skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe you could make one phone for each demographic.
This is really awesome.

One thing that I think could be done better would be to display the BPM Deviation by percentage instead of a hard tempo.

This is especially important when there is ambiguity over what the tempo actually is. Is this song 90 BPM or 180? That question is pretty hard for a computer to tell, and two great musicians might tell you different answers. It's pretty subjective.

Here's an example of two takes of a slow rubato jazz piece. The computer analyzes one using a tempo of 169 BPM and the other at 91. It's the same song, and a very similar tempo. But the one rated faster looks much more erratic because the deviation isn't displayed as a percentage.

http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRFQMHM123E8585C4A&#...

http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRGHGWJ123E858DF63&#...
At least the browser app is open source, so we can trivially fork it, disable the flash plugin, and release the replacement browser to the Market.
Ask HN: Tips for college graduates
I'm giving a keynote lecture at an upcoming student design conference, presenting two paths: entrepreneurship and a full time job. I've got the entrepreneur side covered - what are some tips you would give to seniors for finding a full time job?
Learn CSS Positioning
With the exception of the hockey puck mouse, these were Sculley's monsters.
You have a really strange choice in evidence for your citations. You really jump around in terms of years.

Here is what Buffett said in 2004:

''We think, over time, that the dollar is likely to decline in value against some of the major currencies,'' Mr. Buffett said at Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting earlier this month. ''This is not a short term prediction.''

So while you may cite a paper loss after 2 years, that hardly qualifies as a long term loss. Indeed, if you bother to look at the following chart:
http://www.google.com/finance?q=USDEUR
(set it to max)

You will see that shorting the dollar over that period would have been the appropriate strategy.

Now, you then go on to cite the fact that Buffett purchased equities and bought Burlington Northern. For the first, Buffett purchased equities at near lows, the gains he was able to lock in from such investments would withstand the frictional forces of inflation.

Secondly, most parties look at the Burlington Northern acquisition as a means of gaining a steady stream of free cash flow that will be inflation resistant over the next 50 years. So while it is an American asset, it is an asset that has the ability to raise prices and withstand inflation, that is what is important to note. And if you look more broadly, these are just the types of businesses that Buffett goes after. Businesses with high barriers to entry and the ability to raise prices. That is also why he purchased MidAmerican Energy after utilities underwent regulatory changes.
I saw the author speak; he's a smart guy and is tackling a tough subject. There are a lot of reasons most people (including myself) develop screwed-up attitudes toward risk. The media is most certainly one, but it also deals with natural phenomenon in how our brains are wired for survival. (Recency bias, availability bias, etc.)
Reading the recent "Adobe Bad" threads is like watching HN lose brain cells.

Having owned only Mac/Linux hardware for the past 10 years I have my share of Adobe frustrations, but all this bandwagon jumping after Jobs made a few comments is ridiculous.
404 lol? http://www.windowsphone7series.com/multimedia/Media1/
In Atlanta, the crime statistics are down because the recently-departed police chief set up a system where his performance (and that of his underlings, all the way down) was measured based on the information that made it into the computer system. Apparently, he has made a career out of installing this system when he is appointed in a new city. As with defect tracking systems in many businesses, there is a tendency from the top down to game the system, redefine terms, and reclassify crime reports as lesser crimes or mere 'incident' reports. When your job and compensation starts to depend on statistics emitted by a computer, self-preservation leads to dishonesty. The administration in Atlanta continues to resist the creation of a citizen review board with actual teeth--one that can do more than sit in review of a few high-profile incidents and instead focus on seeking independent crime statistics to really guage the performance of the police department. I don't know about other cities, but I suspect the use of such crime stats packages is common in many jurisdictions.
One thing that I noticed is that whilst the interface would like to be one without boundaries they can't get away from it. (See screenshot: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/02/7serie...).

The person's name stops abruptly a little bit below the title "eople." ;)
you could do it with client-side calls as long as the server-side can sign the data (ie use an hmac). that still means a server-side api, but it doesn't have to make the calls.

for this to work i think you have to make it really easy to use and with minimal impact on the developer. would you handle the generation of badges (this seems like it would be a timesaver - you provide a badge editor that has basic options like colour, etc)? and serve them?

there's some tension between tying awards to a particular site and making them global. initially i assumed people would want their badges displayed as an integral part of their site. but you could also imagine some "global" badges that you provide that people can earn from various sites, and which people might want to include in blogs, personal profiles, etc...
I'm just beginning the process of adding badges to my app, but it wouldn't have even crossed my mind to use an outside service for it. I think in some form your idea has legs, for example as a WordPress plugin or other situation where people need simple plug-in achievements, but not as something to integrate in a case where the developers could do it themselves.

