skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reducing choice is great when the involved tradeoffs are hard to figure out for yourself and depend on so many things around it.

That’s especially true for consumer electronics. I don’t know all the details, I can’t really write all the software for it, and I feel intimidated if I had to make all those choices by myself. I want someone to figure that out for me, especially since it works better as a tool if all the puzzle pieces are put together with care, not some bumbling idiot like myself. (Of course this is more subtle then that. And it’s always a delicate balance. Maybe others can deal better with picking tradeoffs for themselves. I personally really can’t.)

That said, while a little more complex, I don’t think the two models are too complex. But that’s where you can make a reasonable case. Still, they are clearly differentiated along practically only one axis (size) and exactly identical along most others. Only some things are more muddled and confusing to consumers (battery life, screen res, OIS). It seems manageable to me.

As for the watches … see, there’s where I think you are completely wrong. It’s not about functionality at all, it’s all about how it looks – and that’s a world of difference. When I go shopping for clothes I love to have a large selection. That’s the best thing. I want that choice, because it’s all very, very personal. That’s how this watch works, too, and that’s how it’s different. (In fashion there are problems, too, especially with no clear differentiation between products and no great overview. However, Apple doesn’t seem to make that mistake so far. Everything is clearly differentiated.)

The choices for the watch don’t really involve so much tradeoffs you as a consumer have to decide between (there is a bit of that w/ steel or aluminium and glass or sapphire – but that’s probably mostly paying more for better materials, not so much about tradeoffs), it’s more about what aesthetic you personally like. I think that’s very ok for something you wear. When I decide between different patterns for my shirt I’m not making tradeoffs, I pick what I like. That’s far simpler than making tradeoffs. It’s actually enjoyable, at least for me (and if the selection is big enough).
You should simply pick one platform and get it right first. Iterate or pivot then once you gain traction, port.

Why iOS first? Does it matter? It's his call.
Video of Windows 9's new Start menu in action
Very true. Hadn't thought of that. There were a lot early on, but you never hear about that anymore.
I think it was spot on. It made me yearn for Steve and his keynotes. It's sad that he's gone and we'll never see the likes of him again I fear.
In my experience Prolog is best as a user interface. The ability to explore through querying the clauses database and compose and explore different modes without writing throw away code is a real pleasure. Imagine a Prolog style command shell: the datalog semantics compose really well (basis of database queries), the naive search obviates writing throw away functions just for command line use, two way data flow through logical variable and unification significantly reduce the mental load needed to remember variations of function names etc.

It is a pity this is not done more often in practice. It is rather easy to write FFI functions for Prolog if efficiency is a concern. Embedding Prolog style computation inside another language, as the paper has done, seems to me to miss the point. It is the Prolog programming environment that I appreciate the most.
> Like, letting her program her damned computer, like any Excel idiot is perfectly capable of…

Excel is a far more advanced programming environment than any real IDE. There's less room for syntax errors, immediate feedback on changes, you can display and examine all intermediate computation steps…

Most important, the computational semantics of Excel spreadsheets do not include "accidentally delete all the user's files" or "accidental remote code execution" like most other programming languages.
Except last time they only ever released 1 app.
Great book, yes, but don't stop there. There is a lot more to evolution than Dawkins suggests; selection, no matter the mechanism, is, after all, determined by phenotype (the "realised organism", if you will) rather than genotype. And there are a lot of models of selection (and of modification) that make accurate predictions but don't have the Dawkins seal of approval. You'd be missing a lot if you allow yourself to become stuck in the notions of 1976, no matter what their merits at the time.
Exactly right. We're just a few years and a new kind of exoskeleton product away from able to leap skyscrapers if we want to. Materials science, computing, and battery technology are getting there. Someone will just have to actually make it. Good example.
Ah, I was going off an explanation I was given myself at one point--but this makes more sense, thanks.
This is such a depressing comment to read. Especially as the top one on HN.

Maybe he just wanted to make it? You know, the same reason someone might write a compiler, build a violin, cook a casserole, go jogging? Just the fact that he's getting out of VC and back into making things should be commended. Especially by a community that extols the "maker" attitude so heavily.

You could easily replace "share photos" with "look at the world" or "talk with people." Sharing photos is a HUGE part of technology because humans communicate extremely well visually. Of course every new consumer product is going to have the basis of sharing.

Also, it's incredibly self-centered to criticize someone else's work as not being "interesting" or "fun." Turns out there are folks in the world with other opinions than yours...

