skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had a lot of experience with various musical languages (ChucK, Csound, Supercollider, Max/MSP, PD, Faust etc.) I've even designed a few music languages for myself. For what it's worth, I did go to a music school and graduated with a bachelors degree in music, with a strong focus in computer music composition.

In the case of Alda, I'm a little underwhelmed. To be fair, it seems that the author of this software has done a good job meeting his goals. The syntax does look quite intuitive, basing it off of Lilypond syntax was a good choice IMO. I wouldn't call it a programming lanuage, and it can't do everything I want, but it seems to fit certain types of music quite well. Here is my big issue:

>In the near future, Alda’s scope will be expanded to include sounds synthesized from basic waveforms, samples loaded from sound files, and perhaps other forms of synthesis.

I don't want to say Alda sounds "bad", because soundfonts, samples, and basic waveforms have their place for certain styles of music, but it is certainly quite limiting. Considering that there are massive books written about the "perhaps other forms of synthesis", it doesn't seem like sound itself to be too big a focus.

From what I'm reading, Alda is essentially a MIDI file generator. It doesn't actually produce music, rather, it sends MIDI instructions for how to play music somewhere and leaves it up some other program to make the sounds. All of the other music languages I've mentioned can actually make music internally.

Have you ever considered using other music languages with Alda. Overtone is just Supercollider + Clojure, so I'm sure you do something similar. I imagine it would be pretty trivial to get Alda to write a Csound score, since it's basically just a text table. PD has libpd, which I've had limited success with. I might as well mention my project Soundpipe as a possible DSP engine as well: www.github.com/PaulBatchelor/Soundpipe.git
Life doesn't use full rotation much because life has no way to connect up the rotating part to the circulatory and nervous systems.

But that's not the point of the article. He's talking about "em cities". What he means are really big, perhaps planet sized, data centers running brain simulations, at hardware densities near the limits of what physics permits. This fantasy runs into cooling problems, so he's discussing that.
That's exactly my point. PLT stuff is a minor nuisance for all the stuff that I deal with day to day. It might be the echo chamber but whether a language has support for monads, higher-order types, etc. is not even in list of top 100 things of my concerns and yet it seems like every other PLT researcher is constantly worried about some category theoretical construct or another and trying to jam it into yet another language.
Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 universities

Would these people perhaps be clustered in a particular field? I'd guess that things are very different depending on the percentage of PhD's in a field who go into academia versus industry. For example, the academic job market for Astronomy is very different than CS, because there are many more non-academic options for CS graduates.

I think even an outstanding Astronomy PhD from a top tier university may find it difficult to get a tenure track position in their field. The same would probably be true for CS if all the graduates were to pursue academic positions, but since many go into industry, there is less competition for tenure track positions among those who want to teach.
My favourite keyboard of all time was a variant of an IBM Model-M which was awesome, the nearest I've gotten to it in type feel was the Cherry G-80 which is somewhat strangely one of the cheapest mechanicals out there that has MX Blues, build quality is merely adequate and it lacks the "In the event of Zombie Apocalpyse use as club" steel backplate but it was a joy to type on but it was those I ended up replacing with 4000's because of postural issues.
Sorry, this is actually factually incorrect.

As shown in another thread here, this service does not infinitely auto-scale (the recommendation was to use Kinesis), so you still have to know which services to choose, which is pretty much a full-time job with the number of different services offered these days.
Thanks for putting into words what I've felt inchoately for years.
This looks pretty well done. Last time i used QR codes, they looked gibberish
in the list of BS items, have to disagree a little with inclusion of "captchas, QR codes"

..these seem useful. I must be missing some nuance re their bullshittyness - can anyone elaborate?
As a small user, I've bemoaned the lack of 'cost throttling' for a while. I spend minimally and don't want to worry about e.g. private key leaks that cost a fortune, or some malicious traffic hitting my s3 hard.
Business efficiency is not generally a controversial goal -- although what counts as 'waste' is.

The only time people seem to argue against efficiency (generally via false dichotomy, see 'hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive') is in a blank-check environment where nobody is holding these decision-makers to account for self-serving inefficiencies.
Perhaps it's a solved problem. Must it be framed as a binary thing where there's either bullshit or no bullshit? What if there's a middle ground: those who find bullshit interfaces and/or bullshit content abhorrent use tools to improve it or completely avoid it, while those who aren't the wiser continue to go along with it?

You want to argue that bullshit content is what's keeping people uninformed? I say no, it takes a certain innate sense to rise above the natural flow of misinformation. Some people can only be guided by rhetoric - they make their decisions based on consensus in their local network and too easily trust people who claim to stand for it.