Sending you events just so I can query you right back to see if an achievement was unlocked? That seems like total overkill, I wouldn't even have the time to spare for the HTTP calls. And I wouldn't want to introduce a dependency. And all this for probably pretty trivial checks in most cases.
> I would be in favor of overhauling the tax system

Not gonna happen.

What could happen, though, is that you could start something like TED, and charge wealthy people for a high level experience, and let the whole world benefit as well.
The whole SAAS Achievement engine thing is a tricky bit. We've found that people that are familiar with achievements from games immediately get what we are talking about. Those that aren't struggle with the idea a bit. The post does explain what an achievement system is and we do realize that educating people will be a hurdle to overcome.

As far as how tied together things are we have definitely been thinking of offering some professional type services where we do alot of the work for people or some consulting work to help them best implement this system. Those who know what they want will have free reign to implement whatever kind of system they want as nothing is predefined.
Another myth: the world is a dangerous place. Seriously, for most people on earth, the world has steadily become a safer place over the last 50 years. Far more danger during the "cold war."

Media hype of "orange alerts," "red alerts," etc. is just a clever way to get people to accept $1.5 trillion/year of military related spending each year (in the USA).

Sure, crime, terrorism, rogue governments like Israel and Iran, etc. are some danger to the world population, but I believe that the trend is towards a safer world.
One possible cause of lower crime rates in the United States is the ever increasing size of the prison population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...
Is the Apple TV a particularly bad product? It seems to remain a profitable hobby, whereas most of these were lambasted from the start, and fairly short-lived.
Why would anyone trust his identification of the suspect in a line-up after he had already decided who the attacker was and seen a picture on Facebook? Even if the person he found on Facebook wasn't the attacker, he would have picked him out of a line-up because of seeing his Facebook picture.
They could never afford to pay the speakers when they only make 6k a person and bring in so many famous speakers.

They have to get them to do it for free.
The controversy is over a measly $6000? That's what the fuss is about? Most people on this site have had $100,000+ spent by their parents in order for them to attend an invitation-only institution at which they spent four years networking with the supposed future leaders! Gasp!

Honestly, TED seems like a much better investment than an elite college. Four years' time and $100-200k, at an age where it's mostly impossible to predict who will accomplish anything, with those "future leaders" selected by unqualified bureaucrats? Or $6000 for face-time with sure bets? Just sayin'.

There are a lot of problems with our society and with parasitic elites, so don't get me wrong: I'm all about busting and beating on those who try to hoard power. I'd love to see a car bomb hit Skull and Bones, and I'd gladly contribute to an Internet hit pool on anyone who attended the Bilderberg conference. But we have to pick our targets carefully, and TED does not seem to deserve our indignation, at least not based on what I've read. My understanding is that it's relatively easy to get in if you have the $6000 (again, cheaper than college) and sign up early; it seems like it's difficult to enter because there's so much demand that the spots fill up early. Well? That's life.
Obligatory Scott Adams cartoon (one of my favorites)

http://runningagile.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/dilbert-appr...

Systemically measuring things can have the opposite effect than what was desired.

EDIT: Fixed link
We plan to provide a JavaScript library and CSS file that can be used to both get and display the badges. People are free to use this themselves or create their own way of displaying badges. That makes that part of it very easy on the developer while still giving them the flexibility to do something completely different if they'd like..
Just launch already.
I get spurious error messages about the clock being incorrect on some sites - it will say it's in the future, but the time reported looks correct to me.
On top of that, an oft-forgotten influence on public perception is entertainment. If you add up the cop shows, lawyer shows, dramas with criminal subplots, crime-centric films, bestselling thriller novels, and crime-laced video games you get a force that's arguably more powerful than media that covers actual events.

Yes, it's fiction, but it is fiction that relies on verisimilitude for effect, i.e. it isn't fantasy. It has to seem real, which undoubtedly has an effect on what people perceive as real. With a steady diet of fictional crime one could easily be persuaded that crime is more common than it is.

I wonder if paradoxically this also helps to lower the incidence of crime, as the payoff in crime fiction is usually the criminal getting caught.
I'm tickled to see elitists getting out elited(I'm making up words now, but you get my drift).
Cool! Where did you see him speak? I've not dug around for any more of his work. Risk was really eye opening so I probably should!
Get an internship/job, w/o internship/work experience noone is going to hire you
Feel free to prove me wrong. It's generally more productive than taunting.
Wall Street did not create Europe’s debt problem. But bankers enabled Greece and others to borrow beyond their means, in deals that were perfectly legal.

The banks not only enabled these countries to borrow beyond their means, but also loaned them the money. If anyone feels a populist fury that requires retribution against Wall Street then the course is clear: don't bail Greece out. The best way to teach bankers not to engage in this sort of behavior is to show them that their faith in "too big to fail" is not well founded and that moral hazard is really hazardous.

