skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I'd also like to see a study where they test this magic-AI-music against some generic 10 hours relax/focus music from Youtube (or the Machinarium or Age of Empires 2 soundtrack). Properly randomized and blinded etc.

I'd also like to know what it means that this is produced by an AI. What do they optimize for? I mean it would be really cool if they could do some reinforcement learning with real time EEG feedback and whatnot, but I think there is not much AI going on here. Perhaps even zero.

Also, the UI contains a lot of bullshit frills and wizardry, writing stuff like "generating your brainwave" and shiny animations (It's like how MSN messenger used to write "Loading your friend list..." and other recognizable and understandable things for half the time of its loading screen).

And then after one session it makes us click through a personal survey, where you have to click yes or no, for questions like "are you easily distracted", "do you have problems with concentrating", "do you have issues with personal organization" and similar stuff, do you have anxiety etc etc. It's a bit like they are trying to make you realize that "yeah, kinda, I think I could improve myself in these things, let's click yes". I'm not sure how they call this psychological manipulation technique, but I've read about it somewhere. Basically it's the same idea as some cashiers being instructed to ask you if your shopping was a pleasant experience. You want to be polite and go on with the script, but then you'll still identify with that "yes" answer.

Generally, the site rubs me the wrong way. It seems to be targeted at people who don't know much about science or AI, but like the brand and image of science and AI, as these are cool things nowadays. It also builds upon gamification and all these manipulative things.
FYI: someone from the company just responded in a sister comment
أقسام الإعلانات صيانة تكييف مركزي 55973501
I don't agree. There are plenty of things in my life that could be hooked up to some online AI to make them smarter.

Anything with a lock. Just figure out that I'm me and open. If I leave lock up. Open up for anyone on my authorised list.

More cameras pointed at stuff. Our local club (100 members) purchased a weather station and decent camera and pointed it at the sea so we can all check the wind and surf. Cool. More of these cheaper please.

We have Woo devices that we attach to kiteboards, these measure jump height, duration and G force. These are then synced to a phone and internet, so not quite IoT but close. More of these please. Attach them to anything that moves (shoes, kites, surfboards, swim fins, soccer balls, bike) more data is fun.

GoPros, most people I know have these. They need to be better hooked up to the internet.

I think there are a ton of IoT that will make sense and people will buy. Just because you don't see the value in a toaster hooked up to the 'net, doesn't mean the IoT is dumb. I think it's great.
I am not sure this could change current administration's stance on the matter, but I've signed.
Bitcoin Is the Sewer Rat of Currencies
Next time ... can I come? That sounds really fun!
Reproductions are awesome as aids to study and for education, no question. Scan everything and make it available in virtual & physical museums! There are huge gains from that. A faithful reproduction of an ancient Egyptian coffin lid is probably nearly as good, from an educational point of view, as the real thing.

But you're not going to be able to take that reproduction coffin lid, put it in a CAT scan, and find a 3000-year-old fingerprint.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/three-thousand-yea...
US death row study: 4% of defendants sentenced to die are innocent
Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.
LED bulbs started expensive as well. I just bought one for $1.97 (Cree 60w equiv) at Home Depot this evening. Manufacturing efficiencies take time.
English to me is like Scheme(Lisp). They share very simple(not a synonym of easy) syntax, yet actually knowing(owning) either is very different from simply knowing their grammar.
English is one of the few languages you can read a million books, known every single grammar rule, and still sound like a complete idiot when speaking a word to somebody else (even if you're right)
I love that name but isn't it just another name for Gen X?
How We Use Sass Maps for Desin Tokens and Developer Happiness
There is a huge difference between a streptomyces and a shigella, but a huger still difference between either and an archaeon like pyrococcus
> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).

How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.

I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.

I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
> You don't think different religions can be more or less supportive of violence in their foundational texts?

I don't think that's relevant: 1) We can't read the texts except for translations; 2) Within every religion, among experts with great familiarity with the texts, there are a very wide variety of interpretations - so wide they sometimes fight wars over it (e.g., Protestants vs Catholics, Sunnis vs Shia, Jews vs. Christians vs. Muslims (all share the Old Testament; Muslims and Christians share the New Testament)), etc. 3) Adherents to religions are usually ignorant of and completely disregard the texts (lay Catholics didn't even read or hear them until the 20th century IIUC), except when convenient. For example, the Ten Commandments, the highest law, requires people to observe the Sabbath. I wonder if that includes posting on Hacker News?
I'm the same way, but with classical music. I can "listen" to pretty much any piece I've ever played. And in fact I often can't stop it. The second a person or conversation or situation loses my interest, the music turns on in my head, and I'm no longer paying any attention to you. I'm listening to a Brahms quintet or a Beethoven symphony. I hear it just as clearly as if it were playing over speakers.

