jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Wow, this is pretty impressive actually.

Lilypond has for a long time made a big deal about the quality of their output (http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/). But to my musician eye, it looks good but not exceptional.

The rendering of Abcjs in this example, while not perfect, is pretty impressive for something that's running in your browser. It seems pretty lightweight; Lilypond, in contrast, is extremely large and slow. And its convenient features like as-you-type rendering and highlighting the corresponding part of the text are really compelling.

I hadn't actually heard of ABC notation before. Apparently there is a language "standard" published, though it's really just a definition (it is not adopted by any standards bodies AFAIK): http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.0

I'd love to see some more substantial examples of music in this format. It looks really promising, but music notation has tons of hard cases, and amateurish typesetting really stands out. I sing from stuff on cpdl.org all the time, and the low-quality editions have obvious problems, like they'll get the spacing wrong, or they'll have awkward line crossings.
Numbers alone does not create a "dominant language on the internet". Chinese is far more difficult to learn than English. English is international, that's not gonna change any time soon.
A rather misleading infographic, seemingly intentionally so. Yes, internet usage is growing amongst people who live in countries where English is not the primary language. However, that's the extent of the analysis. In actuality despite a lot of growth in non-English web content English is still the de facto language of online communication.
if you are a youngin' at 2400 baud, what does that make me with my parallel port 14,400 that was bigger than the laptop that I am typing this on?
That's how every dishwasher I ever owned used to work. And it's actually a feature: you can add stuff that you forgot to put in after it starts, and you can take something out, when you need it immediately, and wash it manually.
When I've heard mention of Neil Fraser in the past I've thought of his awesome MobWrite project. But now I'll think of what he did for this kid and his family.

Makes one think about what one wants to be known for.
Number of lines is used as a proxy for complexity, especially among those who are less familiar with how the programming sausage is made (management, non-IT folks, etc.). To non-technical folks, it sounds pretty impressive that you can do a simple change (low # of lines) and get a huge improvement. Nevermind the fact that behind those couple of lines could be days of code analysis and several rewrites. It's the allure of the easy, "why didn't I think of that" kind of thing.
First, my compliments to any prophet who goes back to actually audit his predictions.

Having said that, I think Ray is grading himself on a pretty generous curve. Many predictions of the form "X will be Y" are counted as correct if somewhere in the world at some cost there is technology available allowing X to be Y.

As a neutral reader, those predictions sure sound like they are supposedly to be widespread rather than merely existing.
Pretty strong correlation with democracy
Interesting, but for the context of the project (self-sufficient villages) what's the energy requirements?

Aluminum isn't scarce (most abundant metal in the earth's crust), but turning alumina into aluminum requires a lot of energy. Check out the Hall process if you're interested, or for way more information, get a BS in chemical engineering like I did :)

The rest of their web site is kind of fascinating, if you want to completely repudiate Adam Smith.
> we turned 40k of our own funds into 100M

Yeah... you're full of shit. You didn't turn 40k of your own money into 100m of your own money. You're leaving out a funding round, inheritance, money laundering, or the whole story is just BS from the start.
Launch HNs are curated threads that we help YC startups write, and then place on the front page. This is one of three formal things (the other two are job ads and orange usernames for alumni) that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, which is linked at the bottom of every page. There are also lots of past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

We started doing Launch HNs in early 2017. You can see the complete list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/launches. The advice we give to YC startups about launching on HN is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html. The logistical parts only apply to YC cos, but the communication advice applies to everyone.

You're certainly right that not all these startups would make the front page through upvotes alone, but we do work hard to write them up in a way that we hope will genuinely interest the community, and many of them end up getting a lot of upvotes and staying on the front page a long time.
> Even if you're a high-paid professional it's likely cheaper to do it yourself

A lot of people aren't looking for the cheapest option, they just want it done right, without hassle.
The key difference is that they didn't have a good mechanism for sifting the wheat from the chaff: in addition to doing some things that are actually helpful, some things that seemed to work are actually harmful/dangerous (eg. bloodletting).
>> "The economy needs to grow as quickly as the population..."

In countries with declining populations, ought the economy to contract?
I am not sure where you get the rates for ARM loans that suddenly went up. Most ARM loans define the rate after fixed period as "An Index" + "Margin"(2%-3%). The rates for pre-bubble 5/1 ARM mortgages after five years of fixed APR either remained the same or went down.

Just look at the LIBOR Index (most popular index for ARM mortgages) in 2008 and 2013.

