skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So if you have 4,000 albums that don't have a database - try this:
http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

It will take the data from your MP3 Directory structure - lets say something like Artist/Album/song -- and automatically generate the correct tags for you.
Could someone explain the implications of both possible outcomes?
If you still have ownership of the project, port it to Tokyo Cabinet.
Honestly, I am not worried about anything. Don't get me wrong, I'm a pessimist, not an optimist. When you think about it, neither need worry.
Thanks for posting. I read this:

For example, DSPS students often get a short sleep in the night, wake up early with an alarm clock, go to school where they are semi-conscious and perform poorly, get a solid nap after school and only late in the evening they regain vigor and their full mental powers. DSPS students feel best after midnight when everyone else is asleep and they can focus on learning or other activities (reading, Internet, watching TV, computer games, etc.).

And thought, "this article is about me".

In an effort to understand my own sleep patterns, I bought a Zeo. After a week or so, I think I've found how things work. If I get a lot of deep sleep, I may not "feel awake" or refreshed, but I can think really well. If I get a lot of REM sleep, I feel great, but may not be in the mood to do anything. With that in mind, I am trying to figure out how to get a good amount of both in the same sleeping session.

I haven't had a chance to try this yet, but my plan is to tire myself out (hopefully corresponding to nighttime, just to be in sync with the real world), get a lot of deep sleep, and then when I wake up, check that I've gotten enough REM sleep. If not, back to bed until I feel satisfied. (I am pretty good at getting REM sleep in the morning. Alarm goes off, alarm set for +1:30, and I get about 1:15 worth of REM sleep. Great dreams in this period too. It helps that my work schedule boils down to "try and show up before 2" :)

Anyway, I guess I don't have enough data to say anything conclusive, but this is my plan.
How are you estimating those probabilities? I would say there are easily as many eligible girls as there are jobs you're qualified for.
>with no accountability whatsoever.

The legislation has been delayed so that the government can implement "transparency and accountability" measures.

>It's a great way for a government to get its foot in the door into controlling what information is acceptable for its citizens to consume.

Get its foot in the door? The scope of the internet filter censorship will be identical to what already exists for traditional media - books, magazines, films and video games. The government already has its foot in the door. What's happened is that since 1996 they've started to lose grip, and this legislation is an ineffectual attempt to regain the control the government had 15 years ago. However, as the trial report and Conroy himself have stated, the filter will be trivial to bypass.
I started writing some point-by-point comments about your essay, but that ended up long enough to just make me seem like a jerk.

Anyway, I have issues with everything from your premise (“generating insight is trivial”), through your specific structure (how you classify these argument styles), and the examples you use to back them up (several of which I think are either trivial or wrong), to the language at the word level (words like “actionable” are just MBA technobabble).

My suggestion would be to read a couple books on rhetoric, or maybe on construction of philosophical arguments. These topics have been studied intensively (insightfully!) since at least the Greeks.
In my first job, I was almost killed when the lock that holds ones of these to the spindle failed and the disk flew off the spindle and embedded itself in the wall behind the chair I had been sitting in 5 minutes before.

This was around 1987, but we were rather poor in Ireland so government offices depended on technology that was about 5-10 years out of date. My duties including checking the monthly mainframe time-sharing 'bills' with a calculator and knowing which punched fabric ribbon to hand on a printer control spindle to ensure that an incoming data dump would be correctly formatted. At the time I hated working with such antique technology but with hindsight it paid off by giving me a lower-level understanding of computers than I might have had if I had begun my career working with MS-DOS 3 on 286s, which were state of the art at the time IIRC.
But cameras are more beneficial to the public than to the police, and the police are writing the checks, so...

It's sad that we've gotten away from "To Serve and Protect" as a mindset. We'd be better off if public employees remembered that they are employees of the public. Really, it's the public that is writing those checks through tax dollars, the public just isn't interesting enough in watching the watchers.
If we have a court system built on potentially inauthentic memory with people that have strong incentives to lie, and it mostly works, I think the video should probably mostly work, too. (Compare the amount of effort that it takes to doctor a video to the amount of effort it takes to, ahem, edit one's recollection of the events at issue to place one in a better light.)

I realize there are human factors to consider, though.
"The problem is, that I want to make games."