At first for us it was just about a lot of fun. In fact,
some early critics of Twitter said, 'Twitter is not useful,'
to which Evan, my co-founder, replied, 'Well neither is ice
cream. Should we ban ice cream? Ban all joy and stop working
on Twitter? Absolutely not. We were having fun working on it.

— Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder

I'm not saying his app is going to become Twitter. I'm saying the way you're criticizing it is a cheap shot.
What is APF? And why not use the typical URRE rate to calculate your stats?

I'm always mystified at how stupid our storage systems are. Even very expensive SAN solutions from EMC and the like area just... stupid. We've got loads of metrics on every drive, but figuring out that those things should be aggregated and subjected to statistical analysis just seems to have not been done yet.

What I really want is a "pasture" system - a place I can stick old drives of totally random sizes and performance characteristics and have the system figure out where to put the data in order to maintain a specific level of reliability. Preferrably backed by an online database that tracks the drive failure rate of every drive on every deployed system, noting patterns in 'bad batches' of certain models and the like. If one of my drives would have to beat 3-standard-deviations odds to survive for the next week, move the damn data to somewhere better. And if you've got 2 150GB drives and 1 300GB drive, then each block on those drives has a rating of 2.0 - adjusted for the age and metrics of the drive.

Oh well, maybe when I retire in 30 years storage systems will still be as stupid as they've remained for the past 30 years and I'll have another project to add to the pile I don't have time to work on now.
Q: Is Palantir a front for the CIA?

@peterthiel: No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.
Did anyone else catch his Oscar the Grouch mug in the photo? I laughed.
Dropbox/djinni
> if positive evidence isn't present, then the default assumption is correct

What you have said above is horribly wrong and is exactly the point I am making. If it is true then I can prove anything I like just by designing a bad enough experiment.

For example, suppose I want to prove that the moon is made of green cheese. I can start with a null hypothesis that it IS made of green cheese. Then I can point my telescope in the wrong direction and find no evidence that it is not made of green cheese. Using your logic I am free to then conclude that my null hypothesis is true.

You cannot just make any null hypothesis you want and then when you fail to prove it untrue, claim it is true. If you want to make a positive claim about the null hypothesis (for example, claim there is no association between salt and blood pressure) then you have to test it directly with positive evidence in its own right.
Some of us are outraged by where the U.S. is going but stay to try to fix it. Otherwise you get adverse selection effects, like when all the non-crazies left New Hampshire.

Plus have you ever had a European burrito? It's not pretty.
Install Open edX production stack in Ubuntu 14.04
>"In my line of work, in the investing side, you just see a lot of the same old stuff or a slight little variation... you see a lot of crap.... Hats off to them for trying something different."

-Kevin Rose, talking about being impressed by a video sharing app

This was from a podcast posted 3 weeks ago. I thought it was a bit of a silly comment then and even more so now, but I guess that's what he finds interesting. More power to him.

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/08/22/the-random-show-episo...
Home Run
Is cleaning up after yourself memory-wise considered part of the POSIX standard?
Ask HN: Who are people buying lavish and over expensive Apple products?
Hi HN ,
One day there is article how middle class is getting poor and people are loosing money. Only top executives and top 1 % are getting rich.

Other day, there are articles how cool apple products are and how eagerly everyone is waiting for stupid iphone and iwatch.

Apple also claim that millions are iphones and ipads are sold each year. I like their strategy of releasing products right before holiday/shopping season in Fall.

If people are really poor who struggle to meet end needs why is that they keep buying these expensive phones. Mind you actual phone price is $699, $749 and all.

So is poverty is myth in America ? Is american society making fool of itself. Now its its gonna be school / Halloween / Christmas season millions of dollars will be raised to help poor people. Do US have any accountability where this money is flowing ?

Why buy stupid products from company that uses shady tactics ( Ireland treaty), dirt cheap labor from third world country ? In fact, major question is if people are so poor why they buy these phones and tablets (now watches) ?
A work must be creative enough to earn copyright. Most tweets would not qualify, for example. You can assert anything you want without it being legally enforceable.
Adding some kind of arena-allocation library to both the build & runtime dependencies solely to keep valgrind happy, with no actual improvement in functionality or performance, doesn't seem like a great tradeoff on the software engineering front. I'd rather see work on improving the static analysis. For example if some memory is intended to be freed at program cleanup, Valgrind could have some way of being told, "this is intended to be freed at program cleanup". Inserting an explicit (and redundant) deallocation as the last line of the program just to make the static analyzer happy is a bit perverse.

