skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html

Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?

The theory is that the brain seeks "novelty" and gets pleasure from it. If your brain tries to predict the next note and fails, synapses adjust slightly and it learns. It gets better at predicting its inputs. Learning these new patterns gives you reward, and encourages you to seek novelty like that in the future. Randomness doesn't cause new learning, neither does predictable patterns you already know.
Show HN: WikiTrans iOS, bidirectional dictionary for en-ja-zh-ko, compare wikis
But air-conditioning expense makes it cost-prohibitive.
Once in awhile it will reanimate old purchases too.

I took a class in college many years ago to meet a diversity requirement that involved reading a bunch of books about gay Latinos. I'm neither gay nor Latino, but something refreshes that connection -- every couple of years they decide to hit me up with books on the topic, including books that I bought for the class.
So music is a superstimulus for learning?
Sorry for the late response--I just now saw this. We've fixed thousands of screens at this point--we'd have an angry mob if screen replacements caused the issue!

Yes, we have had people come back with Error 53; that's how we knew it existed a while ago. All of them had either had their home button replaced or water damaged. We were able to successfully recover one of them after the Apple Store told the guy there was nothing they could do. It was a water damaged home button and we were able to clean the corrosion off of it by soaking it overnight in a special solution. It came back the next day. If your original home button stops working, though, you are screwed.
VR Adult Gaming Controller
This is a good example of the kind of content that my ideal Internet would be composed of. There would be no social networks, no comments or like buttons, no advertisements, no search engines. Every website would be substantial. It's nice to dream.
Major loopholes (when sorted by revenue lost) in current tax code are standard deduction and home mortgage interest deduction. Touch either one of those and you'll quickly find out how many voters go from loophole-closing to "damn bureucrats from Washington reaching into our pockets again".
I think time to market matters.

Higher rent + long, time and attention consuming build outs + accounting nightmares are more expensive than you think.

Look at Joel Spolsky's story. 4x rent plus $500k in extra buildout. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html
Piwik, certainly when self-hosted, is considered completely fine by most people concerned about these issues. It's still blocked when privacy tools are set to max, which is understandable. But it's viewed as perfectly ethical.
Because even a bog standard 125K a year salary will only go so far in SF. Sunnyvale/Milpitas/Fremont etc are much more desirable in that case
EasyCandidate – taking negotiation power away from the people
Karma Automotive
The article cites a race where the bikes were ~50 and 36 pounds. That sounds like a lot. Even a cheapo bike from Walmart is half that. But over time, its going to be the bearings that suck the most energy. I wonder what those were like compared to today.
Ask HN: Recommended reading for video streaming performance?
PHP programmer looking for tips on video streaming performance. I'm hoping to find some sage advice on the topic. Does HN have any recommended reading material or talks on the subject? I have heard increasing the burst on our CDN will help.

Current context:
>Video content site
>5000 some members streaming video daily
>Lots of "seeking"
>Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct sequence in order to introduce deadlocks

This manually "trickery" you are introducing is you intentionally replicating potential control flows that can (and will) happen in real life. You should come out of this game with a new/renewed paranoia about multithreaded programming and how seemingly safe code may not necessarily be so.
Toronto is literally the Canadian SF.
We're going to use your toothbrush to snoop on you, says US spy boss
Show HN: Audaster, listen Twitter and operate it by voice commands
If you ever wanted to use Twitter while walking/driving or any other action, here is solution: listen tweets, operate app by voice commands. No screen need to use it. Audaster turns Twitter into micro-podcasting platform
This is cool. For one of my internships, every time I learned something I wrote it out with a 'TIL' prefixed and put it in our group chat.

At the end of the internship, I grepped the logs for all those lines but never found anything useful worth re-visiting. :)
I am a Bitbucket product manager.

There are a few options for configuration management and automation.

The installer[1], web setup[2] and almost everything in settings/admin/provisioning can be done via a config file, script or REST call[3].

There are a few 3rd party modules for config management tools available that make use of this:

Chef: https://github.com/bflad/chef-stash

Puppet: https://forge.puppetlabs.com/thewired/Bitbucket

We also provide a docker image that may be of interest: https://hub.docker.com/r/atlassian/bitbucket-server/

As for clustering, Bitbucket Data Center[4] provides the same self-hosted functionality as Bitbucket Server for 500+ user tiers, with active-active clustering for performance at scale and HA, as well as Smart Mirroring for distributed git read performance.

Feel free to email me (rbarnes@) if you have feedback on how these options work for you.