What we have is a war: between those who guide the senseless and those who exploit them. Take your pick.
But isn't the cost almost entirely driven by risk? If someone else could come along and perform the same service for less, then it'd be a market opportunity. If not, then it's priced exactly where it should be. Right?
Under new Oregon law, all eligible voters are registered unless they opt out
I'm not passionate about programming at all. It's just the best way to make money from home.

But I keep my skill growing anyway because I'd like to produce better software products. Development is a mess already, it will be better to prevent further complications.
شجرة+القشطة+Custard+apple
Any chance someone has the raw pictures? They serve them as small images and stitch them together in the browser.
> If to lie is to murder truth, to bullshit is to manslaughter it.

I believe "manslaughter" and "murder" should be switched around here.

IIRC, Harry Frankfurt argued that bullshit was worse than lies, since it corroded this simple but for-society-to-function-in-the-long-run incredibly important distinction (or aspiration).
I don't think technology will help things. Until we change our collective opinions about funding public defenders, better legal software will just cause public defenders' budget/headcounts to be reduced so that they are still taking on the same amount of work.

It's like buying a bigger backpack/purse -- until you change your ideas about what is essential to carry all the time, you'll just fill it up with more stuff.
Newtoninan mechanics were once thought to be based on a set of laws. Settled truth, it was thought. A law is no longer a law when it fails to hold under particular conditions, although it might still be useful. The bulk of practical human knowledge fall into this same category. All current laws will eventually find their way there too.

Conditions where relativity manifests seem way out extreme to us today. How extreme would standing on Jupiter have seemed in 1500 when your goal is not to land a rocket on the moon but to develop a more accurate calendar or navigate the Mediterranean? What will they say of Newtonian mechanics after 500 more years of hindsight?
I agree with what you said, and can add a little more context to the subject.

I have a little experience with this subject. Some of my family once a month drive through grass fields to harvest hay which is chopped and delivered to dairy farms in the area. They range from several hundred heads to ~10k heads.

The fields aren't owned by the dairy farms, they're owned by field farmers and the hay is sold to the dairy farms. So the field farmers who already use old machines have no money, and no incentive to purchase and outfit a drone to comb their fields for metal.

So once a month the fields would have to be 'combed for metal', which is hundreds of acres spread out over different locations. However this still wouldn't stop everything because you have tractors, equipment, semis and trailers going through the field every month chopping and loading hay. So I suppose you would need to have the magnets on the end of the dump and push the hay through the magnets to make sure you're catching everything. This might sound complicated and cumbersome, because it is. On top of that, these trailers also have to be used for hauling corn, potatoes, manure, and everything in between.
Even if you managed to do all that, there's still no guarantee that there won't be metal contamination between the time it's offloaded and fed to the cows.

That was a really long way of saying, it'd be nice, but it isn't practical.
A chap I know who worked at Goldman Sachs, Merill Lynch and Credit Suisse, running teams of people in derivatives clearing, OTC settlement etc. has a degree in Construction Management; nothing related to finance whatsoever.

More anecdotally, the primarily qualification for City traders is that they can think quickly on their feet and have an intuitive grasp of numbers. Nothing mathematical, just arithmetic. Trading is extremely performance led, and performance is explicit in numbers. So social capital or education as social signalling isn't particularly valuable.
Really enjoying this series. Thanks, Kamal!
No offense, but Etsy isn't a large company by most measures.

And besides that, some of the things in his list were already popular at companies a lot larger than Etsy five years ago.

I'm not saying he didn't do good work at Etsy, but I think he's giving himself too much credit for some of it. It's not as groundbreaking as he's making it out.
Startup CEOs are born bad "leaders"
This is pretty neat. But I found it quickly getting very hard to read towards the bottom.

I feel if there's a computer interpreting some sort of language, that it should have a built in notion of the circle of fifths -- why should I give the computer absolute notes, when everything in music is so relative. Maybe viewing the notes in terms of do,re,mi would make sense, within the context of being in some key; then jumping to another key (like the dominant, or the minor version of the current key). Computers make computation cheap, which means it should be easy to think in terms of abstractions (that's how musicians think about music, then unwind those abstractions into absolute notes when writing the music down).

But then I look at the current syntax, how it attempts to be extremely compact, and worry that it won't be possible to extend to better abstractions very well.
The answer is that I, and other public defenders, don’t represent criminals. We represent poor people who are facing criminal charges...

If the public actually paid attention to what goes on in the judicial system, they wouldn't ask what kind of person does criminal defense. Instead, they would ask what kind of person becomes a prosecutor.
There are systems like that, but they're much more expensive than the Kiva system. Kiva just needs a standard, simple mobile robot base and a lot of sheet metal shelving units. It's reliable, because no one robot is essential; if one fails, another one takes over. All you need is a big warehouse with a flat floor; there's not a lot of custom mechanical engineering of conveyors and tracks.

