skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Submarine PR is when a company manufactures news out of nothing and gets the press to cover it. This contract is actually news. If this story was shaped by Boeing PR, it's just straight ahead regular PR.
Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly.

I've quit trying to correct people about this (because it is apparently fruitless) on places like Facebook where friends and family will make off-handed claims about how bad the crime is these days compared to "the good old days" (where the "good old days" is circa the late 70s to the early 90s relative to these people's ages).

All of your fancy data is no match for people's emotional response perceptions.
Kind of interesting to see Apple on the more information-dense side of the UI, I actually think that most of the Android Wear shots look cleaner (though maybe there's too little information), but I digress.

I'm still a bit confused on the ease of use of Apple's UI ,namely the Zoom UI. I'll have to try it to understand.

The fact that this comparison even exists shows that Apple's attempt is not "revolutionary" in any sense of the word: Every Wear screen was duplicated on the Watch. The functionality is the same.

But the main issues with smartwatches are still battery life, size, and general uselessness without the phone. These points were not tackled. So Apple Watch could be a local maximum for this style of watch, but it's not the second coming unfortunately.
Sure, if you compare to the tail end of the crack wars. Compare to 1950 or 1900 or 1980 or... What does this prove exactly?

The perception of "safety" is also not only a function of "crimes per capita". "Blocks safe for a woman to walk through alone at night" or "total victimization rate" make just about as much sense. "Obviousness of safe / unsafe areas" is also a good one - if you have to have local knowledge of what is a "good neighbourhood" or not in order to avoid being victimized, obviously non-locals will develop a perception of the area as unsafe.

Wow, from the downvotes people seem really invested in particular choices of time horizon & measures of safety. Who knew?
Tiffany Discount,Tiffany Discount Stores
Interesting, it looks a lot like Maltego.
One of these days I'm going to get "All you need is Emacs" on a T-Shirt and teespring it.
The people that make money from the law enforcement and private prison industries don't want people to be aware of these numbers. It makes it too difficult to sell new LEO toys and prison beds.

Legalizing mj nationwide will probably help the numbers go even lower. LEOs should be focusing more on the nastier drugs like meth, gangs and white collar crime against the elderly and others that are vulnerable.
Here's a fun sport for Apple watchers, aficionados and detractors alike: has Apple jumped the shark yet in the post-Steve era?

(The game's a bit Candyland-esque; we always arrive at "yes": if Apple's strategy is inflexible post-Steve, they're doomed, if they make any changes, they are also doomed.)

Let's play anyway.

The big, flashing, worrying sign of changed-for-the-worse Apple isn't any hullaboloo about Warhol and luxury, it's that Apple didn't show us a product!

All they have is a fancy looking piece of hardware and a bunch of tech demos with a UI that clearly isn't cohesive or thought out enough to work in the real world.

And then, on top of that, they bragged a bit about how many features the Watch was going to have.

This is real "danger Will Robinson" territory for Apple, in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great: focussing on actual products with a a well-thought out core rather than a lard of features or pie-in-the-sky tech demos.

Gruber buries the lead a bit on this dramatic change. He doesn't get around to mentioning it until deep into the article, and then rather wavily dismisses the change with this bizarre explanation:

He suggests that Apple decided to demo a non-product because they couldn't keep the hardware secret long enough for the software to catch up.

If that's true, that means, what, Apple views secret-unveilings as its core principle?

But I think more likely is that Gruber mind is just going through reflexive contortions of justification here, and the truth is simpler: Apple is slowly losing the focus that for a brief few years really did make it unique among tech companies.

Certainly hope to end up eating crow on this, though. :)
Apple fan-boy here. I agree with the grandparent that Gruber didn't really make this point well. But:

> If you look at the features of the Apple watch, they are
> basically the same as every other smartwatch released by
> Samsung and motorola

This is basically true of almost every Apple product ever, except perhaps the iPhone at launch. I'll go a step further, and agree that Apple generally lags on features comparisons.

Which leads to one of two conclusions: Apple fans are all idiots caught up in marketing bluster, OR, there's something qualitatively different about Apple's take on their products, enough to stump up the extra cash. And you're welcome to the former of those opinions, but I think it's the second.

Fundamentally, I buy Apple for the same reason I shop with Amazon. There is - to me - enough implicit guarantee of quality (for Amazon, of the logistics, returns, etc) that anything else seems needlessly risky.

I'd probably enjoy and find value in a Moto '360. But I might not. I think I'd want to use one for a few weeks before committing to the cash. But my experience of Apple products to date suggests to me I'm going to love my Apple Watch, enough that I'll stump up the cash sight unseen.