It's actually kind of a problem. I don't in general have a particularly wonderful memory. It's just that I constantly reinforce.
I read the "mock brain stimulation" as meaning the headset seemed to be doing something but was doing nothing. I guess the critique of the experiment would more or less stand, though it'd be slightly rearranged. Maybe dropping weights on any part of the body improves performance?
Would appreciate a checkbox so I could disable the CPU-saturating visualization without having to hide the page.
White noise helped me cope with exam stress at undergrad. Here's my favourite....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzjWIxXBs_s
It's such an interesting article. I do see the association of the "open wounds", if used wisely it can prevent an individual from repeating the same error. I would love to see this app that the researchers are trying to release.
Ok. Why the downvotes?
Is this untrue? If true, though not a good enough reason by itself, it is very interesting
> The sun availability does seem to affect my daily energy and motivation.

One of many possibilities to consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

However, for far less than this you can get a lamp that provides a similar effect, if not the same aesthetics.
I don't have time to find the source right now but there was speculation that a structure could be found that achieves this. While I may not capture the exact method, it was essentially something like:

* Yahoo would sell the core "Yahoo" piece or businesses components leaving the new Yahoo as just a shell company with just BABA holdings. Essentially, they decouple it entirely.

* Yahoo's components would be sold and then BABA would almost certainly purchase all of the Yahoo stock, which would just be, in reality, a stock buy back from their standpoint.

* The actual Yahoo components would go to whoever bought them, but likely not to BABA.

Not sure how this plays, but it doesn't seem like anyone smart realizes Yahoo core is valuable, or at least has not been publicly announced as a suitor. It does not seem feasible to recap the company in reverse, selling BABA and betting on itself, although I think that is the move personally.

The result currently appears that BABA does a stock rebuy and Yahoo disappears entirely. The employees acquihired slowly look for better jobs over the next year as they work with the acquirer to destroy yahoo by integrateding it into whatever piece of shit idea some executive has.
Very cruel marketing scam from Ziptask.com
Sure, this probably helps you focus better than a standard studio album.

I would argue that 90% of the benefit of this music is just from the extended intervals of contiguous playing, so there's no "break" disruption. I think any DJ (esp. deep house) worth half their salt can get someone "in the zone" for half an hour at a time. And artists devoted to minimalist ambient or trambient can get you going for hours straight.

Honestly the "Focus: Intense" or whatever I find super annoying. It's got this constant anxious buildup feel to it and never fucking breaks into what I would consider that peak when I start playin my keyboard like a goddamn piano.

Basically, no fucking way would I even consider shelling out an additional Spotify subscription for some "high tech" whale song machine.
My transition from developer to consultant
Interesting point.

Their first article is about 100th Anniversary of the Battle of Verdun so I search "Battle of Verdun" and their page, in the UK, is #15.

Looking at site overall I think this is a fair result?

Maybe demonstrates that results on page 2 are generally overlooked/rarely seen?
An Open Letter to Millennials Like Talia…
English, the PHP of natural languages.
Yes, of course nothing of worth has been created with English. What bollocks.
Can you point me to a good example of this? I've never noticed wikipedia to be unreadable.
Timing and focus.

People in scientific computing started using Python the mid-1990s. This included Numeric (ancestor to NumPy) which Jim Fulton, Jim Hugunin and others started in 1995. Ruby 0.95 wasn't released until the end of that year. Moreover, van Rossum tweaked Python so it would be a better fit for matrix computing, such as multi-dimensional slices.

Then there was PyFort by Paul Dubois at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (1999), and SWIG by Dave Beazley at Los Alamos National Lab, which had Python support by 1998 (see https://web.archive.org/web/19981212033200/http://www.swig.o... ). Those made it much easier to access existing scientific libraries through Python modules. (A phrase at the time was that Python would 'steer' the low-level high performance code.)