The other important idea in this story is that governments are just as eager as corporations and homeowners to engage in overspending and shadowy accounting, so it's not clear why anyone should expect regulation to be a panacea for any of these problems.
It sounds, to me, that he is frustrated with the decision making process internally at W3C and committees that make decisions without a group discussion. It also sounds, to me, that he thinks HTML5 is bloated with things that could a) finish early and do not require anything in HTML5, or b) prevent the publication of HTML5 in a timely manner.
I have. Anthony Watts is checking with some collaborators to see whether they are willing to release it to me. It appears that he doesn't want the data to be public until they've had a chance to submit a paper based on it to some peer reviewed publication.
The other benefit of incorporation is that it may allow you to invoice and be invoiced by other businesses. If you're not incorporated and you, for instance, need to pick up a quick consulting gig, you may find yourself trapped into having taxes withheld.
Around my house, the poor sections of town were the ones with ridiculously tricked-out cars, and the siding on their houses was literally falling off, with lots of roof damage. They'd spend thousands on a paint job, but nothing to stop the leaky roof, drafts, and higher energy costs that go with those. I've seen nearly identical things many other places (replace cars with expensive-but-uncomfortable shoes, stereotypically-goth-$100 pants, etc).

From my experiences, it's typically that moderately-poor people spend themselves into further poverty by having poor priorities. Status-buys seem to rank higher than life-improvers.
That's why there's a trial after a charge, and not just a conviction.
"I don’t have $6,000..."

More surprising is that Scoble's been doing whatever it is he does for so long and he doesn't have $6000.
This new refresh of the windows mobile line is a very bold move by Microsoft. I'm really surprised they threw out all the existing winmo architecture and started fresh. The carrier network that supports WM7 will mean lots of choices for consumers as well. Not only that, they seem to really be emphasizing consistency across devices with the three buttons (start, search, back). This is undoubtedly uncharacteristic of how the winmo division has previously operated.

Most of all, todays announcement shows me they get it. I had always written off windows mobile as an OS, and after looking at things a bit, I'm considering WM7 for my next phone OS.
"...the first handsets are supposed to hit the market by the holidays of this year."

Kudos to Microsoft for realizing they need to be bold here and re-invent things. I'm encouraged by the lack of the "Start" bar. They have an incredibly brutal hill to climb if the handsets are only available at the end of the year. They should really have had a device out the door at the same time as the Palm Pre. It has taken Android a considerable amount of time to get to where it is today, and that took a no small amount of effort from Google. RIM, Google, and Apple are not going to be sitting on their hands this whole time milking their lead (well, RIM might ;)). Assuming the time frame holds true (a big assumption), by the time any appreciable number of users have these devices in their hands (early 2011), Apple alone will have released a major new OS update as well as hardware update, and be halfway to the next one. I expect Google will be similarly aggressive.
You may want to get a different link; that one threatens goatse in response to hotlinking.

Edit: Praise internets, link is fixed!
Of course, the root of the problem could just as much be Apple and not Adobe.
Yes, we addressed this in one section of the article. This is probably the one thing that gives me the biggest doubts. Many achievements can, like you said, be very trivial. Either way, it's alot of extra work that needs to be done constantly. Optimizing and implementing that is something that we don't expect everyone will really want to do themselves. Achievements can potentially be a very large system with alot of code, rules, conditions, etc to manage and that's the one thing that makes me think that it could require an entire separate system, much like a blog (Wordpress), forum (PhpBB), customer feedback (Get Satisfaction, User Voice), and so forth.

As far as the whole plugin thing - we've thought of that too and are exploring applications that we can create open source plugins for so someone can very easily plug our system in. For an example of how that might work, just try leaving a comment on our blog itself ;)
You should incorporate immediately if only to start the clock on your stock. If you sell within a year (for stock), you'll get hit with short term capital gains instead of long term (at least in the US). And if you can hold on for five years, you often get another host of tax benefits when you sell.
I used it when I had to setup my iPod to download some iCal web calendar. It was autogenerated by software had as a result had a huge url - some two hundred characters I think - and I didn't what to type all that in on my iPod.
It doesn't actually specify that there was any images on Facebook.

The whole story is weird though. If someone tells you they own the land you're on and then assaults you, you go to the police and say "the owner of that land assaulted me" and they'll take care of the rest. No need for a diversion via google and facebook.
Microsoft release Windows Phone 7 Series
That's a really interesting interface... my first impression is that it looks really cool. Finally someone is _not_ cloning iPhone.

One thing that is interesting is the comparison between (Mac, iPhone) and (Windows, Windows Mobile). On the Mac, it's unusual to have a window maximised, but on the iPhone that's the only mode of operation. On Windows, it's unusual to have more than one window on screen at a time, but WinMo7 seems to have completely abandoned the concept of windows. Interesting...
"Don't do any paid user acquisition until you can calculate your CAC and LTV.

