skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't remotely true.

The total violent crime rate has decreased by ~50% in the last 20 years. The rate of "Nonfatal Firearm Victimizations" has fallen by ~75% from it's 1990's peak:

Overall: http://i.imgur.com/EpZQTo5.jpg

By Race: http://i.imgur.com/h7rQVf2.jpg

(From this PDF: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf)
May as well just redirect to Apple press releases on the same topic whenever a Gruber post gets submitted. It would be an interesting NLP problem to figure out what subject he's talking about and automatically find the appropriate Apple press release to redirect to.
Hacker News Sidebar: An Extension for Google Chrome
Is there a source that you have on that? I typically use city-data for that sort of thing, and their page doesn't tell the same story. http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.h...

While theft and arson are up, rape and assault are down.
> Who (Roger Penrose excepted) would have guessed that it
> would be possible to make a set of times so incredibly
> small and deceptively simple that would have these
> extraordinary properties.

Well, one of those people was my professor in school, Clark Richert, who "discovered" the tiles at just about the same time. Penrose sued, my professor won the case.

His artwork is beautiful, by the way,

http://www.clarkrichert.com/
But those innovative taxi companies still charged a 10% surcharge for using your credit card. Which mysteriously dropped to 5% when Uber appeared on the scene.
> don't see how the overall point doesn't equally apply to the Apple Watch.

This is something that nobody seems to want to acknowledge in (for lack of a better word) the Apple fanclub.

If you look at the features of the Apple watch, they are basically the same as every other smartwatch released by Samsung and motorola (except for the NFC/Apple Pay stuff, which I am genuinly excited for).

People are trying really hard to differentiate Apple Watch from the Android watches, but it all sounds so absurd because they are so similar (apart from the home screen zoom-UI). Even Apple made their watch square!

And we know that Android Wear kind of sucks. So if they're not that different, Apple Watch will probably not be that great.

The "digital crown" input mechanism is interesting. The Watch seems to have a crisp (tiny) screen. And the wrist bands look cool. But unless there's going to be some crazy battery in there, 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.
The Geometric Principles of String Instrument Making in Brescia [pdf]
"Most of these things"...

My two newest ones both weigh in under 400g (a bit less than 1lb) ready to fly - fully loaded I could fly with 800 or 900g all up if I wanted to (they're a _lot_ less fun to fly loaded up like that though). They both use 5 or 6 inch props, usually plastic (though I do have some carbon fibre ones) which while they hurt a bit if you're careless are not super dangerous. I'd hesitate at calling them "mostly harmless" - you're right in that they're about as likely to cause damage in public as a baseball or frisbee - I think of them as about as dangerous as a kid on a bicycle.

A friend has a octocopter with eight 14inch carbon fibre props spun by 2kW motors which weighs in at over 6kg with all five cameras it usually flys with mounted.

Those _shouldn't_ be subject to the same rules - but the hobby/tech moves _way_ faster than the regulations, so while I disagree with it, I understand _why_ the restrictions need to first be based on the assumption that there are people flying unshrouded lawnmowers spinning blades capable of chopping heads off - because they _are_.

At least here in .au, there's strong evidence our local authorities are thinking about a graduated set of regulations (at least for "non commercial, hobby use"), where sub 0.5kg craft will be treated differently to 2kg and 5+kg craft.
This talk is fantastic: "Mathematics of Juggling", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38rf9FLhl-8
I am very excited to have a chance to listen in on this course. I currently attend a state university in Illinois that has a small entrepreneurship program and I am working hard to get every student involved in the startup space in Chicago where I know they will gain the most knowledge and experience. This course that Sam and YC are making available will be a huge resource to myself and my fellow students this semester. Appreciate the hard work and thought. Can't wait!
I am really interested in Elixir. Seems like a language built with a purpose (scaling past the limitations of a language like Ruby) and has a focus. It doesn't try to be cute or throw in features for the sake of throwing them in but, makes a concerted effort to bake useful things into the language.
A major part of the article discusses the fact that if this applies to the Apple Watch he will be disappointed.