If you want to make games, make them. Don't let anyone tell you they are impractical and you should work on accounting systems or card games for grannies or whatever. It is not that they are necessarily wrong (or right), but it is your time and your life

Make some small games first. Only the actual making (especially completing) of games will teach you if it is something you want to do fulltime. You can think of business aspects once you have some tech chops.
And you don't need to worry about any of it.

Well, call me a cynic but I'll believe it when I see it.

The concept is definitely neat tech-wise, but even if it works as advertised; for me it's solving a non-issue. I wouldn't like to depend on the YUI servers like that and I don't see how adding a <script>-tag to load a plugin is too much work.

I can see this being a handy helper during testing ("let's check this one out, quickly"). But revolutionary is too big a word for that...

You seem to be asserting that verbosity === complexity. This is untrue.

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree there. Different mindsets I suppose.
YUI clashes fundamentally with my all-time favorite programming quote:

Good code should be like a miniskirt:
long enough to cover the subject,
short enough to maintain interest.

Shoehorning javascript (a prototype based language) into a class model might have seemed like a good idea before jQuery came around. But now jQuery exists and I don't see why I should settle for less. Modularity and consistency are strong in jQuery land, too. JS code doesn't have to look like java to obtain these properties.

Now as this has turned into a framework rant (sorry) let me do YUI some justice, too.
As said, I don't see why I should settle for less but I do see at least one reason why others do. YUI does indeed have a strong (perhaps the strongest) library of unobtrusive modules and widgets. I'm absolutely looking forward to see whether they can sustain that edge. In my biased eye it seems like jquery UI is catching up fast, but time will tell.

ensuring optimal performance by [...] rather than having to load huge monolithic chunks of code that will never be executed.

That's wrong. Normally you want that one monolithic chunk because it will be fetched once and then be cached. You don't want each page to fetch various bits of javascript for the same reasons why performance-obsessed sites combine their images into a single sprite-file.
Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome

Holy crap, what I do has a name. That's comforting.

This "syndrome" comes and goes in cycles, for me. Currently, I'm enjoying regular "day" days. In about a two weeks I'll naturally switch into nocturnal mode, for about three weeks. After these three weeks I'll spend 3-4 four days "fixing" my sleeping schedule....

Is this how it is for other DSPS persons here? I highly value my sleep and vivid dreams, which are very prominent during the DSPS episodes, and I honestly feel more productive and creative in that time.

Someone once told me that the best thinking occurs at 3am, which is when the local world around you is most quiet and you can think more clearly. I think she said it was some Buddhist thing, though I can't remember exactly what she said. I always thought that was neat, and concurs with my experience of being able to focus better in the middle of the night.
I like the way you call it 'tolerance' yet redefine it to exclude things you think are unacceptable. ;)
I'm just railing against this idea that unrelated details are an indicator that care has been paid to important things. Now, not everything is like the programmer in a suit; I know so little about UI that it's possible that things I see as unrelated details are not, in fact, unrelated.
I feel it is overly broad to completely eliminate "grin fucking" from your repertoire of responses. For example, when presented with a bs-er with powerful friends. GF-ing is a great option. Frankness is not always the best.
+1 vote for job.

both might fail, but you can keep one on your cv.
more fun to be frustrated in love, than in career... right? ;)
Hammering the bullet train's nose
I believe that if they lose, they're pretty much dead, and if they win, they can resurrect their longshot lawsuits against IBM and others.
Paying for graduate school, mostly, as well as vague concerns about finding a job when I actually have to.
Thanks, sorry for the late response. I have a friend (Wiktor Wołkow) in Poland that has an archive of about 150,000 images, no backups.

It's his life work, most of it is 35 mm, some on 60x60, he's been a professional photographer his whole life long and the thought of a fire there scares me.

So I have been thinking off and on about how to tackle that job, it would take quite a bit of time and money to do it properly.
I make games for a living, and I agree with what you're saying, but I would cast a net much wider than just games. Ultimately, a ton of stuff the Hacker News community is working on falls into the 'want' category - not the 'need' category.

I accept that what I'm doing isn't making the world a better place in any meaningful way. But I see you work as an engineer at Etsy, and I would suggest that you're in a glass house throwing stones.
"DIY U": The End of University Prestige
Good point. This is also where lifetime value vs. cpa will become a really important metric to watch.
Denis has just given you some of the best advice I've seen on HN in my year here. My few additions:

You don't have to quit the day job to build stuff. Building stuff can be low-bandwidth, too. Middle-aged middle-class women and small business owners have a lot of problems that can have a rough solution written in a week. (Think like "scheduling software for a beauty salon": it is a CRUD app. Not even a very difficult CRUD app. I don't know if it can be marketed in an efficient fashion but I'm absolutely positive there is no technical risk involved in making a prototype and shopping that around.)