While at this time, Ruby was just becoming known in the English speaking world, and didn't really hit the mainstream until Ruby on Rails in 2005. This means Python had a 5-10 year head start, and Ruby hasn't caught up.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/138643/why-is... covers a reasonable and diverse set of explanations.
I think some are genuinely useful.

Smart water sprinkler controllers seem generally useful. I used to forget to use our non-smart controller's "rain delay" all the time.

We also have an alert system setup to let us know when the outside temperature would meet the heating or cooling requirements of the thermostat. This is pretty useful in southern California.

A single switch to kill all your lights when you leave/go to bed is useful. But at $35 per smart switch you're going to shell out a lot of cash for this convenience.

My biggest issue with IoT as it is currently evolving is how reliant on the manufacturer they are to keep working. I would be surprised to see some of these devices working in 5 years, much less 20 or 30.
I did not get from TFA that the Dutch don't like English. Also I don't think that's true at all (source: I'm Dutch). According to an older HN submission (can't find it right now) the netherlands is, with the exception of the UK, the country with the highest percentage of people speaking English (96%), and I don't know of anyone not liking it.
I was confused by that at first as well. A better title would have been, "The legendary battle of Verdun".
I think of it not as good recall but rather a comparatively longer duration of "the present". Which does present (heh) problems because some things are still in the present for me while for most others those things have been consigned to the past.
> conjugation and gender are just as complicated

Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?
I love the Samsung hardware, and own an S6 - mostly because I was excited about Gear VR - but I really wish I could root my phone without forever tripping some "Knox" bit that might theoretically have repercussions in the future, and at the very least would affect resale value.

In an ideal world, root would be a built-in feature, which can only be accessed through some obscure code, like the developer settings. It would show a big scary warning, and it would have su app controls included. Rooting the phone could trip some bit, sure, but a full factory reset should reset it.

The only reasons I can see not to do this are 1) extra work supporting people who've messed up their phones. Easy enough to fix: we don't support phones while they are rooted. 2) allows removal of built-in apps. But really, just because you can't uninstall the stuff doesn't mean you have to use it, so is there really a benefit there? And 3) it would take a bit of development effort to add the feature. Perhaps the demand just isn't sufficient to justify it. But I find that hard to believe. Unless there's a 4) that there's a segment of the buying public that would actually be scared to learn a phone could be rooted or something?
Wow. I was looking at the first couple photos thinking "I get it, that's what a skylight looks like, now show me the damn lightbulb!"

Here's to hoping this tech gets commoditized and indoor spaces get a lot more pleasant.
Life is a journey, not a destination.
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you say markov chains have no memory and are a randomwalk, but "a disease caused by a strong feeling of blurred and deceptive movements of the teeth" seems quite similar to me?

I think the markov chain that generates this hacker news simulator:

http://news.ycombniator.com/

Does CONSIDERABLY better in many cases.

Our discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248773

Also I think this corporate bullshit generator uses markov chains:
http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live and I also find many of its output examples to be superlative.

On the hacker news simulator, much of it is on-point: "Tell HN: Bump for Android in the UK on Monday" or "Ask HN: Any help to find short term, remote programming gig?"

Both of which are extremely intelligible, if surprising.

"The Illusion Machine That Changed Their Lives " makes perfect sense to me and I would 100% click.

As you can see from my link to our discussion, some people accepted the site as the genuine deal. (Obviously most titles it generates include clear give-aways: most, but not all.)

Given my review of its output I just think that the dictionary generating app we're discussing can use improvement.
> The CIA ... very likely knew ...

They definitely knew something: A month before the attacks they gave President Bush a briefing titled: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike...
>Any rhythmic audio stimulus will entrain the brain ... the very first research on audio brainwave stimulation used simple clicks.

So you're saying that minimal techno is actually good for you? I don't believe it ;)
Artificial sunlight could be revolutionary if applied with scale in cities. It could enable new, far denser forms of architecture "built for people", mitigating the ill psychological effects of being without natural surroundings.

The energy use would be heavy, but it might be worth the cost given the transportation energy savings and higher productivity and happiness of the city population.
But for a tiny, well connected island Britain has a remarkable diversity in pronunciation.