> there's nothing revolutionary about this, and its
> functionally the same as the 6 watches that Samsung has
> released, and will probably be almost as underwhelming

History is not on your side with this one.
Rise of marijuana as drug of choice as opposed to amphetamines like crack.
To be clear, for people, who haven't read the article, it's making case that Apple and Google are taking "vastly different routes to getting a computer on your wrist" and that "we'll see who has the better approach in 2015".
Fighting Poisons with Bacteria: Going Inside the Rice Microbiome
Their implementation periods are horrendous. Their marketing speak and sales drones make it sound like a turnkey appliance...like you just drop it in, point it to your database URLS and you're now playing with knowledge management. But in practice there's months of custom backend Java development (the entire tech stack is Java 1.6 or something horrible) to build the connectors and map the data into their backend, then months of ontology management meetings to build up the one-true-model (TM) for all your enterprise needs.

Then months and months of post deployment tweaking and continuous work to keep the system alive and fix issues when some of the data sources change schemas or something.

I've heard things like average time from purchase to full deployment is something like 9 months. But from my time dealing with them I think it's much longer.
What part is Apple playing catch up with exactly?

Based on what I saw, Apple Watch seems to me, a lot more than just a notification device that Android Wear is.

Additionally, there's nothing in Android Wear that I've seen that focuses on the watch being, well, a watch. All the straps sucked, we don't know if the time is precise (this is the first thing Apple said about the Apple Watch), and most importantly, none of the watches out focus on user experience at all. They just wanted to be first out.
The Magic of Consciousness [video]
- Gaming (1985 NES release)
Description:

Consciousness is at the core of our very existence. An intangible constant that underpins our experience of the world. But for centuries it has been the frustrating source of a seemingly impenetrable explanatory gap – it is largely a scientific mystery.

As we interact with the world, stimuli trigger physical processes in our body. Nerve cells transmit messages around the body and through the brain. But how do these physical interactions give rise to the conscious sensations we experience? Can we get conscious sensation from nerve cells alone?

In this video theoretical psychologist Professor Nicholas Humphrey asks whether consciousness could all be an illusion. Could it be a mirage constructed in the theatre of our minds? Perhaps the questions we should ask are not centered on sensations themselves, but merely on the appearance of those sensations.

And why does consciousness, in any form, exist at all? How did it evolve? The answer might lie in our social interactions. Consciousness elevates our interpretation of the world and the people around us. It alters our psychological profile and breathes joy into our experiences, and makes us value life itself.
The URL Mess
I am no Gruber fan and I am no Apple fanboi, but I think his points are dead on in this post. He is hedging his bets, repeatedly, but given that we know so little about the Apple Watch, that seems reasonable. At any rate, the main point of the article being that the iWatch is not a play into the Wearables market, but rather a move into the much more lucrative luxury watch market. Given how bloated that market is and the value that the Apple name bestows on its products, I think that it's a reasonable assumption. That being said, his "Apple is not a technology company" line is weak. That's like trying to argue that WalMart isn't in the retail business, but rather distribution. You see... they do distribution better than any other company in their space (which is retail) therefore they are in distribution.
> Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly.

There's far too much money to be made and too much gain for some political parties to do anything other than pretend it's the end days of the crimpocalypse.
The AppleTV, which is not marketed as having any internal storage at all, has the same (meager) 8GB of storage as the now free-with-contract iPhone 5C.
Much like the iPhone announcement then.
> Among biggest impacts of the ride services has been the drop in taxi rides taken by people in ramp taxis, which carry people in wheelchairs. As the ride services have grown and the number of cabs has diminished, so has the availability of wheelchair-accessible taxis, which are costlier to operate.

That's certainly a negative effect, but why would it result from the rise of ridesharing services? If taxi companies need to scale back the number of cars in their fleet, shouldn't they only take from the cars that aren't accessible?
Seconded. One of the best books I've ever read - I honestly wish I could forget it and start over.
There is the argument that you can't learn much from failure. You could've failed for 6-7 reasons in reality and can have a theory about the 2-3 reasons for your failure with some overlap between the two.

Successful people however had a series of small wins and small failures and got to experience the difficulties/challenges at each level of success.
Unfortunately, it appears that the rate at which the developing world is catching up with the developed world may be reverting to a much slower mean: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21616891-ten-years-ag...

While the proportion of people in poverty has fallen significantly over the last 20 years or so, the absolute number of people in poverty is still quite high because the bulk of population growth is in very poor areas.
I guess Coinbase didn't learn their lesson last time they tried using reimplemented consensus code.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260595.0
How about we just start by having traffic laws enforced for cyclists at the same overall rate as that for motorists.
A robot (combined with a video camera) lets you test
things on real devices that current software-only tools don't handle:

- Testing interactions between apps and the actual sensors on real
devices. (Accelerators, cameras, GPS, making phone calls, receiving and handling SMS messages etc.)

