skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Theres a definite difference...Learning step by step to a voice and visual instructed teacher (in my opinion) is much more clear than having to read something and reread it to really understand it.
I agree. I've been confused by this notion of driver-less cars up until now because at the end of the day it didn't seem workable or acceptable to have cars on the road with no human attendant. Musk clears that up when he says he doesn't like the term driver-less and it's much more like auto-pilot on an airplane that will assist drivers. He predicts it will be a common accessory in high end cars in 3 years and in all cars in 10 years. One scenario where this would be very helpful would be in the dense fog which occurs in the California Central Valley.
In the second legal battle that Aereo won back in 2012, the lone dissenting judge in the US Court of Appeals in NY had a scathing critique of Aereo's scheme. I'm generally pro-Aereo, but I think HN readers might find this portion of Judge Denny Chin's dissent interesting:

"Aereo’s “technology platform” is, however, a sham. The system employs thousands of individual dime-sized antennas, but there is no technologically sound reason to use a multitude of tiny individual antennas rather than one central antenna; indeed, the system is a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law. After capturing the broadcast signal, Aereo makes a copy of the selected program for each viewer, whether the user chooses to “Watch” now or “Record” for later. Under Aereo’s theory, by using these individual antennas and copies, it may retransmit, for example, the Super Bowl “live” to 50,000 subscribers and yet, because each subscriber has an individual antenna and a “unique recorded copy” of the broadcast, these are “private” performances. Of course, the argument makes no sense. These are very much public performances." [1]

[1] http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/620ea2ad-c6c...
No, seriously. Everpix DOMINATED WhatsApp on every possible metric: ... revenue

WhatsApp has a few hundred million people paying $1/year

Everpix had 250k in revenue, total over the company's entire existence.
Is he out of touch because he is improperly interpreting the law, or because he reached a conclusion you don't like?
GM has been advertising very heavily on the Olympics and other venues. They're spending cash on it.
Fewer fields in the contact form - I mean why have a textbox? I am contacting you about conversion optimisation surely? Just grab my email or even better have a mailto: so I can say hi

remove full stops from h2

add full stops to li (personal annoyances)

What if my startup has no funnel? What if I have no traffic to optimise? these seem lie bigger issues for l
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebooks-whatsapp-acquisit...

"I’m 42, essentially married with a kid. I don’t give a shit about this. I’m not sexting with random strangers."
I think we should figure out what we mean by understand. Do you mean modeling 'the human brain' on some level and building abstractions?

Those abstractions are exactly that - abstractions. They are not the thing itself. Do you think we can understand everything through abstractions, even the process of understanding itself?
450,000,000 actually. At the rate whatsapp is growing, they will add 1 million more phone numbers by tomorrow evening.
> I do recall someone explicitly stating that radiation is a poor means of losing heat compared to convection and conduction - which seems to just be wrong.

Yes -- it's a common belief, and it's wrong. Under clear skies after dark, objects on the surface that are convectively coupled to the atmosphere will quickly fall below air temperature because of radiation heat loss, which can produce what is called "radiation fog", so named because it's caused by the air being cooled by the ground, which in turn has been cooled by direct radiation into space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog#Radiation_fog
ArsTechnica is lame to act like this is a Utah-specific thing. This is a federal case brought in a federal court that happens to be based in Utah.
I don't know about that. This same judge was a big part of SCO v Novell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._Novell

He seemed pretty reasonable there, IIRC.
I can hardly read that grey used on sequoia's blog. Just sayin'...
No problem! Have you commonly come across all these variations? I have seen a couple different things but my experience working in objective-c written by others has been limited, so my impression was that the above was more widely accepted.
You don't know if he applied as an engineer. He was VP of Engineering at Yahoo! by the time he left the company, it's somewhat unlikely he was probing for an individual contributor position.
Beginners have no idea about the connotation of 'numpy array'.

Talk about premature optimization.
I just want to second the recommendations for Ra and Fine Structure. Fine Structure is older and not as polished, but still a lot of fun and fairly well executed. Ra is better. I enjoyed mood of the authors other stories too.

I first found this site when someone linked to Fine Structure here on HN. And so it goes...
I'm sorry, but AGI vs Alchemy is a poor analogy with almost no parallels. I see this as a rather blatant strawman argument.

Flying machines vs AGI makes a much better analogy. Natural flying machines (birds) existed in nature, before artificial ones (planes) were invented. Artificial manned flight was speculated as a possibility for centuries with no macroscopic working examples, and heavily criticized as a transportational panacea/fantasy that was seen as clearly impossible to people at the time.