It's very, very tempting to "experiment" and "test" various paid customer acquisition channels. You start with AdWords, then do some cheapo banner ads on a couple of ad networks, and soon you're hooked on some hard affiliate stuff and paying thousands of dollars a month to an Outsourced Program Manager"

Humorously worded, but I can tell you from loads of experience, this is flat wrong. Your LTV for customers you acquire from ads can be vastly different (in either direction) from ones you gain organically. I've had apps where it started out 3x CPA, then ended up 1/3x as the law of big numbers came into play and we had reached everyone we could target well.

Experimentation is how you grow and find your place in the market. From the start you should be throwing small chunks in different places, testing the signup flows of the people who come through them, looking for your highest ROI and most scalable method of customer acquisition.

If you don't have the self-discipline to wait until you're showing sustainable profits to throw the big budget in, and carefully monitor it throughout, then you shouldn't be running a startup. You should be waiting tables at Applebee's.
Top worst Apple products of all time
No, you'd be surprised at how many of the less obvious ones can get swept under the rug (and even the obvious, see recent Amy Bishop coverage). This happens in the U.K. to game the statistics, from what I've read.
Got ya. You may try to come up with a way to do the demo without the email address for users. If I had just stumbled upon the site, and thought it may be something I would use but was not quite sure, the first thing I would do is try the demo. If I immediately saw it ask for my email address I would feel like you are scavenging addresses and move on to another site. If you absolutely require an email consider clearly stating that up front and the reason why an email address is needed for the demo to function.
Ask the attorney: ‘Finder’ keepers could be losers, weepers
I was thinking about a "Web Achievements" toolbar for Firefox etc. Where people would get awards for being rickrolled, spending time on websites, visiting certain websites for x times and so on. Maybe with a (adblockplus like) subscription thing that allows any site to provide achievements for itself.

It's not like I will ever pursue this idea, so if someone thinks this is a good idea, please use it!
Monoculturalism is a form of conservatism. Multiculturalism makes things less certain. It shouldn't be seen as fear, just less certainty. “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.” This is a completely normal response to uncertainty.
It was really a bug, and they fixed it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/gcc-4.2/+bug...
Put shortly, "sentence first -- verdict afterwards."
So, thanks to Facebook, not to mention our ability to feel "connected" with someone who has been memorialized ad nauseam on cable news, the number of people with this excuse is increasing despite the number of random murders decreasing?
10 Awesome and Creative CSS Templates For Design Inspiration
In this post I am sharing some awesome and very creative examples of CSS templates for design inspiration. So take a test drive of creativeness.
In Milwaukee, someone I indirectly knew was murdered this summer. People in my town have been getting robbed more than ever based on reports from my parents. To me, the crime rate is higher than it was when I was younger, despite reports that it is actually going down over all.
While your cynicism about official crime statistics may be well placed, there are ways of measuring crime that are practically impossible to manipulate, such as crime surveys which ask a random sample of the population if they have been the victims of crime in the last year. Both the US-based National Crime Victimization Survey (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/) and the British Crime Survey (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/soti.html) are of this type, and they have both shown a consistent downward trend in most types of crime. In addition, the figures for some classes of crime, such as homicides, can't be manipulated either, and these have also been decreasing in recent years.
Yes, I am just used to lynx since it comes installed by default :)
PopJam.com: A Facebook Connect-powered Chatroulette clone
Ha, good point. I hope nobody got confused by that.
Hacker's life in Tallinn, Estonia, end of week 1.
[Microsoft is] dictating rigid specs for 7 Series devices (a specific CPU and speed, screen aspect ratio and resolution, memory, and even button configuration), and doing away with carrier or partner UI customizations such as Sense or TouchWiz. That's right -- there will be a single Windows Phone identity regardless of carrier or device brand.

So all Windows phones will look the same and work the same. I'm skeptical that hardware manufacturers will be enthusiastic about Microsoft turning their products into commodities again. Unlike the situation with PCs, this time they have a viable alternative in Android.
It's standard backlash-backlash.

First, it was against Apple - "Without Flash, the iPad will suck. Apple is evil for excluding it". Now, the pendulum has swung the other way - "Adobe is evil".

Eventually we'll settle on the agreed upon: Adobe is only mildly evil. :)
Google's Endgame
For sure; but e.g. with science fiction, I can delve well into, say, the top 60% without feeling nauseous. The same is not the case with TED.
Site-specific url shortening could solve this perhaps? example: http://arst.ch/ebg
Understanding the Real-Time Web for Web Developers
Polymorphic business/management = bad idea that has aged even worse.