Hacker News Reader

turingon Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

And in my experience Google products have gotten significantly better and more polished in the last few years. Goes to show that their products aren't getting worse, just shifting in focus and priority.

turingon High-res Nexus 5 official Press shot

Also of note is the price: it was briefly listed on the Play Store with the 16GB model going for $349.

turingon Boston Dynamics Unleashes Wildcat, the Sprinting Quadruped Robot

DARPA also financed the Internet. I think we can expect similar public benefits to come out of this research one day.

turingon Boston Dynamics Unleashes Wildcat, the Sprinting Quadruped Robot

To be fair, ASIMO is not even in the same league as ATLAS or any of Boston Dynamics' other projects. I've always gotten the feeling that ASIMO is more of a press play by Honda.

turingon Boston Dynamics Unleashes Wildcat, the Sprinting Quadruped Robot

Wow. And I thought it was cool seeing self-driving cars around Google's campus. Boston Dynamics must be one interesting place to work.

turingon Stanford researchers to open source model they say has nailed sentiment analysis

I believe this is strictly supervised learning. The mechanical turk is only used for the initial labeling of the data.

turingon Flutter (YC W12) acquired by Google

I remember thinking back when they first launched that a Google acquisition could be good for both parties. Congrats to the team, can't wait to see how your technology gets developed and deployed!

turingon Nexus 5 to be first smartphone with MEMS camera

They don't claim that it's technologically similar to Lytro, just that it can offer similar functionality. To get any idea of what they mean, watch the YouTube demo at the end of the post[1]. At about 1:37 they show off being able to change the point of focus after the fact.

http://youtu.be/idtmJBa5u3Q

turingon SpaceX Launch - Official Webcast

Update from Musk: "Launch was good. All satellites deployed at the targeted orbit insertion vectors."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/384392608350367744/photo...

turingon Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algorithm, “Hummingbird”

That's cool, haven't seen this one before. Thanks for sharing :) Played around with it a bit, and it seems to have pretty good coverage; got everyone from Frederick Douglas to Dijkstra.

turingon Deep Learning: Facebook Wants To Know Even More About Its Users

An interesting thing to note: Facebook actually hired Marc’Aurelio Ranzato away from Google, where he was working on the Brain project. Prior to that he was working in Hinton's lab at University of Toronto.

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ranzato/

turingon Lifting the lid on the iOS 7 UIPicker

It's the time picker in the Calendar app. It was introduced in May: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/29/google-calendar-for-andro...

Personally, I rather like the new time picker and have never experienced any usability problems. Also, the appearance depends on your time settings; the inner circle the parent poster mentions only appears if you use 24-hour time.

turingon Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

Both Page and Brin turned 40 this year. There's also Brin's heightened risk of Parkinson's. His mother has it, and according to Wikipedia "both he and his mother possess a mutation of the LRRK2 gene (G2019S) that puts the likelihood of his developing Parkinson's in later years between 20 and 80%". He's donated to Parkinson's research in the past, and this investment is certainly along the same lines.

turingon The iPhone 5s Review

As Dan said, it's not as if Intel is standing still. I definitely don't expect any Macs to be running ARM for at least a few years. Would definitely be interesting though :)

For those that haven't read the full review, here's a quote from Anand that addresses this topic:

As far as Macs go though, there's still a big gap between the A7 and where Intel is at with Haswell. The deficiency that Intel had in the ultra mobile space simply doesn't translate to its position with the big Core chips. I don't see Apple bridging that gap anytime soon.

turingon Civet coffee: why it's time to cut the crap

There are a lot of farmers who use ethical and sustainable methods.