He is expecting developments between now and release (ie. more information) to demonstrate that this is not the case.
Emacs Lisp's Future
The idea that No One Is Coming.

No one is coming to fix your problem, help you out, give you the magic "tip" you need, point you in the right direction, throw you a rope, help pay your bills, show you "the way," etc.

"But if I just see the right specialist..." "If I could just hire the right consultant..." "If I could just..."

Bullshit.

No one is coming.

You own your problems.

Whatever your problem is -- raising money, finding the "right" therapist, quitting cigarets, finding the right partner, getting the right degree (if I just had an MBA...), learning the right skills -- whatever it is, it's your problem. It's okay to ask for help. But it's your problem. No one's going to fix it on your behalf, make you better on your behalf.

No one is coming.

"Yeah, but..."

No. No one, is, coming.
Even though this video doesn't go into any deep details as to how No Man's Sky technology works, it does give some interesting hints as to what "procedural generation" means in this game.

It's only about 10 minutes and I thought it was worth the time.
> I don't see how the overall point doesn't equally apply to the Apple Watch. Playing music via Bluetooth only

But Gruber says this:

> It has internal storage and Bluetooth, so you’ll be able to use it for music playback without taking your iPhone with you.

Is Gruber wrong about that? I admittedly don't know, but he sounds authoritative here that the Apple Watch has storage for tunes. That's pretty cool to me.
Spot on. As is typical of Gruber he is conveniently missing the fact that Android Wear updates come straight from Google - i.e. the barrier to software side of innovation is almost non-existent compared to Android phones. There is nothing in hardware or software innovation and differentiation that the OEMs and Google cannot add down the line.

There is really no merit to this article at all - it comes across as a series of bending, twisting, confusing hogwash that tries to get you to somehow believe that Apple has gotten everything right and if they haven't gotten something right they surely have secret plans to get it all right. (There is one consistent thing with Gruber - he conveniently ignores or otherwise pooh poohs facts that get in his way. Apple didn't state battery life numbers and Moto 360 battery life is widely varied in the reporting - ranging from half a day to 40 hours - but that doesn't stop him from claiming Apple Watch will run throughout the day irrespective of usage and Moto 360 will top out at half a day! Given his emphasis that Apple is doing more with the watch than competitors and given the physical limitations the claim that it will last a day no matter how you use it - is dodgy a best.)
Tapster creator here. Happy to answer any questions!
Android wear is basically on gen 2 or 3. By the time Apple's Watch actually comes out they'll be on Gen 4 or 5. The iteration in Android land is breathtaking right now. And I think the devices (phones) at the mid and high end are basically better and fill many more niches than Apple's stuff.
The problem with RadioShack is that I can't walk in and pick up a Raspberry Pi. That's the space they used to occupy. And the person who sold yesteryear's equivalent knew their stuff...more than just another cellphone sales clerk.
Another Day, Another Quote Fabricated by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
It's a video of a "dirty" guy on a computer in a rusted warehouse, browsing facebook on a computer. It pulls up your info and shows him scrolling all over it, looking at pictures, etc, and then he Google Map searches your hometown. There's a shot of him driving, with cuts of him in the hollywood-style "freaking out" thing, and then he gets out of the car with either a knife or a gun, and it puts your profile pic on a piece of paper taped to the dash.

So, somewhere between reality and fear-mongering.
Apparently Carmack didn't actually use it anyway, so I suppose there wasn't any purpose. But Carmack's series is significantly different from the normal Fibonacci series, because it only consists of the first ten elements, which isn't enough time to converge. If it was used in actual graphics or gameplay, it would have had a significantly different effect than a normal Fib sequence.

I just thought it was interesting, and another example of the same type of style which led to rocket jumping or bunnyhopping, which were also accidents.
The only way you could make this work would be to make the electronics swappable out of the chassis, to give the object some sort of historical permanence for the owner.