[1] https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/running-the...

[2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/automated-s...

[3] https://developer.atlassian.com/bitbucket/server/docs/latest...

[4] https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/
There's a lot of supposition in your post and no evidence in favor. First of all what makes you think Gmail stores user data in plain text at rest? Secondly think about your definition of "backbone" networks. Google's own network is extremely large in scope, and generally user traffic lands in Google's network at a point very close to the user. For example if a user in Japan sends mail to Google, that connection will be terminated in Japan, and backhauled across Google's network to wherever the actual servers are located. Google intentionally shrinks the scope of network surveillance by minimizing the network distance between the user and Google's frontends.
I guess that we, as a society, could all contribute valuable information and things, and then the overhead will be less and the need for obnoxious ads less. It's a win for everyone. Best example is Wikimedia with zero ads at all.
How is that different from a hedge fund manager not earning much for a few years, but then hitting a big liquidity event?

I think the assumption here is that a lot of people with eight-digit incomes choose to continue participating in the workforce, but I don't know if there's data to support that.
One of the startups I worked for moved office a few times as we grew and leases expired etc.

The engineering team pushed for "quiet private space". We avoided asking for "offices" so that the focus was on what sort of environment we needed, and didn't jump straight into the status and/or cost issues.

It never happened.

The main reason wasn't cost savings (though that was definitely a factor) or management paranoia (which wasn't too bad) or status/ego. It was simply a total failure to understand the process of software engineering, despite being told by the people who were employed to do that job.

The people planning the offices were from a sales background. They were extroverts. They hated quiet spaces. They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation that broke everyone's concentration. No matter how many times we tried to explain to them that we got far more work done if they'd just shut the f* up (we'd usually put it more politely than that), they'd keep on thinking that he most important thing was to have a "cool", "vibrant" space and, to them, that meant open-plan and loud.
My personal belief, after having had a 100% remote job, is that there is a lot of value in having people physically co-located at the same physical office.

This isn't always true and I would never want to enforce it dogmatically. For some people / teams / companies, significant remote working is very successful. I just don't believe it's always or even frequently better than a physical office with adequately private and quiet working conditions.

I do believe fully remote working is probably better than the shambolic open-plan disasters that are common these days, so if someone makes you believe in a false dilemma pitting fully open-plan versus fully-remote, then fully-remote is probably the lesser of two evils.

I did read the parent article. I responded as I did because I am dumbfounded that the idea of paying for the cost-effective extra benefits of private offices is not really even considered -- we've come so far on the path to destructive workspaces that we don't even think about it any more.
How difficult of a problem is it to break out of local optimums several generations down in a genetic algorithm? If we prune the domain space from the get-go randomly, and then keep on creating sub-domains of the original large (or potentially non-finite) domain, wouldn't we generally only head towards local optimums, albeit, quickly?
This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen on HN in a while. Great job, keep up the good work!
I wish technology was simple enough that writing these TILs would be unnecessary.
The grass is always greener on the other side, isn't it?
LeBron James is not ready to say goodbye to Kobe Bryant
You're right about commit notification emails, an add-on is currently the best way to get this. It's something we'd love to add soon but isn't being worked on right now. You can hook up HipChat notifications for new commits as an alternative, and one that means less email.
Few businesses would suppress growth to lower the tax base. One way to avoid profit (and punitive taxes associated with it) is to expand the business or seek new markets. Amazon, Alphabet and Warren Buffett are fans of this approach.
> The/my meritocratic process doesn't care about race or gender. When I hire consultants and contract-out work, I often don't know their race or gender and I'm not interested. I choose candidates in my price range based on the best work-samples.

It might be true for you. We know it's not true for many other people. That's why orchestras stick auditionees behind curtains. It's why people are advised to remove any protected characteristic information from their resumes/CVs.

> I'm going to stick with my approach of not caring about the gender, race, or any other _not at all relevant to their work or how I treat them as a person_ detail

I'd be interested in how you know you've eliminated this bit of strong conditioning, or whether you're operating under a cognitive bias.

Because so far when we test people who say "I don't care about race / sex / etc" we find people who do in fact care about it.
I know plenty of YC founders (and even an early employee or two) that have ended up financially independent because of it.

Investing in, founding, and leading a company are three different skillsets. The best founding CEOs usually are not venture capitalists; you don't see Larry Page, Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs wishing they were investors. Similarly, it's possible to be a good founder and terrible leader (eg. Parker Conrad, Pierre Omidyar), or a good leader but incapable of founding something (Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg) or a mediocre founder but excellent investor (Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Eugene Kleiner, Don Valentine).
I get "ERROR: gyp returned non-zero" while building. Missing dependencies? (Win10.)
BrowserHub enables multiple “default browsers” on OS X
I'm looking for beta testers for BrowserHub. If you're interested, sign up on the website.