Depends on how you define "a lot". The vast majority of eggs and milk produced in the United States are not in any way ethically produced.

turingon Google Founders' Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk

Google flew 155 missions for NASA. There are definitely serious questions to be asked here, but it's not as if Google wasn't contributing something.

turingon Why you should not trust emails sent from Google

I think that quote could also be interpreted as saying that Google simply didn't see it as a change that qualified for the program, not that they weren't planning on fixing it. But again, I could be entirely wrong; I have no experience with either the team or the program. I just have a hard time imagining any of the engineers that I know there getting assigned a bug like this and clicking 'working as intended - will not fix'.

turingon Why you should not trust emails sent from Google

I definitely commend the author for his work, but I think that there might have been a slight misunderstanding here. In his last email, the author talks about how public disclosure would "force" Google to fix the vulnerability. But I read Google's response as simply saying that they did not think the bug qualified for the program, not that they didn't intend to fix it. Then again, my reading is definitely influenced by my time at Google and how seriously my team took this sort of thing.

turingon 3-Sweep: Extracting Editable Objects from a Single Photo [video]

It was also submitted here even earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6351712

Personally, I'm just glad to see this video finally getting traction. It really is such a cool demo. It even stands out in the field of consistently high-quality SIGGRAPH demos. Can't wait to read the paper!

turingon [dead]

Maybe because they were able to purchase a lot of existing infrastructure from the city for $1?

http://www.zdnet.com/google-to-buy-39m-provo-fiber-service-f...

Moreover, the linked article makes no mention of the NSA. This baseless Google-related FUD is getting incredibly tiresome.

turingon Google is defragging Android

Could you explain? Looking at the document you cited, I'm not sure what you mean. For example, the document says that Android would give "mobile operators and device manufacturers significant freedom and flexibility to design products" and that "Handset manufacturers and wireless operators will be free to customize Android in order to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost." Both of those things seem to hold true, even with the changes being made to Google Play Services. Am I missing something?

turingon Google is defragging Android

downvotes don't change the truth of the observation. Android is no longer meaningfully open, other than a years old core of basic functions.

The problem is that your observation isn't true. Here are some of the under-the-hood changes in just the most recent releases of Android:

  -OpenGL ES 3.0
  -Bluetooth low energy/Bluetooth AVRCP
  -restricted profiles
  -VP8 encoder
  -new DRM framework
  -SELinux
  -various other optimizations and APIs

Yes Google is moving some functionality to Play services. Yes it is worth discussing how this may impact the future of Android as an open platform. No, that does not mean that Android is no longer "meaningfully open", especially not in the matter-of-fact way you are presenting it.

turingon Kevin Spacey on the potential of Netflix to disrupt traditional TV [video]

Speak for yourself. I'd much rather pay $7.99 a month for a subscription that provides me streaming access to everything rather than $20-$30 buying new music every month.

turingon Humble Comedy Bundle

Came here to say the same thing. Tig's performance alone makes this worth purchasing. Truly unforgettable.

turingon Computer can read letters directly from the brain

I think that's part of what makes this so incredible. The current model uses only 1,200 voxels. With the higher resolution scanner mentioned at the end of the article, they will be able to use 15,000. With that in mind it seems this approach could have a lot of potential for further improvement.

turingon Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 3

Happy to see Panorama Education here, definitely a bright group :) Also refreshing to see that they are profitable, given that these days profitability is frequently, though not always, left out of the equation for young startups.

turingon Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

If they manage to remain at or near profitability through the continued scaling of Model S production and the introduction of the Model X next year, then things could get very interesting when they release their infamous 'third-generation', mass-market vehicle.

turingon Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

"Of note, during validation of Model S roof crush protection at an independent commercial facility, the testing machine failed at just above 4 g's. While the exact number is uncertain due to Model S breaking the testing machine, what this means is that at least four additional fully loaded Model S vehicles could be placed on top of an owner's car without the roof caving in."

I don't have any frame of reference for how this compares to other vehicles, but damn, that is impressive.

turingon Amnesty International on the detention of Greenwald's partner

I don't claim to be an expect on Irving, but a cursory glance at Wikipedia shows that he is an active Holocaust denier that an English court found "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence." I'm sure there is more to his story, but to say that he "certainly deserves" to be called a historian is pretty simplistic.

turingon Introduction to Golang

Yet given the NSA's surveillance scandal and Google's long history of a close & secretive working relationship with the NSA

I'd love to hear evidence of this relationship instead of your speculative fear mongering.