In fact, the analogy extends startlingly far. People doubted the possibility of manned flying machines for the longest time, with arguments strikingly similar to yours, e.g. 'We have no proof that such artificial flying contraptions can exist!'. Explaining away natural flight as a supernatural magic only accessible to birds is also eerily similar to the constantly retreating dualistic arguments against a mechanical brain.

Even your criticisms of current AI has analogues[2]. Long ago, even in ancient times, there is evidence of small "toy" birds that might have flown much like paper planes. Many similar toy examples existed around the 19th/20th century, too, yet many people still vigorously doubted the possibility of a flying machine that could carry a human.

Let's compare a paraphrase of common arguments against heavier-than-air human flight, with a paraphrase of your argument:

Of course we have natural examples of flight, as we see birds all around us. But there is no more evidence for human flight than there is for Bigfoot, leprechauns or space aliens. Sure, we have little toy examples of flying machines, but they're very limited -- the idea of full heavier-than-air human flight requires a leap of faith.

Vs.

[Of course we have natural examples of AI, I, the author presumably am one.] But there is no more evidence for AGI than there is for Bigfoot, leprechauns or space aliens. Sure, we have little toy examples of AI, but they're very limited -- the idea of full AGI requires a leap of faith.

[1] (Obviously I'm not referring to fusion or anything like that, because people of that era wouldn't have recognized that as transmutation.)

[2] To be fair, I think it's safe to say old-school non-probabilistic AI is dead. But just because one path ends doesn't mean there aren't a thousand others constantly exploring new ideas. Indeed, recent advances in deep learning are incredibly promising.
That ground has been covered many times. Hotels it turns out do things that AirBnB doesn't, for good reasons. Taxis it turns out do things that Uber doesn't. Yadda yadda. My critique is intended of the theme, not any specific instance of it.

You probably consider yourself neither stupid nor evil - try to remember this when it's your turn to be "disrupted"...
Startups are picky, large employers are less so. Try Cisco or Intel.
My guess is that the Supreme Court will be skeptical, because it looks too much like an attempt to get around streaming rules with a sham antenna that exists solely to get around streaming rules. I'm not that confident in that prediction, but I would be more surprised if they win than the reverse.

Another company that could in theory do something like that is Netflix. Currently they have streaming rights to a certain set of films, but they can rent you physical DVDs of a larger set of films. Could they eliminate that gap by setting up a "remote DVD viewing experience" service for the remainder? For the films where they have the streaming rights, they stream directly. For the films where they don't, they simply robo-insert the DVD into a player, hit play, and stream the output to you... which amounts to streaming video of the film, just with some robotic shuffling of DVDs to give it legal cover. My guess is this wouldn't fly either, but it's hard to say for sure.
Cannot see any picture there
I contribute to CocoaPods repositories, so I've seen a lot. I don't really feel adamantly one way or the other, but just be consistent.
Don’t Panic Documentary by Hans Rosling – The Facts About Population
That is my preferred method as well, but I've seen a lot of templates use:

-(void) doSomethingWithParameter:(NSString *)parameter;
Exactly my thoughts. Any idea how to get out of Facebook's database? I'd be willing to pay but then they have my full name instead of just a fake and my phone number.
I've been in the same boat and I've discovered that the way to get better at programming is to get better at computer science. Most books on programming usually contain a lot of basic knowledge about language constructs. It's all variables, functions, classes, and then maybe some things about web programming. For the most part language constructs usually aren't enough to solve problems. It's very hard to take that knowledge and apply it to a fundamentally different problem than what was worked out in the book. And because the problems the book worked on were most likely trivial, you don't really gain much perspective on how you would build something more complex.

That's where computer science comes in. CS deals mostly with abstract concepts -- algorithms, data structures, parsing...that type of stuff. If you train your mind to think in these terms, then you start seeing programs as the sum of their parts (state machines, stacks, trees, grammars) and complex programs become less of a black-box. In effect you're transforming And because you can now picture how someone else has built their program, you just put those same pieces together and with a bit of thinking and googling, you can glue them up into something similar. Eventually you'll be able to picture your own solutions from scratch.

The thing, though, is that computer science is math. A different type of math, but math all the same. It's something you have to work at your own pace, patiently. Deliberate practice is not just a catchy phrasing. It's a very important concept. I stress this because I made the mistake of rushing through a lot of this stuff. I only half got it, but it's worth taking the time to fully understand even seemingly simple concepts because it opens up so many possibilities!

