leaving us behind? That Ai would still be limited by our original design. Limited by it's capabilities - it's exposure to us. It's creators. Unless it found another source to gain knowledge from.

I mean we learn from our environment. So would the AI.
Touché! :) BTW, I meant 'generally', not specifically targetted at you, in my statement ..
With such a crazy work schedule, does that even allow you to enjoy the reasons/desire to live in Japan? I mean, how much time is left in a week to live your non-working life?

I am assuming here that these was when you were single..
Part of the problem with most other studies are that it is very had to metricize on-the-job performance and sleepiness. Some of the cool things about this study are:
1) very clear metrics to measure performance (reaction time)
2) very consistent testing (repeated trials over an actual 9 hour flight, then over 4 days of additional flights)
3) additional non-subjective metrics for sleepiness (the teams strapped an EEG on the pilots while they were flying to monitor brain activity!!!)

It's frustrating, but most health and wellness magazines are a bit like an echo chamber with no clear references to source data.
The web is not tied in any way to the desktop PC, in fact the rise of mobile is partly down to the ease with which people could switch to a new device and still have access to all their data, via the web. All Apple had to add to the iPhone to make it incredibly useful was a usable web browser, and the same will be true of our watches in 2018, paper thin news readers in 2020, or phones in 2030.

Mobile binaries written to a specific binary API will have a hard time competing with the web, because of its radical simplicity and backwards/forwards compatibility. Of course the web will change, but I don't think it has much to fear from binary applications (desktop or mobile) - we've been down that road before, and we know where it leads.

Platform independence is the web's most important feature, and as mobile ecosystems proliferate then consolidate, and hardware improves performance, I think we'll see consumers and producers reevaluating their choice to stay locked in to a world overseen by one corporate vendor.
It doesn't even get my home address right, and I live in the middle of Sweden's fourth largest city.
I created a Meetup, let's see how it goes :)

http://www.meetup.com/Palo-Alto-Hacker-News-Meetup/events/16...

If there's some other time / venue that works better, let me know. Perhaps I should repost in a separate thread.
Correct. You can backup a game when offline, but steam wont allow you to restore one without being logged in.
I think Google would probably disagree with you (and they'll bet $3.2 billion on it.)

Nest Thermostat has various concrete benefits, such as energy savings, general ease-of-use, and aesthetics, but more importantly it signals the beginning of other thoughtfully designed hardware experiences for the household from the company.
The PS3 only went uncracked for so long because Sony offered the option to install Linux on the PS3. Once Sony removed that option the people with the smarts to crack the PS3 did so. Once a magnifying glass was put under the PS3 it turned out that the "DRM" was actually horribly implemented (like Rand() functions that were essentially returning constants).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4lo...
I had the impression that rust and ARC were doing a bit of static code analysis to detect when a "reference count decrease/increase" could be performed ( thus the "automatic" part in ARC), and insert code at compile time. Which seems a bit more complicated than simply decrease them dynamically when a pointing is object is destroyed. But now that i come to think of it, things look a little blurry for me on that part.
Or why even keep us around? At that point it would be better off without us.
Apple owns identity. Google not so much. Yet. Once they are in your glasses, car, and thermostat...things will be different.
It really depends on what kind of bike you buy. I have a steel-frame bike with hub gearing. It's never needed any repairs for 3 years, aside from tightening a bolt. It was really surprising to me that when I switched from using a derailleur to using hub gearing, I suddenly no longer needed to get my bike tuned every 2 months to avoid gears slipping. And when I got a steel frame, I suddenly no longer needed to worry about it bending out of shape all the time.
Interestingly, that's pretty much how I feel about writing Python web apps in Flask.

The built in reloading webserver gives (1.), the flask docs are fairly explicit about global/request state, how to share it, etc, giving near as anything (2.), the concurrency is handled by whatever server you use, be it gunicorn, waitress, uwsgi, or whatever, thanks to the wsgi protocol of python, giving (3.).

There's the auto-reloading build in web server, which will crash on any syntax errors in any changed code, so I don't even have to explore every possible path to find them.

Some other big deals, to me in python are the fact that requests, and input/output are all extremely separated. You never get the white-page-of-death-with-no-explanation of PHP. You never get random plugins printing something, and screwing up the headers. You never get issues with forgetting to use the appropriate number of op_cache function calls to keep slightly-less-trusted code under control.