Even speakers of "RP", a supposedly region-neutral "educated" accent which is as close to "official" British English as we've ever had permits variations in pronunciation so marked that speakers of one variant can find speakers of other variants' pronunciation of a particular word comical.
What Apple’s FBI Standoff Says About Android Security
It’s also a 660-pound object installed in a drop ceiling nearly a meter thick. You’d need very high ceilings to start with, and you’d better hope it’s installed well. Not to mention that it consumes up to 300W of power.
Can you provide evidence of the effectiveness of your methods? Are there peer reviewed studies that sustain your statements? Spot checking the site, there isn't much convincing evidence (a double blind trial with very few subjects that you sponsored is not really convincing).
Another jerk it to Jobs comment....
I dig it. I'm creating an SSB pinned to my menubar for this right now.
the author didn't seem to mind my review, and I said it's an extremely interesting project. It can be improved considerably, and I don't see any reason the author shouldn't do so if they want.

the other fun things, the typeface, the tubmlr reblogging the details, etc, that you mention would remain even if the etymology generation and some of the techniques on the generation side were improved.
When a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean talk to each other in English, they often can't understand an American who joins in the conversation. Perhaps Basic English, without nativisms like "stick around".
"Threads" and "The War Game" were more realistic, IMO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
salafi: Thanks for stopping by and contributing. Your comments are perfectly appropriate and shouldn't be downvoted, but unfortunately that happens on HN sometimes to comments that, regardless of their validity, make the angry minority unhappy. I hope you stick around!
Shareholders are represented by board, board hired Mayer. If they think she did a bad job then they made a poor choice.
It's because Mandarin has standard syllables. While the sound for "p" is in the language, it's normally bound into a syllable. So saying "app" with the "p" sound at the end is awkward, but "pi" is natural.
I agree with all the answers that have been posted so far, but I think it is worth pointing out that, in idiomatic usage, an event or person may be described as legendary even when the facts are well-known.

The way it works is this: many historically-important legends have a basis in important events in a people's history, when bold and resourceful action saved the day, but the story tends to exaggerate the glory. A recent event may be described as legendary if it has those properties to a degree that is normally only seen in legends, and the same goes for the primary actors in those actions. An example that comes to mind is Shackleton and his rescue of his crew, a legend in the history of exploration.

I mention this because of the sentence 'Yet over the interwar years it justly came to be seen as France’s “finest hour.”' (my emphasis.) I think that here, the author is saying that the battle reached legendary status within the French national psyche, without implying that this is a misreading of history.

To be clear, I agree that if Maginot's enthusiasm for forts was a result of Verdun, the author is saying that was a misreading of history. As for Hitler's "no retreat" doctrine, I think the point is that he was, for his own reasons, making the same mistake as the generals at Verdun: I doubt that his attitude owed much, if anything, specifically to that battle (he was at the Somme at the time.)
IMHO This article is interesting but slightly misleading. Its known from other research that certain tasks are easier in a certain "brain state" which tDCS could stimulate.

A classic example would be that a Blue Angels pilot goes through the entire display routine, in their heads before they strap into the cockpit. [0] If the pilots didn't mentally prepare to fly precisely, even a highly experienced pilot couldn't achieve that level of performance. Its likely that the brain activity between different flights, and between different flight leaders, would be somewhat consistent.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBIXmkpO6H4&feature=youtu.be...
Which is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to translate something from an acquired language into your native language not because you don't understand what you're attempting to translate, but because none of the words in your native tongue feel right. But it eventually starts to happen a lot and you realize that there's so much that you weren't able to easily conceptualize because you were constrained by the limits of your native tongue.
This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple.

I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people who only speak very rudimentary English.

So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English speaker.
Do we? Is it really that big of a problem?

If someone says they read a "Tweet", I instantly know that it was a very short message most likely made with very little thought or planning behind it.

It's a word, just like any other. This whole idea that we should stick to more vague words because they are "more adult" is silly to me.
Considering it is Samsungs flagship device, and Samsung have offerings for business security with KNOX, I have no reason to see why they wouldn't.
Your comment is unnecessarily hostile.

And I'm not an idiot. The 'Personal Hotspot' item was missing in my menu so I searched internet and found dozens of articles describing how to fix it.

And fixing it included things like 'Enter your carrier name into the text box' and 'Restart your phone'.

For example take a look at this:

http://www.igeeksblog.com/personal-hotspot-missing-in-ios-9/