So in order to solve your tutorial problem ("what you need to learn, in what order, to get started"), I would suggest you pick a problem that's interesting to you, find out what sorts of concepts it depends on (what data structures are involved, what fundamental algorithms, ... that sort of thing) and work your way from those concepts to the solution (a working program). For example, if you were interested in building databases, you might want to learn more about b-trees, but in order to learn about b-trees you might need background in simpler data structures and work your way up. You might also want to learn about how to build a query engine, so you might want to learn more about lexing, parsing, and all that. From there you just learn how to implement those things (or find a decent library) in your language of choice and go from there.
Any benefits are purely a side effect for me. I play because I love competitive gaming.
I think it would be a bit different if the child (AI) takes all your food and kicks you out of your own house ;-P.
If you'd read the article, you'd know that a federal case brought in a federal court in New York came out the other way, so the impact of this decision is geographically-limited until the Supreme Court weighs in (oral arguments coming in April).
I probably said it that way so I could hear nice arguments about why I'm wrong. Sorry if that's trollish :-)
Thank you, Paul!

The headline fullstops are really catching a lot of flak. ;) They're gone now.

> What if my startup has no funnel?

Do you mean if the conversion process does not have a funnel, or if they're just not tracking it yet?

> What if I have no traffic to optimise?

Good question. As I see it, going from 0 traffic to 1,000 is a whole different beast than going from 1,000 to 10,000. The former often requires not just optimization but marketing from the ground up, branding, product development, and so on... All of which can easily turn into a full-time job for one or more people.
WhatsApp equals Free SMS, plus you can create groups. That is what their value proposition was back then, that is what it is now.
Maybe you should give an obj-c seminar
My sole reason for posting the example was to show how a small number of individual antennas could produce focusing lobes within a 2D space. Phased array radars use many more elements, much higher control over the wavefront, and for a different purpose.

In a cellular antenna scenario, unlike phased array radar, you cannot avoid multiple lobes, but the advantage of phasing is still present. Adding antennas to the system (beyond three or four) becomes a case of diminishing returns.

> More antennas can enable you to narrow lobes more - you may have not been phasing them properly to get that effect.

There are paradoxical effects with more than a few antennas -- apart from the complexity issue. In some cases you will see lobes with strange shapes in locations having no benefit. With a circular array of antennas, you sometimes get concentric circles of high signal strength, not what you're after in the described system. Example:

http://i.imgur.com/hK9BZnF.png
The irrational rationality behind Facebook’s $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp
The worst is:

unless
...
else
...
I have a problem with his assertion that Tesla will be the first company to market with a significant "autopilot". You can go out today and buy a car from Honda that will autonomously turn the steering wheel to stay within lanes and adjust the throttle/brake to maintain speeds in traffic. If I read the (marketing) details correctly, it sounds to me like you could turn the system on in LA and not touch the wheel/brake/throttle until you have to exit I-5 or run out of gas. If that's not a significant advance in autopilot technology, I wonder what Musk is cooking.
I concur. % formatting is extremely cute and I miss it in every other language.
An entrepreneur with no resources will get you one exasperated entrepreneur.
Rise of the IT Generalist
Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App
Git: how to use stash
Presumably you're paying a flat-fee that's more than $1/year though.
Life lesson for US HNers who may never have been in this situation: you can negotiate with healthcare providers on price. It is actually fairly routine. They won't think less of you.

70 cents on the dollar delivered immediately in cash beats the heck out of 100 cents on the dollar transferred to a debt-collection agency, worked for 6 months, and negotiated down to 60 cents of which the agency keeps 15.
it should be in my profile
> Finally if you're going to invoke the "I was doing this before you were born" I'm more than happy to quit now. I had this foolish idea that you (as most people on HN do) wanted to understand the world as it really is.

I understand these issues perfectly well, and you are trolling. I proved my case, or weren't you paying attention? The conversation is about an unconventional scheme that relies on a conventional cellular system.

As I said before, go argue with someone else until your earlobes dry.
> 40% is clearly closer to "won" than 16% is.

No, because the internet was expanding rapidly, so it wasn't won at all. That's like saying a basketball game is won because one of the teams got 100% of the points awarded in the first minute.

My point is that as "number of happy messaging users" approaches "number of humans" things will get harder and harder for a messaging upstart. Whoever I was responding to was suggesting that there will just be a long chain of succession forever and ever. I'm saying I think surpassing the encumbants was easy five years ago, is still doable today, but will be quite hard in 20 years.
Scaling to Millions of Simultaneous Connections: Rick Reed (Whatsapp) [video]
As a better alternative, we are providing DeployGate. If you get bothered by people who asks you to install the app you are working on in person, DeployGate is there for you.

Plus, DeployGate has just released a beta program supporting iOS apps yesterday and it's free if you get started now. =)

https://deploygate.com/beta_program
Thanks for the succinct summary.
Read this in the past and there's a few things that bother me

* It's impossible to simulate a universe of our current resolution, because it would take more matter than the original universe.

* You can't just simulate 'observable areas'. Everything needs to be simulated.