(That is, assuming that you don't need portability to odd systems that don't actually free memory on process exit.)
How in the hell does one discover that kind of thing? :) I don't really know much about crypto and symmetric ciphers in general, but aren't the odds of discovering something that converts from JPEG to PNG by applying AES extremely small? Let alone something that ALSO goes from JPEG to PDF by applying 3DES.

I presume there is some algorithm based on the nature of ciphers themselves?
Hey! Creator here. Awesome to see this get posted and people excited about the project.

I made a cool writeup about it here:
http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-wi...

It's a great little library for doing audio recognition, stream radio advertisement verification, and all sorts of interesting people email about all the time that I never would have thought of.

It's certainly not as speedy as Echoprint, which is both written in C++ and doesn't use an FFT for the locality sensitive hashing, but is quite user friendly. The benefit of doing constellation or time delta based LSH methods like in Dejavu is that you can actually recover the time at which you matched.

If you love it, feel free to dig in and contribute!
Also check out this project, being featured in the next AOSA book:

https://github.com/audreyt/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet/...
My understanding is that Apple just included the standard Japanese emoji set, to help sell iPhones in japan. For a long time they were even hidden on non-Japanese iPhones.

The standard Japanese emoji set is pretty randomly put together and I don't remember my old keitai having that many country flags.
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We've been around for three years and we're growing fast. Unlike a lot of early stage startups, we measure our growth in revenue, and it's been exponential since the day we launched.

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We’re located in the Mission district in San Francisco (5 blocks from BART).

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- Unlimited vacation

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Just a nitpick, but core.logic is a version of Kanren[0].

[0] https://github.com/clojure/core.logic
I'm not sure if the article was good or bad. But boy did it make me miss Steve Jobs. (and I don't even use Apple products).
Only the file headers need to be valid, and generating a new file is as simple brute forcing encryption with random keys and then checking for a minimal correct file header.
Yes. Now it will rain value.
Insert different name and no one cares.
The way you check Google, before you look like an ass on Hacker News.
I'm pretty sure the casings are there for fire isolation
You can share your heartbeat with others with the apple watch, yes.
The search query is "I deleted facebook", the results stop being relevant after the first page, the rest is just noice, the problem is that you have failed to point to me to valid examples of motives to hate Facebook, weird, since you afirmed there were several well documented, yet, you have showed the quantity of zero.

So, you can't show me an example, I assume you are bluffing and neather you or anyone here has a valid reason to hate Facebook, at least not a reazoned one, just emotional.
I was a Commodore 64 kid, but do have a lot of nostalgia for Radio Shack of that era, of course the cellphone-centric Radio Shack of today is nothing like it used to be.

My feelings on them possibly dying are similar to how you might feel about an elderly loved one passing away after they've been suffering with serious dementia and/or other serious illnesses for 10 years... sad to see them go, but at the same time it is probably for the best because even if they somehow manage to hang on longer there are no good days ahead of them.
Maybe this is naive, but wouldn't it have made more sense to do a bunch of smaller cp commands? Like sweep through the directory structure and do one cp per directory? Or find some other way to limit the number of files copied per command?
It's funny that ii is even an issue because Linux does not support platforms without MMUs without some serious modifications.
Since Amazon is positioning this phone as a conduit from which to sell additional products from Amazon, they probably don't want consumers that can't afford the $200 phone.
The web has changed. Agreed.
Dropcam will soon work with Nest
"This Middle Eastern Startup Was Panned By Two Western Reporters...You'll Never Guess What Happened Next!"

"23 Lessons Uber Is Learning From This Group's Customer Acquisition Strategy"

"One Easy Trick To Overthrow Western Imperialism...Politicians Hate This Guy!"

le sigh.
So they're basically moving from timeshifting to permanent storage. It's not just about keeping the last 5 episodes of the Simpsons but all of them, forever. Why buy the DVD set?
The Apple Watch Explained – Hands On
iOS users are Apple consumers. Among that group there are far more people who: a) are interested in associating themselves with tech-fashion trends and companies, b) have the disposable income to spend (either directly or indirectly via advertising-driven sales), and c) have shown that they are willing to part with said income fairly readily.