- Testing perceived latency of video playback or UI transition animations.

- Testing interactions with the real environment -- an app that controls a light, completes a point-of-sale payment, or opens your car door, for example.

- Automating apps that you don't own or didn't write.

Automation APIs on iOS are pretty locked down so you can't automate apps that you don't own. Classic example is if you want to automate an interaction with the built-in phone, messaging, or email app. For this use-case, for automating on a real device, you'd need a robot. (This is less of a problem on Android, though.)

Also, phone manufacturers and network providers use robots to certify the devices themselves. Just last week, T-Mobile sued Huawei, alleging corporate spying of their phone-testing robot design. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/business/t-mobile-accuses-...
My favorite theory: Cellphones. Now black markets do not require real estate, which means no bloodbaths for prime territory. Cellphones turned the black market into a ubiquitous thing that's all about lead gen!
It is more correctly circular reasoning. The psychometric measure g does not break this circle at all. I will never believe in "intelligence tests" until this circular reasoning can be broken.
Yeah, you would think the taxi companies would lean more on this niche market, not less.
> raised almost a billion dollars and is valued at something like $9 billion dollars.

And now particular plans to sell or go public. This keeps all their financials private and the fact that they have to keep doing new fundraising rounds every few months does not make me think they're making money. At $9bil valuation, finding a buyer is going to be really tough.

They're a really weird company to deal with too. A bit cultish, the CEO is kind of flake the few times I've met him at their conferences. I get the impression that he's not really running the show, he's impossibly unqualified with zero history in any of the spaces they sell into and no business background of any useful type.

Their offices are nice, loads of free great food, but when people emerge from their offices for lunch it looks like they're on a death march. If you ask any of them if they like it there you'll always get a blank stare and a "I love it at Palantir, Palantir is great" answer.

Combined with the track jackets and sketchy legal history (well worth a read), it's kind of off-putting.
I can't speak for the rest of the lineup, but I know that YC partners see hundreds of startups run through their program each year. The aggregate value of that is significant, and there are very few patterns they haven't already encountered.

Having seen so many iterations of the startup process, I'd argue that they are eminently qualified to give advice on the subject.

I'd certainly prefer it over some random, anecdotal account from a founder who just happened to be in the trenches recently.
Crudely put, the idea is that lead in gasoline meant lead in auto fumes, which mean lead in the air. Lead in the air meant lead entering the body through the lungs, which meant mass low-grade lead poisoning / developmental problems.

Less crudely put: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Toxicity
no clean-air standards

Either the author is attempting to bias their readers or was unintentionally misleading -- California generally requires personal vehicles to be smog tested on a regular basis. I should know; my less than four year old car (at the time) had to be smog tested just this past year.
The problem with RadioShack is that you can pick up an Arduino or (probably, by now) a Raspberry Pi there, but you didn't know it.
Why would they need to be different?
I have to agree with you that he really did outdo himself on this one. His posts generally have one of his many hallmarks but this one seems to have quite a tangle of all of those.
And they would be right. Why? Because the joystick doesn't look the same as a steering wheel, so it's a stretch to call it a digital steering wheel (though you wouldn't exactly be wrong)

The crown on watches and the crown on Apple Watch look the same. It's a crown with digital functionality. Thus, the digital crown.
Well, you can keep do this with any two numbers a, b such that a + b > 0 and you'll end up with the golden ratio :)
JavaScript Expression Evaluator
A good blog for data issues
I have underestimated the Musk-Fandom. I'm also behind the guy but am lolzing at all the knowledgeable armchair astronauts and their expert conspiracies.

If only they would have relied on the opinions of web developers rather than experts in the aerospace industry.

I'm happy with the outcome but I don't hate Boeing so I'm obviously biased. That being said, I hope Elon demonstrates his ability, and will cheer him on.
I'd like to see it compared with news viewership/readership from various sources. Do people who watch TV news overestimate crime more than those who read news online? How does education about current events affect the estimates?

Though I have no data, I'm skeptical that the 24-hour news cycle is the primary factor. I would guess that people always tend to overestimate the crime rate, as a far fundamental bias, similar to how then-modern technology is always ruining society [0], or "kids these days" are always the worst generation ever to grace the planet. The article doesn't say whether people have gotten less accurate over time with their crime rate estimates.

[0] http://xkcd.com/1227/
I also own some Apple products,and one thing that is substantially different has been build quality and ease of use.

iPods were fun to use, iPhones had enough UI differentiation with things like blackberries to be "different".

the Apple Watch doesn't seem to have that. As a cousin post commented, Android Wear's UI almost seems more Apple than Apple's own UI.

Maybe the Zoom-UI and the crown are it. maybe this will tackle people's issues with usability. But there seems to be little differentiation. I won't argue about it being the best on the market (it might be), I just doubt this changes the marketplace as much as we might want.