With BrowserHub, you create rules based on the URL to define which browser should be used depending on the link you clicked. For instance, you can set Safari as your default browser but create a rule to always open YouTube links in Google Chrome. Maybe you want to always open video URLs in VLC, you can create a rule for that too. The possibilities are endless.

BrowserHub is going to be available on the Mac App Store and on getbrowserhub.com soon.
customers also demand it.

some customers would rather be told the wrong information, at the right time of day, than the right information 2 hours later.

i wouldn't have believed it until i saw it myself.

people in general are insane, half of "work" is just catering to insanity.
That's awesome. It seems like you'd need a pretty good knowledge of the physics to even come up with an idea. I'd love to hear about it if you want to shoot me an email.

I actually have a similar thing where it seems like I've got an idea for a better battery but I have to assume I'm just missing some basic physics.
Five kids is very old fashioned and ... Roman. It's good to be not alone here in HN.

On the subject, eventually the house's temperature goes to the heights. But I'd never worked so much before and the parenting experience gives a great sense of achievement. It's like a family business with its own departments, and its own kind of clashes.
I assume the headline's claimed seventh tip is to not make off-by-one errors during interviews? ;-)
While that may be a valid point on some glasses-bridge-pushing technical level (certainly Linus has strong opinions on HFS), but so what? In practice, this hasn't been an issue (I spent about 15 years running OSX desktop workstations and laptops, and and also managed a fleet up to 50 OSX client machines in very shady power situations w/o problems) - sure ZFS is technically sweet but doesn't make sense on a laptop (OpenSolaris, BSD on the go? please) and has historically been a PITA on Linux (CDDL).

What other enterprise-class file system are you talking about? btrfs is still immature, anytime I've strayed from ext, I regret it. And NTFS? I've had lots of more problems w/ that than anything else (admittedly, probably due to poor interactions between Windows and ntfs-3g on Linux).

In any case, since OSX isn't a data-center OS, I don't see what "enterprise-class" storage has to do with it anyway.
And just look how successful Joel's endeavors have been. It's almost like there's something to this idea of really investing in your employees...

Do you think Joel would not attribute a significant amount of the financial returns his companies have seen to his cultural choices about providing the best workplaces, even when it cost him a lot to do so?
Congrats, Apache has had this for 20 years
Something that's totally understandable. Remote working is not for everyone for sure. At least, not yet. My personal belief is that there'll come a day where creative work revolves around spaces that aren't part of an office. Co working spaces, coffee houses etc. There's a lot that needs to grow to make this a reality (eg: I could find only one co working space within 15 minutes travel time around me). But my point is, once these co working spaces, studios, and coffee shops built around the theme of creative work really start to show up, remote work will hopefully no longer be a thing of loneliness. Best of both worlds where you sync with your fellow workmates in a fluid fashion. Morning might be a great time to socialize, but when you want to dive in, you move to a quieter more private working space. That's the future I believe in :). Yes. I'm bullish on the future of remote work and the end of the traditional office space :D
How a whole language of the Steam Translation Server was shut down
White House seeks first chief information security officer
I am very curious. Can you briefly explain what do you mean by "that took 2 calls"?
Have you attended a hackathon? It's usually more like working full-time for a couple days than an actual marathon without sleep.

There's really no better way to meet other programmers that want to collaborate. Meetups are the second-best option.
Maybe he wrote it on his MAC before he uploaded to the WEB site.
This is mere ray-tracing problem.

What we call bright sky is reflections of Sun rays from particles in atmosphere. What we see is reflected light.

When Sun is shadowed by Earth we see only light reflected by distant object, such as Moon.

The darkness of the night sky is relative - some rays are here, but our visual system is conditioned for days (reflected light), not nights.

The idea that everything should be filled with starts is just wrong. Rays from distant stars were deflected, blocked by particles, etc.
NetworkMiner 2.0 Released
This is different than the reading comprehension tested in the other sections though. It's straightforward to understand what is being said what the extra information tests is if you can determine what information is important to the question you're being asked to solve. Being able to figure that out is really important to practically applying math and most fields one might get into post HS.

Also both of those interpretations are ruled out by a check of the math. 209 salads and 209 salad + drink combos are both more profit than the food van made so if a student answers those they failed to check their work at all.