There are probably other tiers of problems which can be solved in a month or three months. You can also gradually extend the v1.0 of your solution in terms of functionality or niches (salon scheduling... for massage therapists! Salon scheduling... with online booking! Salon scheduling... en español!.)

Having a cash cushion is excellent advice, but ramen profitability (or day job profitability) is even nicer. After that, the risk is truly minimal (if you have a profitable business selling salon scheduling, what is your main strategic risk -- people stop getting their hair done?) and your runway is infinite.

Incidentally, salon scheduling software presumably takes minimal time to maintain. You could probably build it and maintain it on, oh, call it five hours a week. That gives you a whole lot of time for pursuing other interests -- including perhaps a startup with larger ambitions or building the next great videogame, if you really want to do that.
PE Firm Plans Open LTE Network to Challenge AT&T and Verizon
The size of CEO's salaries seems to make this claim false on the face of it (http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/05/02/top-p...). Admittedly some of those people did actually found companies, but many also spent time getting an education, moving into an entry-level (ish) job, then climbing the ranks, building a career not just a job.

I understand the point, but there are other perspectives.
Alex Gaynor - Towards Application Objects in Django
What if I could never be the next [insert successful entrepreneur's name here]? What if I'll never change the world?
Correct, it is finickity. I also probably resize my windows more than reach for the menu bar.

On the other hand, putting a direct manipulation control in the corner of the screen where it would get maximum fitt's law benefits would mean it was no longer a direct manipulation control which would make it significantly more finickity to perform the actual resize once you have 'acquired' the control_and_ would take that piece of valuable screen real-estate away from more useful controls.

Secondly, by attaching the menu bar to window you still have the same problem with a finickity resize control and you loose the advantage of the top anchored menu bar. Certainly window resizing in Windows is just as finickity (actually, possibly more so, windows in windows don't have to have the status bar resize thumb that is the norm in mac os x. I'm sure theres actual HCI research about windows vs mac os x resize interactions but I don't have any of it handy so wild speculation will have to do).

[Strange aside regarding Chrome: the window itself doesn't have a resize thumb (only border resizing) yet the text areas do. On the other hand there is no visual feedback to indicate that you have acquired the resize thumb]
Wow! I learned a lot! Thanks!
Hmm,

Text starts talking about tab completion without giving slightest explanation of what it is. Oddly, I was wondering that a few week ago. Any guru ready to give a hint?
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
"Content is Bling" Will ebook readers evolve as digital watches did?
Make some small games first. Only the actual making (especially completing) of games will teach you if it is something you want to do fulltime. You can think of business aspects once you have some tech chops

Want to see the 14th revision(Version 0.1.3) of an increasingly tricked out tetris clone? Or for that matter, want to see my in-progress network branch of my tetris clone?

I also have some experience with canvas and javascript, which will become the future of gaming.

I already took your advice and have some technical chops.

Some knowledge I am missing is mostly mathematics, less so web application development, and most importantly business acumen.
This is reminding me of a post I read on HN about some guy who was trying to start an advertising business focused around getting popular video bloggers from youtube to advertise products.

Does anyone have a link to that post? Im intrigued on reading it again in light of this.
PHP debug tools
Peter and I are both really curious about how fiction books will work with Leanpub. As you say, we think it's a slam dunk for non-fiction books (both Peter and I have written non-fiction books, so we have a bit of experience here).

For fiction, I think it's a really interesting and open question. Dickens, for example, wrote all of his books in serialized format and wrote them a chunk at a time, publishing them as he wrote them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens). This was an unusual way to write serialized novels, but Dickens was no slouch and he (in my opinion) stands the test of time.

Did he receive and welcome feedback as he wrote? I don't know the answer to that (I'm a coder and physicist, not an English Lit major :), but I can imagine that he got feedback whether he welcomed it or not.