* An infinite loop does not end, even in an infinitely powerful computer

* A fun calculation from the ZFS folks: To fully populate a 128bit filesystem (ie permute all combinations) you a lot of energy. So much energy you could boil the world's oceans, See:

* [1] Physical Limits of Computation: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043.pdf

* [2] https://blogs.oracle.com/dcb/entry/zfs_boils_the_ocean_consu...
I'm assuming this is a practical question rather than a theoretical one, since you don't want abstract concepts that you can't relate to.

Usually if you enjoy your live you don't stop to ask if it's futile or not. When life is hard or boring... that's when such questions usually arise.

So... I don't what to assume to much, but if life is too boring, you CAN make it better. It's not futile. The general strategy seems to be to 1) get skills, 2) get paid for those skills, 3) have free time, 4) figure out what's interesting to you and spend time and money doing that. Many people have problems figuring out each of these steps, but they're all solvable.
> A dipole is not directional?

A vertical dipole, something I mentioned a few posts ago, before msandford decided to turn this into a pissing contest. As a radio amateur, you will be familiar with the radiation pattern of a 1/4 wave vertical coupled to a ground plane.
Large capital expenditures undertaken by municipalities are usually funded by bonds.

A municipality would issue bonds to fund the replacement of their water mains, which are breaking and pouring water into the streets every winter. It would issue bonds to renovate their elementary school, which has a leaking roof, asbestos insulation everywhere, and drinking fountains that dispense leaded water.

Municipalities have limited borrowing power, so muni fiber does have to compete against all those other priorities. And it's been a tough market for muni bonds lately.

What's more, muni fiber would be considered a non-essential revenue bond. These types of bonds carry higher interest rates than essential services bonds, or general obligation bonds.
Elderly nun among anti-nuke peace activists sentenced to prison
I don't understand why the Martians would be in a better position to re-colonize the Earth than the survivors on Earth.
Of course they can afford this.
Facebook has currently a market cap of $173.35B (https://www.google.com/finance?q=FB)

They spent on WhatsApp $4B (cash) and $(12+3)B (in stock). $12B is nothing when you have $173B.

If the $173B evaluation is correct, it's a totally different story. But as long as people think it's correct, Facebook can profit and buy any competitor with investor's money.
Why buying whatsapp is GENIUS and Google must be shit scared
I like your analogy, and will take it a step further.

You're like a person who can run 10 km nonstop and therefore respects someone who can run 15 km. But since you've never tried riding a bike a long way or swimming, you don't respect people in those professions.

If, instead of turning your nose up at them, you were to try those other professions, then you might find yourself developing some respect for what it takes.

That's kind of where I am. I have learned some things in depth. But I've learned enough about enough things that I have come to expect there to be something real to learn to be good at pretty much anything I don't already know. Since I'm smarter than most, I can learn a lot of things relatively quickly. But I still can find ways to treat people who know things that I don't with respect.
No, such agreements needn't be deceitful nor manipulative. "No poach" agreements don't preclude me, as an employee, from leaving one firm and moving to another - they only preclude the partner firms from actively seeking out one another's employees.

If an "extreme no poach" agreement does, however, limit my future choices, then such information should be disclosed to me prior to employment. Even this more extreme form isn't inherently deceitful if disclosed. If not disclosed, then it would be unethical.

Note that California (and likely US Federal) law makes no poach agreements of any form illegal, thus making disclosure quite tricky. Of course, their illegality also makes it much easier for partner firms to cheat.

Thus, under the circumstances, the "soft no poach" agreement would be ethical: It requires no employee disclosure to remain ethical. The "extreme no poach" agreement, however, can not be rendered ethical in the current legal environment.
Music Production on the Pandora
- Unlimited SMS plans are less common than unlimited data plans in Europe.

- You can not do group chat via SMS. You send a SMS to multiple people, but they will only see your number and can't reply to the group (unless I am missing something). I feels more like chat room for your friend group or family.

- In Europe mobile phone providers have historically tried to rip off people with MMS, which may be a reason why they are unpopular.
We already have massive redundancy on earth: Different cities. Different continents. A supervolcano would destroy at most a few continents.
There was a company that did remote DVD streaming, exactly in the fashion and with the intent you describe. They lost on court [1] with a $1.8m payout.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/streaming-movie-ser...
NEW WOMENS FLAT PUMPS
Humans exhibit "intelligence". Humans exist in the physical world. There is some physical process which produces "intelligence". A priori, there is no reason to believe this process cannot be understood, engineered, and re-implemented (whether it be in silicon or in a biological way).

Your argument could have been made for every piece of technology before it existed. Here's what scientists, engineers, and mathematicians do: they either keep trying, or they find a reason why it's impossible.