Jan 2008 - 4.18750%

Jan 2013 - 0.84250%
[Groupon employee speaking]

Group buying is still relevant in new markets. In established markets almost every deal tips.

many merchants are not sophisticated enough to structure their deals properly such that it is economically beneficial to them

One of the services that the margin on the deal pays for. G wants the merchants to have a good experience (95%+ report that they do) and continue to use G as opposed to other deal sites. Deal makers here structure the deal to maximize benefit to the business. That's why you'll get $20 for $10 to a sandwich place, $10 for $4 at an ice cream shop, and $50 for $25 at a steak house. This is with the insight of all the other deals made in your city.

Merchants must give blanket discounts, and have no ability to segment or run comprehensive campaigns. In particular, merchants can not do things like target existing customers with reward programs, and new customers with enticement programs

This is true for the "Daily Deal" which gets the most exposure and are outsized deals. These are basically a marketing budget spend, but the money goes to G and the customers instead of advertising media.

New personalization and deal feed features (currently out in limited markets) let merchants put deals at will to previous and interested customers completely outside of the daily email.

Also, G's intention is to get customers to the business, not to take over the business relationship. Businesses should have their own rewards programs, etc.

We have three problems to solve; 1) long term economic viability for merchants through assisted program creation, 2) segmentation and campaigning for merchants, 3) relevance for customers.

#1 is already something we do. #2,3 exist to a limited extent but we're working (a lot) on improving them)

What if we had a "personal fingerprint" for each consumer that is subscribing or consuming from a stream, as well as the attributes of merchants and their individual campaigns? If that fingerprint contained rich information about their interests, demographic information, and so on, then we could both assist the user in subscribing to only those promotions that meet their interests, and assist the merchant in very fine grained segmenting and targeting.

It's like you read our mind. But just as most small businesses aren't good at or interested in marketing, it's the same for segmenting and targeting. I think as a data-head, Bradford is overestimating how much merchants want to do that. They just want a stream of customers coming through the door and Groupon does that in a very hassle-free way.
I justify downloading movies from file-sharing networks with:

a) In cinema there are 30 minutes of advertisements before the movie starts

b) In cinema I cannot take my food and drinks with me

c) In cinema I sometimes cannot even take my backpack with me

d) DVD/Bluray treat me like a pirate. Unskippable insults and advertisements. Hard to get on my harddisk in a reasonable setup. It is easier, faster and more convenient to download a third-party copy.

e) Last but not least, I do not really care about the industry itself. No loss to the world if hollywood or the music industry would die. People make art if they feel the need, there is no money incentive for true art. I do like to "reward" art creators though, if I really appreciate what they did.

I bought 4 DVDs in my life. 2 I could not play them out of the box on my Linux OS. The other two were Jason Scott's documentaries.

I bought a lot of used CDs from ebay. Stopped even doing that when the media industry lobbyism shut down my favourite torrent site (the owner was cleared of all charges years later). Now I download free music. And sometimes, very rarely I download a commercial album. I would not buy it, no harm done.
If I really liked the Mona Lisa, I'd have three options:

1) Go see the original painting even if might cost me a pretty penny (not that it does, bare with me here)

2) Buy a decent copy from a reputable artist.

3) Get a high definition scan of the painting for free and print it in high quality paper.

Most people who pirate movies fall into three groups. The group that saw it in the cinema, but can't be bothered to buy a dvd/blueray to watch the movie one more time a few months/years later. The group that did not see the movie in the cinema, but wants to know if the movie is worth paying for in the form of a dvd/blueray. And finally, the group that will not buy the movie or go to the cinema anyways. The first group thinks that paying to see the Mona Lisa once is ok, but don't want to spend twice or thrice the cost of seeing the original to buy a decent copy they just want to look at once more. The second group would rather have a free taste of the artwork before committing any money into a copy that they might not like if they didn't see it before. The third group was not going to buy the copy or go see the original anyways.

I think that all this will be 'amortized' at some point when digital renting and downloading of movies and tv shows become the norm and are integrated into the living room viewing experience. In any case, the excuse is either that you don't want to pay more to see something you already payed less to see once AND want to see once again, specially since now you get to see it at home, or that you want to try something out before committing to a purchase. The third groups excuse is that they would have not payed money for it anyways. I can sympathize with all three, since the options that all three require are not in the grasp of everyone yet.

Regarding your final question. Yes art should be owned by the owner, said owner should not force me to pay an exorbitant price to get a copy of the artwork if I just want to watch it one more time. Also, I should not be forced to buy a copy of the art piece if I don't even know if it's worth buying. You wouldn't buy a car without test-driving it would you? Finally, some people are just not into art that much, and don't really want to own a copy of the piece.