Of course, if you could do that though, then you're not really in the smartwatch business, since it would mean anyone could make compatible wrist-bands.

Conversely - that might not be a bad business to be in.
Has anyone benchmarked this? lmbench (I'm biased) or something else?
8-space tabs? Yuk!
Since it's (public) Beta launch in end of Sept, the testimonials most be from their closed Alpha customers. :)
Is it just abortion or an increased use of conception prevention methods and morning after drugs?
> And we know that Android Wear kind of sucks. So if they're not that different, Apple Watch will probably not be that great.

that's really the salient point isn't it? Apple's playing catchup, but shooting for targets that probably aren't all that great to begin with.
Color me skeptic, but this smells just like the previous bait-and-switch to me.

Why should we trust Zuckerberg to not pull another all-your-data-are-belong-to-me crap like countless times he did with FB and not f--k user's privacy all over again?

(Yes, I'm pissed and Zuck can fold his shiny new app and shove it where the sun don't shine.)

As far as tech goes, my guess is this is based off of WhatsApp whom FB acquired earlier this year. Time to move my private chat groups to Silent Circle or Signal.
>Perhaps there's some use case where the digital crown is a preferable method of input (setting a very exact numerical value for example)

Home automation.
RS kind of was the original maker space. They could take that market back.
Ars Technica recently did a comparison of (what we know of) the Watch software, and the Android Wear software:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/smartwatch-wars-the-app...

Android Wear looks very primitive in comparison.
I've done a bit of work with Palantir. This is basically spot on. They're really cagey about the core/user requirement in real life so I'd be comfortable in saying most customer over purchase cores. They usually staff 2-3 full time guys for every 30-50 people and the implementation takes forever. I know of more than one place that didn't have a working system a full year after purchase. Meaning the maintenance had already expired on that first year.

Your later comment about the crack model is also spot on. There's a fairly long list of disgruntled places that bought on discount and are now being hit with huge O&M maintenance fees and are looking for a way out. I think they're government customers are slowly going away.

They're starting to show up more overseas here. Palantir recently opened up a Seoul office. But how much of whatever business they get out of it is government and how much of it is commercial is anybody's guess.
wait until NFC truly takes off...
That's what happens when people keep talking about "growing inequalities" instead of focusing on the fact that everyone is actually getting richer with time (and obviously people who already have a lot of capital grow richer faster). There's no zero-sum game at work.
How Gangs Took Over Prisons
I found 2 demo projects in their github account: https://github.com/switchface/helm-demo-colors and https://github.com/switchface/helm-demo-gradients .
Pretty much all the smartwatches have sufficient internal storage for some music. They're probably all just an app away from supporting this kind of use-case.

In other words Gruber's case on this is irrelevant.
I'm not sure I understand your criticism. He seems quite clear to me. He thinks that iThings are egalitarian products, but demonstrates that Apple as a whole is not, given the existence of Macs, and now the watch.

This is a worthwhile point to make, since people will compare the watch to iThings, not Macs.
Strictly speaking, being on the GSA schedule and being able to offer products/services for sale to the federal government requires that you not sell that product/service anywhere else for less than that GSA price.

This is actually one of the reasons that doing business with the government is less lucrative than the commercial industry (for products and services which are comparable, many are things only sold to the government, so there is no hesitation about pricing them through the roof).

As you can imagine, one of the ways that duplicitous federal contractors get around the idea of having to sell to the government for less than their normal prices is to structure their products/services as different (and therefore not apples to apples comparable).

I still would bet that the price that they charge Goldman Sachs (just as an example, I don't actually know which investment banks are using their product) is higher than what they charge for any individual government client.

Also, I think it's probably worth noting that the maximum addressable customer base for their products for federal agencies is way smaller than the equivalent number of financial customers. There's really only a handful of agencies that have this capability (I'd guess more than a handful, but probably less than a dozen).
Mobile developers: is there a need for this? Are automated testing tools for emulators not good enough?