The Kiva system is low-maintenance and low-skill. All you need on-site is someone to replace batteries and tires and clean the things; anything more than that, just ship the robots back to Kiva HQ in Massachusetts. No need for any on site engineering talent or on call maintenance.

Dispensing racks for picking systems are complex, expensive, and have single points of failure for each item. They're essentially huge vending machines. They do exist, though.[1]

Amazon has an R&D program under way to automate the picking process where the Kiva shelf unit reaches a human. They have a competition for robot picking.[2] The prize is $26,000 for a solution that will save Amazon billions.

[1] http://www.ssi-schaefer.de/en/conveying-and-picking/automati...
[2] http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/
I agree with most of what you said and laud the support of constitutional justice. It would be great if more people on juries actually knew about the proper role of government (insert appropriate rant about public schools / indoctrination).

Some scholars assert that jury duty is actually forced servitude by the state and we would have better outcomes by paying jurors for their time instead of compulsory service.

> prosecutor with just police evidence to convict anyone of anything

Should we increase general surveillance from the State in order to gather non-police evidence? Who else would be doing a criminal investigation to gather proper evidence than the police? Are you including detectives/FBI in "police"?

> Have the defendant locked up for more than a week without trial? Violates the constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial. Defendant goes free.

Did you really mean trial in this case? Often both sides need lots of time to prepare for trial. We had an article on HN a little while back about the bail bonds racket, so there is lots of liberty to be regained in this area.

> The police stopped the car because the driver failed to use a turn signal?

I would push to remove frivolous laws from the books. There are WAY too many criminal penalties in the law. I'm especially disturbed by felony-level penalties imposed by non-elected agencies in the bureaucracy, e.g. felony copyright infringement[1]

Bonus side-note: Government officials receiving fines rather than felony convictions [2]

> A police officer killed an unarmed person? Deliberate, unprovoked, unexcusable murder. Life or the chair.

Just as a non-officer should have the right of self-defense, I wouldn't lay down this sort of absolute statement. There are plenty of scenarios that justify the use of lethal force even if the aggressor is unarmed. We shouldn't advocate revoking the basic right of self-defense to anyone. Is this what you're advocating?

> The police have tracked mud all over our Constitution, and it's long time since that was way too much.

All branches of government at all levels have shredded the Constitution, not just the police.

[1] http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/copy-corner66.htm

[2] http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20150705-texa...
I think this is awesome! One thing – would be really awesome if examples would be editable and you could evaluate them via ClojureScript somehow, that would make a huge advantage I think.
The mom who apparently told her son that she would not bail him out also proudly told the reporter she told her son to not drop the soap in prison. A lot of people praised her for what she said. I am just sad that people think criminals deserve sexual assault as part and parcel of being in prison. The Jared from Subway who was convicted of sexual offenses against children faced similar public decries. People laugh at the idea of sexual assault and rape in prison. People here in the US laugh at the idea of sexual assault and rape in prison. When I approach them and tell them to reconsider what they're saying, they call me an accessory to sexual crime against children. I don't get it.

An old saying says judge a society bynhownit treatsnits worst-off people. When I think about what I've had to hear from otherwise sane, well-educated, and well-travelled people makes me wonder if there's any hope for humanity at all.
Given how hard it is to determine what is actually causing high load sometimes I'm surprised we haven't evolved more easily actionable metrics.
Url changed from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2490762,00.asp, which points to this.
Atlas of the Real World (distorted by various non-size measures)
"We took every step in accordance with the law. They appropriately went to the court to obtain warrants."

I can't believe this was by the book. Sounds like mayor, judge, and police all abused their powers.
There's a whole different aspect: you can actually choose not go to uni in Germany, and still build a career: vocational training. Germany still runs serious trainee programmes, including IT.
I've posted about it a few years ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689741

original article:
http://blog.sandglaz.com/zeigarnik-effect-scientific-key-to-...
You can set up an alert to notify you as soon as your bill exceeds a given threshold.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...
All of them!

And anyway, those are all artificial categories, I think.
The way you address these things:

End the drug war entirely. End vice prosecutions. Focus on victimful crimes.

Increase the funds PD's get to the level DA's get. A PD's got a lot more to do than a DA, because the DA has police officers behind it feeding it cases. Funding parity is a Schelling Point.

Stop electing DA's, stop electing judges, stop electing sheriffs; "Tough on crime" is the only campaign strategy these people use, and it's implied to mean "Harsher than was the case last year". That outcome ceases to be remotely just after a few years.

Enfranchise felons with voting rights. The reasoning that they're incapable of voting correctly stems directly from racial persecution.

Cameras everywhere.

Training in conflict de-escalation, like the rest of the world's police forces.