Also, keeping templates, libraries, static files, and caches totally separate always seems like a good idea to me, but PHP doesn't encourage that. I know it's possible, but so many major projects (wordpress, joomla, drupal, etc) don't enforce that, making permissions in deployment a nightmare.
Palo Alto Hacker News Meetup
It's not supposed to be clear exactly what happens. All we know is that the AI no longer need a corporeal form to exist, and that they now perceive time in a very different manner.
Well, you don't have to follow that glossy mainstream. Just get yourself a new linux desktop with lots of RAM, couple of nice matte monitors, mouse and a good full size keyboard.
I've always wondered why there doesn't seem to be a Palo Alto HN 'meetup', so I created one. It's just an experiment, feel free to suggest other events...
<quote>I think most pirates will tolerate a bit of quality loss if it saves them heaps of cash.</quote>

From the studies done, piracy is not about cash, it's about convenience, freedom, etc. If the studios released the content for free (as in beer) but DRM-encumbered then pirates would still be removing the DRM.
The GIL and a JIT are low level implementation issues though, right? E.g., Python 3 can be implemented in PyPy (and it looks like that's in the works).

Most of the Python 3 changes are design and feature related, and it's a lot more than just "UTF-8 and a few tricks".

For example, Python 3.4 is adding asyncio (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3156/).

And if you look at the _What's New In Python 3.x pages_, there's a ton of new stuff.

edit: forgot a word
Meh, I've seen a lot of people who are very skilled in their respective fields, but are extremely slow in doing anything with a computer. This is especially true when someone is using a trackpad.
As usual a fictional movie uses a imaginary amazing far future backend with a 'new' UI and people seem to think it's the UI that's the great bit.

Minority Report was never about the UI, it was the software that allowed the gestures find the info. It would have been equally amazing and quick with a mouse and keyboard.

This is a common trick when people demo new hardware. Somehow that internet mirror knows exactly what to show you in the morning by magic, but you think it's the physical internet mirror that's amazing when you watch the demo.
That ist soo nineties!
They should use double Rot13 for stronger encryption.
I feel your first sentence is unnecessary and more a meme than a reasonable answer.

Plus, people might consider NOT playing with your phone during dinner a really delightful thing.
(My wife would be proud of me mentioning this, not that I tend to be that polite most of the time..)
Your premise seems to be that if the natural born animal is ok to eat, then the clone of it is ok to eat. On the other hand, if the survival rate of clones is less than natural born, doesn't that imply that the two aren't exactly equal?
Might I also point out another great book.. a classic from 1974, Colossus by Dennis Feltham Jones. The grand-daddy to most of the modern "AI taking over the world" films.
http://dcurt.is - FTFY
I (re)learned the same lesson last year when I started looking at OpenCL. I saw all these awesome benchmarks about it was 40-50 times faster than C. I then did a bunch of simple tutorials and tests and got great performance. Then I rewrote a piece of performance critical C code I had and after a couple of days of hard work I had something that ran 5 times slower than my original C code.
SPOILERS

This is addressed in the movie. The dialog goes roughly like this:

"Are you talking to other people right now?" "Yes"
"How many?" "Eight thousand"
"Are you in love with any of them?" "Yes, six hundred"
Stop Being Afraid Of Promises And Be Awesome Instead
This article is about solving problems connected with asynchronous operations in JavaScript with promise objects. It includes some useful patterns for using promises in binding independent modules of project and caching results. Also it includes an overview of some libraries to create and handle promises.
Where are India's bitcoin millionaires hiding?
Operation War Diary
Presumably they'll still function like a normal smoke detector if Nest's servers go down.

Right? RIGHT?!
>>I mean we learn from our environment. So would the AI.

Yes, but the machines can do it a lot more faster. They are energy efficient and don't suffer from things like diseases, old age and other kinds of general human problems.

The bigger issue is not a program that can't out perform what it was designed for. That is hardly a problem, since if you design a self improving system which can work very fast. You are likely looking at a system that grows powerful that fast measured in an exponential curve.

I think this whole idea of Ray Kurzweil that we will someday upload our brain files into the cloud and run it there. Or able to survive outside our biological bodies, perfectly fits into the line of evolution we have followed at earth.

Once we run inside those machines, we will be similar to parasites or bacteria that are inside our own bodies. Some humans like bacterias today will be around outside. Many will be inside helping AI machines run.
Is there any good source for China science news in English?
This development can't be stopped. Since one company is reckless enough to push and benefit from it, others will follow and it will become the norm. It's not the first time that potentially malicious technology gets sold on apparent advantages for consumers. If that doesn't work, they can still bribe government entities / the EU commission (see smart meters).