Fascinated by this, but a bit confused about how practical its uses are. Very cool in any case.
They do have some examples of the engine working in the "guide" pages [1], but I don't really know enough about the technology to be impressed. "It's just a black triangle."

[1] http://helm-engine.org/guide/gradients/
I'm also a happy NewsBlur premium user, and RSS is the only way I could keep up with all the blogs I follow. In fact, I'm reading HN via its RSS feed right now...
To defend my position: They're not calling it a "crown", they're calling it a "digital crown", and digital knobs are common place objects that already have a name.

If I build a car with a joystick instead of a steering wheel and call it a "digital steering wheel" everyone would say, "No, somebody invented that already, it's called a 'joystick'"... they would not say "I am going to educate the uninformed and tell them that among car connoisseurs, a joystick is called a steering wheel."
Funny you should mention that. Palantir's main competition in the governmeent, i2, is now IBM.

i2 was selling their software at some fraction of Palantir's and in the DoD space it's basically as ubiquitous as Microsoft Office. Palantir is everywhere, but it doesn't end up being used nearly as much.
Yeah, forgot the viewport thing. Thanks for that.

As for the burgermenu, I'll take a look at that; thanks for the pointer. I'm currently playing with this alongside Pure (which I'm also interested in for many of the same reasons - namely, the lack of JavaScript, the small footprint, and not being some giant clusterfsck like Bootstrap and Groundwork tend to be), and one advantage of Picnic in comparison to that is that the menu actually shrinks down to a burgermenu without the need for Javascript (as far as I can tell; with Pure, that doesn't seem to be the case).
Android Wear has that functionality included in an update - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/09/android-wear-moving-f...
Those don't really show much of the FRP style programming, it's how pretty much all haskell graphics libraries work.
Can you explain the lead in automotive fuel thing?
"The iPhone has long had a better camera than just about any Android phone, and it’s always had a better ecosystem of editing and sharing apps than any other platform."

I'm in neither camp, but after reading this I can't really take this review that seriously...
Why not? People aren't stupid, and I expect most people realize that some businesses aren't meant for YC for one reason or another. Trying to obscure that fact doesn't make YC better, or more appealing. I'd actually say that covering that material would make YC more appealing, because it would hammer home the point that the YC people are on-the-level, straight-shooters who don't try to distort the truth to favor themselves. Who wouldn't rather do business with somebody like that? It's basically about trust.

You could almost make a comparison by analogy the old saw about how "the best way to get customers to use your product is to make it easy for them to leave your product".
Your first guess isn't far off.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/crooked-ladder
It really is an ugly square brick, regardless of how nice the bands are.

For a company that wanted you to think difference, which I interpret to mean "don't be a square", all this squareness and market conformity is really disappointing.
There is only one question I ask to Minix: How much space and time does it take these days to compile a Minix kernel?

The current system I use takes about 220MB of RAM and about 15min on an underpowered netbook. (It is not Linux but still has decent hardware support.)

Of course I'm also curious what other folks who compile their own Linux kernels see as their "minimum" requirements.
Want to kill Uber and Lyft?

Require drivers to be as ADA-compliant as taxi services.
The book by the same title and author (which is heavily based off of this paper) was actually one of the first books on functional programming I read. I don't think I would suggest it as an introductory text to anyone, but even so I really enjoyed reading it even though I didn't know what functional programming was at the time.