Also the phrasing there is the same as student would have seen tons of times before taking the test. It's not exactly an extremely exotic way to write it out. Really this is one of the more straightforward questions of the batch presented.
`git branch` also determines whether your working tree is modified. This can be extremely slow on large repos.

`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` is very inexpensive in comparison, and doesn't print anything extra you might need to parse out if you're in a shell script.
I've been using Notational Velocity for a while in this way. It's wonderful. Synced on Dropbox, my "little black book" is available on any device I have at hand, and instantly searchable.
We recently open-sourced it. Let us know what you think!

https://github.com/hashrocket/hr-til
Ancient Romans knew that lead water pipes were unhealthy and so they preferred terracotta pipes. It's hard to imagine why the U.S. ever had a single lead water pipe, let alone huge numbers of them.

Updated with a reference for the downvoters:

Sheets of lead were used to line Roman aqueducts (as was cement) and lead pipes to convey water. But lead also was known to be unwholesome and, for that reason, pipes made of clay were preferred—as Vitruvius, who wrote during the time of Augustus, explains.

"Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [ceruse or lead carbonate, PbCO3] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them" (VIII.6.10-11).

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/win...
Remember folks, now that Rand Paul has dropped out, there is one candidate left who is not a drug warrior. This will be the easiest vote I've ever cast.

Edit: I was not fair to Trump on this. He apparently isn't a drug warrior. Still gonna be an easy vote for me though!
Why no search engines? How would you find these good websites?
Join pushdown to remote servers in Postgres 9.6
Digital Asset Holdings Donates “Hyperledger” Name to Linux Foundation
An interesting historical byline was the debate over the distance of quasars in the 1960s. What made quasars so unusual was that their spectrum resembled absolutely nothing that had been seen before. A typical quasar spectrum has a broad continuum with a number of emission lines on top of it. This should have made it fairly easy to identify the composition of quasars since the emission lines tell you what elements are nearby, but the observed emission lines matched up with no known elements. Maarten Schmidt realized that the most prominent emission lines could be those of hydrogen if the recessional velocity was about 15% of the speed of light.

This sparked a big debate in astronomy because whether you believed Schmidt or not, something crazy had to be going on. If Schmidt was right, these objects would have to extremely far away --- much further than anything that had ever been observed before. And if they were that distant and that bright, that would imply that they would have to be extraordinarily luminous. The timescale of the variability of the spectrum implied that whatever the source was, it had to be less than the size of Solar System. Yet if they were really that far away, something of that volume had to outshine an entire galaxy!

On the other hand, if Schmidt was wrong and the quasars were really local, you still had to explain just what exactly they were. One plausible explanation was that the emission lines were generated deep in a gravitational well (i.e., there was gravitational redshift rather than cosmological redshift). But no known objects could stably produce emission at such specific gravitational redshifts.

Ultimately the cosmological view of quasars prevailed because theorists could show that accretion of gas onto a supermassive black hole could produce the required luminosity in the required volume, whereas there was no good explanation for how you could produce a non-cosmological quasar.

The story of non-cosmological quasars turns out to be an excellent example of science progressing one funeral at a time. Even when most of the field had moved on by the late 1970s and 1980s, a small cadre of vocal astronomers continued to insist on the non-cosmological quasar model even into the 1990s until they started to die. Halton Arp was the most well known of these (he is better known for the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies) and even published a book in 1987 arguing in favor of the non-cosmological model.
Also, most employers won't allow remote work.
Deep Learning Introduction with ConvNetJS
Maverick's Lab: NASA Applied Research Accelerator
Am I right that this is basically this is a super high tech Michelson–Morley experiment, to detect waves instead of aether?
Show HN: Mariana, the Cutest Deep Learning Framework
Remote working only works for some people. Why? It's so easy to get distracted and not get your work done.

Many people also miss the social interactions of an office.

I was the hiring manager of an entire virtual development team some years back and we had a very difficult time finding employees that could actually work like this.

It would always start out fine and then progressively get worse after a couple of weeks/months. I have found that the same type of people that can make it work are self-starters and could also run their own business.
Except for when someone doesn't use that model. I work with people who keep their door closed all the time, but they're not in a "don't bother me" mood.
i love the openness of a protocol approach (like email), but i just don't see how it's going to have a chance if it falls down this badly as a product-as-a-whole.

what lessons can we learn from slack vs irc? from whatsapp vs email? from usenet vs reddit? etc.
All those things are calculable from web logs.