I agree with you stealing is stealing (and bad). But can you really point fingers when a lot of the stealing is caused because it really is the most sensible way to test drive or revisit the movie? Can you really point fingers if you know that your movie was watched by one more person that would have not seen it if it hadn't been pirated?
I have hard time understanding why browers' parsing algorithms should be standardized or why it's a good idea to do so. Shouldn't a language be defined declaratively using a grammar?
These are good tips for any language, not just English. I would add, "find a free daily newspaper" in the target language. Even just reading the captions to pictures for 15 minutes a day helps a lot.
This article takes something simple and elegant (if incorrectly labeled) and turns it into a sad tortured example of how to get yourself picked on in high school.
> Why do they insist on justifying stealing?

They do not "justify stealing", they do not consider copying of publicly available information amongst each other (sharing with thy neighbour) as stealing. (FYI, not even current _laws_ consider people exchanging "protected" but public information as stealing, its only you and your ilk who keep repeating this, who directly profit from the prohibition.)

> have every right to discard your economic theories.

It is also considered that a for-profit censorship right is morally wrong, and thus can be ignored.

> Is it because people don't think art should be owned?

It is because very very many people do not think that for-profit censorship rights (also known as "copyright") should be applied to private and non-commercial information sharing because it makes western countries no better than china, north korea & co. As hard and fiercely as you can get hit there for copying and spreading a bit of political information, you can get hit here for copying and spreading a song, a picture, a poem. Both utilize censorship of _private_ information exchange in order to protect a unnatural prohibition against its own people for the benefit of a few "rights holders". They basically only differ in justification.

Those evil pirates do not want their homecountries to engage in massive censorship and daily remind them of North Korea, and thus collectively keep engaging in passive resistance by ignoring censorship laws. The icing on the cake, and a definitive validation of their views, is the little cute pieces of hate propaganda that is always accompanying censorship regimes. The endlessly repeated 1984esque mantra "copying is stealing, duplicating is deleting, sharing is theft" , you and your ilk never get tired to repeat, perfectly fits that role. So keep repeating if you like, but consider that it may have a completely opposing effect on your target audience.
Another interesting site concerning visualization of patterns in prime numbers:

http://www.divisorplot.com/

http://www.divisorplot.com/6.html -- the Ulam spiral
See also why the GPL is the involiate Word of God but enforcing other copyrights is like Dick Cheney clubbing baby seals with a Zune.
We already use Sheevas for this and tons more. Taking the default debian, plugging in a usb stick and running snort is indeed a 10 minute operation.

For more elegance, use a guru plug with its dual gigE ports, turn it into a transparent bridge, and just put it inline with the ethernet cable of your target.

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp...

Once you realize you've got a fully capable linux server/router right there in the wall socket, all kinds of wild applications start springing to mind.
I agree, but the wording is poor. "no algorithm can optimally perform a particular task done by some class of professionals" implies that general intelligence is not an algorithm.
You raise an interesting point: what you're editing has a big impact on the effectiveness of the editor you're using.

When I first learned vi, I kind of hated it because I was editing code on an ancient system that used a COBOL-like language, in which most things were in upper case. Because vi's commands are all case sensitive, combined with the fact that I used capslock a lot for coding, it was kind of a pain. Also this language did not use a c-like syntax with punctuation, it instead used a lot of english words.

Later when I switched to editing C source code with vi, suddenly vi's quirks and methods of operation become far, far more productive than they were using vi.
One of the most useful features in Firefox is the cookie policy to accept all first-party cookies but throw them away when you close Firefox except for certain sites you've whitelisted. This allows you to stay logged into HN for example but discard all Facebook, Google, and other cookies.

Chrome currently only lets you throw away all cookies when you close it and doesn't offer the ability to whitelist domains. It sounds like this might bring in the missing functionality.
Wait, so who gets reported as "NICE"?
FYI the device pictured is a SheevaPlug and is most of what is cool about this IMHO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

This would be a fun project but it strikes me as a little lame that they want donations for what I imagine would be writing a few bash scripts.
This is your third submission about your startup in the past 24 hours, and your sixth in the past week. I think we get the message already.
Fair point. Apple definitely should be better about designing for repairs and upgrades. They have been going the wrong way on that for years now.

I like what Microsoft did with their latest Surface Laptop. We should be making devices more repairable, not less.
I don't have a problem with valuing human life over pretty much anything, while being neutral about which animals live or die.

I suppose I agree that just calling something "natural" isn't a great argument on its own.

My main disagreement here is the arbitrary decision that this is a "negative outcome".
> Personally, I'd imagine powering a Bollinger from a power wall and generator connected to a biogas digester that runs off the muck pile of a small horse or dairy farm.