I don't particularly care for Apple's products. I find them to be at best of equivalent quality to other items on the market and the aesthetic doesn't particularly appeal to me. But I recognize the value in targeting and marketing to that audience first.
What's your battery pack for?
The "#ifdef DEBUG..." option is pretty much exactly what they did:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2014-08/txtVTwv5...
Open it to the world from the beginning, there's always people out there willing to comment/help on code. Github is your friend.
Nope! Dejavu is meant for recovery of perfectly maintained signals with additive noise. That is to say, detecting a signal or song played slightly slower than the original hashed version is completely outside what Dejavu can do. Detecting a signal played back at the same speed with a lot of background noise is just fine - that's what the algorithm is meant for.
I didn't check this demo in particular, but I have seen this trick before. The first observation needed is that you can insert an arbitrary block of data into the picture without changing how it renders. The second observation is that AES is a symmetric algorithm, meaning decryption is the same operation as encryption. Using this, you can encrypt the PNG, and embed the result in the unencrypted JPEG. Then, when you encrypt the JPEG, you encrypt the embedded PNG.

There are a couple of complications to this. The major one is that both formats require correct data near the begging of the file. The size of this region is small enough that it is feasible to brute force passwords until you find one that works.
I don't understand why so many people in the Apple vs Android debate are completely oblivious to the fact that Apple is just a lot smoother transitioning from task to task and handling lag so that the user doesn't notice it. I've been a majority android user (Droid 1 '09-'11, Galaxy Nexus up to today) but I did purchase a 5s last year, which is currently waterlogged due to lending it to my mother.

I borrowed my mom's 3GS and even though it is quite slow, it has a magical ability to accurately detect and respond to my inputs as I would expect it to. Even on my Galaxy Nexus I have trouble with video lag switching between tasks, very long delays between my input and a response, and sometimes complete ignorance of my inputs. One of the most frustrating things for me when using the device is opening a web browser and trying to type a query into the search bar without having to wait for it to do who knows what in the background and attempt to load the last page I was looking at that I have no desire to see, while ignoring my spam clicking of the "X" to try to get it to stop.

Not to mention the app support for the 3GS is amazing compared to my Droid 1. I certainly can't get all the latest apps, but older apps still function extremely well, it really lives up to the UX hype. My Droid 1 can't even run YouTube anymore.

It's obvious that the advantage Apple has is that it has it's walled garden, closed hardware/software ecosystem. But it really shines in making the devices usable.
Well, with ZFS you could squirt snapshots of /home to another box for backups. Since they're just the changed blocks, they'd be fairly small.
So people don't accidentally learn something? If you take the time to post the photos I don't know why you would not want people to see them. I could see his point if he was running a Tesla related business or that was his website, but he just seems like an enthusiast.
See also The International Journal of Proof-of-Concept Or Get The Fuck Out.

https://archive.org/details/Pocorgtfo00

https://archive.org/details/Pocorgtfo01

https://archive.org/details/Pocorgtfo02

https://archive.org/details/pocorgtfo03

https://archive.org/details/pocorgtfo04

https://archive.org/details/pocorgtfo05
In light of experience would it perhaps be helpful after all to use a block-level copy (such as Partclone, PartImage, or GNU ddrescue) and analyze later which files have the bad blocks?

I see that the choice of a file-level copy was deliberate: "I'd have copied/moved the files at block-level (eg. using dd or pvmove), but suspecting bad blocks, I went for a file-level copy because then I'd know which files contained the bad blocks."
A smarter company would have treated the $250K as a marketing expense. It's peanuts compared to what Yahoo earns, and imagine the reaction when people figured out that Yahoo had gone to the mat for its users.
AES encryption is not the same as decryption.
If Yahoo continued to resist, I'm sure the government would just gradually increase the amount until they had no choice but to comply.

These kinds of fines are usually issued for contempt of court. Judges don't take kindly to parties that try to ignore a court order, which would include writing off a court imposed fine as a cost of business.

There's few things more terrifying than an angry judge with full power of contempt. There's no principle of proportionality, which gives judges almost unlimited authority. See Chadwick v Janecka (3rd Cir. 2002) as an example.
The idea that a different screen size or a bunch of watch bands would cause a delay of 3 months is pretty ridiculous. The far more likely scenario is that either (a) there are serious hardware showstoppers, (b) yield issues with certain components or (c) the battery life is still unacceptable.

Also the single version of a watch is a really dumb premise. A watch is a fashion accessory so you need to support people's varying tastes.
You simply couldn't talk about things that are relevant to your share price.

"My boss was an asshole today." Fine.

"We're about to get bought out for $x million." Very much not fine.
This was killed already once today and is back again?

Steve was very explicit to Tim Cook and others in the Apple executive team that they should never ask "what would Steve do." Seems to be written by someone with little understanding of Apple today.
RHEL6 uses ext4 as default[1] filesystem. It certainly does support ext4 as root.

[1]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...