My guess is that for certain types of fiction, and certain types of authors, Leanpub will work really well. Others will run screaming from the very thought of it. Hopefully Leanpub will help us find out more.
Startup Waffles - Waffles for Founders and Hackers
Decided to throw together a fun and random event for hackers and founders in Palo Alto. If you are around Silicon Valley come by!
I agree! Got any spare MIPS?
I decline to give this remark any sort of content rich reply
Ha. Yeah, but titles work. Newspapers learned that years ago. Hope the title wasn't too offensive - just want to make a point.
What will people do once there are no more survival type problems to solve for anyone? If we can't play games with each other and socialize, life is going to be pretty boring unless we start introducing survival problems again.
The connection between pretty and good posited either in the linked article or one of its links (perhaps http://www.uiandus.com/blog/2009/7/27/realizations-of-rounde... ?) is that the cognitive workload required to process visual cues is (inversely) related to the qualities that are often perceived as 'attractive', e.g. round rectangles, non-garish color schemes, sensible type choices etc.
That. And don't be a grin fucker. Tell people when you think they're full of it. Politely. Respectfully. But tell them.
How rsync works
Not a senior (just a lowly sophomore) but I figured I'd chime in:

Figuring how I'm going to balance the contracting work I regularly do with another very short term contract this week, and class.
Funny, he didn't mention Hydra/C.mmp, CMU's capability-based OS and hardware (built on PDP-11's).

I remember studying it while an undergrad (mid-70's), and even playing with it over the (then) ARPAnet.

Programmed in Bliss-11 (ah, sweet memories), and, yes, the whole capability-OS concept blows your mind. You have to think about programming in an entirely different mindset. (A great one, IMNSHO.)

Too bad the concept never really found commercial success (other than being hidden in various AS/x OS's from IBM).
how exactly is this different than netcat -u ?
Perhaps, but it would be easy for Apple to break it at the next upgrade, and it would not be unlike them to do it.

Oh, and I would have to jailbreak iPhone to use it.
Exactly. Provide a "rootable" platform that works as well and is as delightful for average customers as iPhone OS is and then you've got my interest. But until somebody shows that, this theoretical world of 'total device freedom' with users still having a worry-free experience sounds to me just like more of the same "Linux on the desktop is going to happen when the next release of Gnome comes out!" that I've been hearing for over a decade now.

Users are asking for easy to use, fun devices. Not root.

It's astonishing how many people working in the software industry look at something their customers are clamoring for, say to themselves "I don't want that!" and, because of that, ignore it.

I used to think that this industry was worse off for being largely run by business/marketing people instead of techies, but the older I get, the less strongly I think that.

The point of business is to make things for your customers.

When you make things for yourself, that's a hobby.

Yes, obviously, when you're your own customer and thus your work is also your hobby, that's a wonderful thing: for you and for your work.

So here's a hint for techies: quit taking so much pride in how superior your taste is and how much smarter you are than your customers. That just means it's harder for you to "get into their head" and build what they want in a way they'll want it.
Solaris is no longer free
Funny thing that you mention about Linux. I used to have a Linux blog where I only used to write about Linux. It was very easy to get traffic, my best months were ~600k and I was making fairly decent money (around ~1500/month), but I was very easy on ads and had to turn down many ad offers even though they had amazing CPM (from Microsoft, Apple and antivirus softwares).

I ended up selling the site for 20k in 2008, cause I needed some money for a new project and I was getting bored with the blog.

I guess the lesson I learned from my experience is that almost ALL traffic can be monetized. Who knew you could make $1500/month from a linux blog? I could have made more if I took all the offer and pushed it farther. Now that I think about it I think it was a mistake to sell it, the new owner totally trashed the site. :(
overcoming the financial challenges to be able to pursue my dream
I still am confused by the WikiLeaks budget request -- $200k minimum exclusive of salaries per year just to keep the lights on? $600k with a couple salaries?

JYA did this with cryptome for YEARS as a hobby.
The Function of Home Address Plaque | Home Improvement & Health Care
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Eye candy is mostly about conspicuous consumption. It makes it look like you have resources to spare so you must be doing something right.
YAPSE
I have a heuristic - never make a big life decision for the sake of a romantic situation. Romances should work within the context of everything else you have going on. I'm almost positive my life would be full of much more trouble, and not much more romance, if I didn't follow this rule. But it could just be me. I would make an exception if I'd known the girl very well for a while and seriously thought she was likely the one.
I don't recall him saying that; I do recall him saying that he didn't know how to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk and that Apple doesn't do that.
If MS should be panicking because of that then Google should be shitting themselves because of Cuil. But that would be stupid, people say.
So this is the same thing that's already in swank-clojure?
... but most commonly they are imported from Mexico.
Oh, you're talking about the future! That's far more awesome.