If you control the timing of the supply of energy via the burning of the biodigested muck, why go through the Powerwall? The Bollinger's battery is 10x the capacity of the Powerwall. If you charge it directly from your generator, you don't have to pay the round trip charging losses of the Powerwall.

The only reason to use the Powerwall is to exploit solar power by charging the Powerwall during the day, and then drawing upon it at night to charge the truck.

Also note that according to this article [1] from Penn State University, all the reclaimable energy from dairy cow waste in Pennsylvania would only provide for 20% of energy used on Pennsylvania dairy farms. So it's not like there is going to be a surplus of electricity to charge your car. It would make more sense to use the biogas directly for the dairy operation, because you can potentially use both the electricity and heat from burning biogas to, for example, heat and power the cow sheds in winter, vs using that electricity to power a truck. The truck could get its electricity directly from solar, or from the grid.

1. https://extension.psu.edu/biogas-from-manure
Which, for a merchant, if it happens, is damn near a death sentence. If you can't accept payments from Mastercard anymore, your business is pretty screwed.

So in practice this works mostly by deterrence. They rarely have to actually drop the hammer. Most merchants will comply well before it ever gets to that point.
> seems mostly centered around the fact that rust isn't C and less around the merits of rust itself.

If a language is advertised as a replacement for C/C++ then one can reasonably expect there to be little that works counter-intuitively coming from the to-be-replaced language.

> In this case, pioc is not a register (so there you go).

"It's in reality a register being modified" is not the same as "it's a register".

> After an initial write to the watchdog's configuration register all subsequent writes are ignored by the MCU. If it compiles, it's probably OK.

Hardware isn't perfect. You brought up the immutability of the watchdog timer as a benefit, it really isn't, that's all I wanted to say. I also doubt that just a compiling piece of Rust can usually handle a hardware failure or an error.

> Which peripheral is being manipulated? What happens if I get a magic number wrong and that function operates on the wrong peripheral?

If you already have an Arduino-y abstraction then it doesn't matter in which language it's written, the same opaqueness would happen if you can't look up the pin mapping from documentation. If you really need to see which peripheral is being manipulated then it's not difficult to write two very simple lines of C to do the same thing just as clearly. You're comparing two very different things, it's just not a very good comparison.
> When we have the next industry crash (.com crash) will these people stick around?

I feel like the people who jumped into boot camps to make a quick buck will move on to the next hot thing

I'd like to think that the people who are in the industry because they actually enjoy the challenges and problem solving will stick around
> If you are able to ask yourself and others like you then you are doing it right.

Maybe. In a very small number of cases. Most of the time it is people either a) struggling to come up with ideas or b) trying to figure out a way to solve their dream with minimum effort.

> Don't be afraid of those who think that this is impossible.

It's not technically impossible. But setting out to make $1Million in 3 years is generally a non-optimal approach.

I'm a realist in the sense that I figured out a long time ago that truly impossible goals are worthless and, generally, counter productive. Here's an example of how to fix that; one of my long term goals is to go into Space. This is technically feasible now, but to do it I'd need a few million $'s - so that's a good hack, I can work to achieve my goal through some means and the money should be incidental to that. But it is not limiting because I may find another way to achieve this goal without the cost.
I like the do idea. I've always been passive and waited for others to make decisions and organize the activity.

I'm embarrassed that I made this post now as I'm sure this is obvious to most people.
I guess this could be good advice for manipulating status for short time periods (dating, job interviews, business meetings, etc.), but fortunately once it goes beyond that (relationships, careers, business deals, etc.) the status of everyone involved will settle down to the natural order of things.
It's just as easy to de-authorize devices (and hence invalidate host IDs) on Dropbox as is is to change your Facebook password.
I use Firefox for the Add-ons:

Pencil - Awesome tool for wireframing

Firebug - Simple, but powerful. Love the copy as Bookmarklet feature.

ColorZilla - Color Picker

Web Developer - Quick CSS writeup

Pixel Perfect - overlay image over top of the developed HTML, check your design

Fireshot - for screenshot

S3 Firefox - Manage AWS S3

Elasticfox - AWS EC2 Interface

Greasemonkey - User scripts

FireFTP - FTP client

JSONView - JSON Viewer

SQLite Manager
C is as close to machine as any other language can get. Why not new Johnny learn programming in C?
> Do you trust Dropbox to not send compromised JavaScript every time? If so, why not trust them with your keys in the first place?

I don't trust Dropbox to do either of these things, but at least in theory I can examine the JavaScript each time they send it to me, whereas there is no way for me to inspect Dropbox's internal operations to make sure they aren't misusing my key.

The problem becomes mechanically verifying that a received chunk of client-side JavaScript is indeed the decryption routine that it claims to be. I think this is a solvable problem.