This might end up being like the iPad. A lot of people ended up buying iPads, but unlike the iPhone, we didn't get a very large new tablet market from it.
What I don't understand about this is... why don't ATMs just put a damn motorized door in front of the card reader slot, or alternatively stick out a tray that you put the card in. The door approach makes it so that the thief has very small time window in which to install the skimmer. The tray approach can make it so that a simple internal image of the empty tray can determine if anything is ever left on it which is out of whack.

Yes it costs a little bit more, but CD-ROM drives have been doing both of these approaches for ages, and it would make the installation of a skimmer reader much, much harder.
there's a fair amount of vendor lock-in in this space as well and Palantir is pretty good at it. They talk quite a bit about open standards and what not. But moving off of their platform and onto one of the competing ones is basically impossible.

They've done a fantastic job at disrupting the link-chart market (which is surprisingly robust) and making it seem like customers are buying something else, but at 2-3x the price of the competition. They hide their sales guys as "forward deployed engineers" and obfuscate their sales process to the point where it doesn't seem like you've ever dealt with the kind of sketchy enterprise sales goon you'd deal with from any of their competitors.

They're very smart.
Top for Cassandra in bash
RadioShack also knew how to ride a wave. During the
CB radio craze of the 1970s (you had to be there to
understand)...

Sure, I understand. It's just called "Facebook" now.
I have waited impatiently since the 1990s for a functioning E-ink reader with fast enough page turns to browse documentation.

And the reason it isn't here is not technical problems -- it is because some shaved chimpanzee of an MBA thought high quality E-readers without colour (or a battery good "just" for a few days) was too small a market?!

I have vertigo.
Usually I feel bad for traditional businesses quickly displaced by emerging startups. However, I've been in too many cabs where the driver is constantly on the phone while driving, abusing the speed limit, slamming on the breaks every 8 seconds, foul odors, dirty vehicles, roundabout routes, the list goes on. Good riddance.
> What part is Apple playing catch up with exactly?

Existing.
Ugh, I am not sure if you are being sarcastic but it in fact is exactly unlike the original iPhone announcement. The OG iPhone solved a long standing problem that no one else had managed to solve elegantly. It did few things and it did them better than anything else before it.

Apple Watch - well your turn to tell me how it is anything like the iPhone - Apple actually did not tell us what problem it is solving - why competitors' watches are horrible, why I need the Apple Watch etc. That's the worrying thing about this.
I sent a note about using an elisp-on-llvm solution. Someone had done the work already, it appears: https://github.com/boostpro/emacs-llvm-jit
The above links to Mother Jones do a pretty good job. To make a long story short, the lead in the fuel came down to earth in solid particulate form, and formed fairly high concentrations in the soil, where it was ingested by kids.

Noting Crito's comment, I don't know if inhalation or ingestion was the primary vector.
whoa... just spent an hour reading some of Grellas' HN essays. Insightful stuff.

DC Toedt is another solid lawyer worth reading on HN. Out of Texas, I think.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dctoedt
This sounds pretty great, the biggest hurdle would probably be the fact that most current Radio Shack stores are very small relative to the space that would most likely be needed for these kinds of varying DIY projects. Though I haven't been in a Build-a-Bear in a while, maybe ever, so maybe they could use that size model since those stores aren't enormous either.
The best thing about Apple selling this watch now is that it puts them on track to make one half as thick a few years later that really will be aesthetically competitive. Within the decade, smartwatches will undoubtedly be thinner than mechanical watches, but they've gotta start somewhere.

Though I do have to admit that going into this thing, my guess was that they'd be using a new color e-ink display to save battery life, not a "raise your arm to turn it on" sensor.
What a strange attitude.
It's worth pointing out that they seem to have a monopoly in handicapped transport too. Not saying this is a major plus and not saying it's a profitable market, but they can at least use it to their advantage in marketing and courts.
Without bothering to actually look at the numbers, I suspect you are wrong. Flight was a big thing in the 50's through 80's (although it has continued in a few notable locations (Detroit, etc)). The 90s and 00's are best characterized as a reversal of flight though. Cities like NYC were rejuvenated, young successful people are once again moving into major cities.
> in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great

The thing is, Gruber's mutant power is the ability to turntwist just about anything Apple does into a core Apple value and what defines them and makes them great.

In other words, what Gruber thinks and writes about basically doesn't matter, because Apple could do just about anything and he'd clap for it and stand in line.
The accessible ones probably use more fuel per mile.
Except that he continually derides iCloud...
Thanks. If I may ask, are you a member of the lay public or do you have some expertise in the field (certainly you know more than I do!)?

> If these findings are surprising to you

Not knowing much about the field, I didn't have many expectations.