Reduce the prison sentences you give out substantially, and drastically increase spending on the crime-avoidance strategies we pilloried as bleeding-heart liberal ideas. Turns out the most strongly supported finding in criminology is that they work a lot better than increased sentencing.

With the savings from all this prison reduction, build prisons that don't inflict trauma on their prisoners, don't require violence to survive in, and most importantly, don't require joining an organized criminal enterprise, a prison gang, to be comfortable in. Gangs destroy what little benefit you get from imprisoning people.

With what's left over, shift resources away from SWAT & drug enforcement, and towards dramatic increases in the size of the detective force. Higher capture rates beat longer sentences at deterring crime by a very large factor.

Rebuild at least parts of the public mental health system that we shut down completely in the 70's.
That's a bit of a rant but it's a good point. The most effective thing ordinary people can do to fix the system is show up for jury duty when summoned.
As a thought exercise it is interesting to think through what we would 'trade' though. For the S3 case there could be a hard cap of allocation, but once it is reached then does the service just switch off? Could it just respond to, say, 100 requests per second, as a ratio of how much money you want to spend in some time period?

For Lambda style services it's odd because if I was hosting them in my own container (or an AWS one even) then they would still accept requests but their responses would start to slow (but still work). Trading through-put for cost/scalability?

The trouble with AWS services for that 'fear of success' type of budgeting (different from losing a key or malicious calls) is they are either on or off, with no in-between cost/latency/resource allocation ratio.

I'm surprised this hasn't come up more actually (or I just missed it), considering the overlap between devs that would like less devops and devs with limited budgets..
I believe the author's current setup is running ZFS on Illumos (specifically OmniOS), with volumes exported over NFSv3 and Samba. It's not mentioned in this post, but some of the older ones talk about it [1]. The comment about FreeBSD was worrying that if they started relying on ACLs now, and later switched their fileservers to NFS-on-ZFS-on-FreeBSD instead, they might end up with incompatibilities in the ACL models.

[1] Here's one on the network filesystem setup: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/NFSFutureDesir...
But hardware expenses are predictable. X load means Y outlay. Investments in better software through more or better programmers is uncertain – just look at how even experienced devs continually underestimate the time it takes to implement any given feature.
It's good to see that http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/de... agrees with what Ian Sutton himself later reported about the relative difficulties and problems.
I bought it on your recommendation. It had better be good, otherwise I will come back to haunt you.
Thanks for the update :)

Regarding helium, considering that it's plasma we're talking about, I think it can't escape at all - the separated nuclei and electrons should be contained by the magnetic field.
Used to play with these a lot as a kid. User "__bb" must have also spent some time on a cattle farm because everything (s)he's said about the magnets has been spot on.
It's true: a lot of bullshit could simply be eliminated with plain English. And the technology field (from development to design to UX) is overflowing with inflated writing and unnecessary jargon in articles, blog entries, design guides, and documentation.

A specific example relating to UX: I always point people to this gov.uk design guide as an excellent example of clear writing that is easy to understand. It's not perfect, but it avoids being too wordy and I think it's a good example to emulate

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/resour...
Yes, thanks - I do use those. I was thinking of a slightly different scenario though when compare to my own container, as in my reply to bpicolo below (or above).
Also note the total absence of any reference to cost and billing. This isn't free.
It's probably worth distinguishing between QR Codes used for advertising, vs other uses.

For example, I print QR codes on the back of my business cards containing a VCard record, to make it easier to import them into an address book if needed. Or at home, I have a QR code that automatically populates credentials for my WiFi network when guests come over. It's also the easiest way to add a TOTP code to Authy or Google Authenticator.

I like to think these are reasonable uses.
I just used one to board a plane. It worked well, that's no bullshit.
New Antarctic Research Ups Sea Level Rise Estimates
I'm intrigued by http://keymouse.com someone have experience with it?

I use a MS Natural Keyboard, but wish to have ergo+mechanicals...
I am somewhat ignorant. What significant achievements does Dawkins hold in his field? All I know is that he's known for trying to convince others of his beliefs.
Sorry, I didn't see that you wrote that you're connecting in Dubai, so "most countries" might not be relevant here. :-(

In that case it seems to make sense to do more research or leave it at home.
> I think we need a serious discussion about paywall content.

We've had this discussion ad nauseum. There will never be a consensus, but the HN question is settled. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

We all hate paywalls, but an HN without NYT, WSJ, The Economist, The New Yorker etc. would be much worse. These are sources of high-quality articles and intellectual curiosity is what HN tries to optimize for.

I'm thinking of adding the following to the FAQ to reduce the endless relitigation about paywalls that has been choking so many threads like a weed. Objections? Additions?

1. Paywalled articles are ok if there's a workaround.
2. It's ok to ask for a workaround in the thread and share one.
3. Generic paywall complaints about HN stories are off topic.