The book is about persistent data structures and what techniques can be used to measure their time complexity. I don't think there's much utility here for the software engineer (although I suppose there's probably some edge cases where it would come up), but as someone who's interested in programming language development I plan to keep this book around for a long time.
That was brought up in Gruber's post as well. What is more audacious then dropping 10k on something that will be obsolete in 2 years. There's an audience for that kind of ridiculous spending and you can bet people will notice a 10000 dollar Gold iWatch strapped to your wrist and know that you are someone with so much money that having an obsolete piece of technology that costs 10k is no big deal.
I suppose the problem is that there is no canonical standard of ethics to which we can point. We should write one.
Well if it comes down to the bands, you just know there will be knockoffs. As for the enclosure itself, Apple seems really proud of their manufacturing process for these things. If the guts of the thing are swappable (even if only by Apple), it might be tough for anybody else to come up with a comparable knockoff.
I'm switching from Android to iPhone largely because of the camera.
Cracking the Tech Center
> The new companies, unlike taxi operators, have lesser insurance requirements, no restrictions on the number of vehicles they put on the streets, no clean-air standards and less-stringent background checks.

There are clean air standards for taxis? I'm not sure how well they work, since about half of the taxis I have taken recently (worldwide) have had the engine light on, indicating a likely emissions problem. Since taxis drive so much, an emissions issue on a taxi for a month is probably equivalent to a year on many private vehicles.

That said, even private vehicles have clean-air standards in any state (like mine) with emissions inspection requirements.
> In 1971 the US ended the Bretton Woods system, finally freeing the dollar from any pegging. (Thanks for the wrong hint)

Eh? You were complaining about inflation not foreign exchange rates.

For reference you said:

> In this sense, taxes are higher now, since the dollar was pegged to gold then.

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-in...

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=1917&ye... You can verify the #s there too, cept by year to give you an idea. 1917-1918? 18% inflation

Let me point out a few lines for you:

1917	12.5	15.4	14.3	18.9	19.6	20.4	18.5	19.3	19.8	19.5	17.4	18.1	17.4

1918	19.7	17.5	16.7	12.7	13.3	13.1	18.0	18.5	18.0	18.5	20.7	20.4	18.0

1919	17.9	14.9	17.1	17.6	16.6	15.0	15.2	14.9	13.4	13.1	13.5	14.5	14.6

1934	2.3	4.7	5.6	5.6	5.6	5.5	2.3	1.5	3.0	2.3	2.3	1.5	3.1

1935	3.0	3.0	3.0	3.8	3.8	2.2	2.2	2.2	0.7	1.5	2.2	3.0	2.2

Bretton Woods was for handling international exchange rates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Fixed_exch...

Do you get it now? Or are you confusing the rate for gold for the rate for real goods [e.g. Food, Housing, Labor] still?
They sure have chosen their preferred client industries of Government and Financial Services wisely then. Those industries (a) are accustomed to paying that much for their technology, and (b) are very unlikely to leave your platform once you start using your wares, since the difficulty of getting them as a customer in the first place (and how slow they move and how much paperwork / due diligence is required) directly translates to difficulty for them to move off of your system.

Brilliant.
1. Crime pays less than it used to. Back in the good old days, people carried more cash on them. Pickpocketing and mugging was reasonably profitable when everyone had money. These days, everyone has credit cards. I frequently carry less than forty dollars; I've gone weeks where I have zero cash in my wallet.

2. It's harder to avoid the fuzz. Police techniques have gotten dramatically better. Everything from witness protection programs (Now you can testify against the mob boss without worrying about feeding the fish) to analysis of crime patterns means that police are collecting more evidence than ever before.

3. Entire avenues of crime have disappeared due to 1 and 2. For example, auto theft has declined dramatically due to the institution of chipped keys, GPS tracking, and the easy apprehension of chop shops.

4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone.

I don't think that these things are exclusively responsible; I'd just like to add them to the nice list that you have going.
What about a cold weather? You can still turn the crown in gloves when it is freezing.
A scanner: How secure are open source Ruby projects on GitHub?
> primitive

In the same sense that 2010 era iPhone was primitive? It's a different design strategy on part of Google - given the limited screen real estate they want to keep the information density minimal. That's actually a Apple-esq stance whereas Apple is taking Android-esq stance of adding ton of involved stuff which frankly doesn't sound too right for a smart watch.
Apple Watch luncher in your browser