skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very good point. I think we can both agree that a great composition, both smart and understandable for general public, may be quite simple to perform. On the other hand, sometimes poor composition may be somehow hidden under the layer of the great performer's skills. Not only a jazz problem, btw. As you noticed correctly, it is also quite common for rock bands and, I believe, classical music is affected as well.

The balance is the key. Let me once again mention Sting here. I know I may be quite obsessive with this guy, but he really seems to be the one who found this balance. Always sort of bugged me )
I think I actually fall somewhere in the middle. I evaluate a piece of music by both lyrics and melody/harmony/beat...

I can appreciate purely instrumental and also Rap which is heavy on lyrics and beat. I think being too far on either end of the spectrum causes you to lose out.
How to ping various search engines to re-index your website or blog
2 or 3 days
I don't have anything to say about Pulse favicon but the app itself tries to solve the same problem (and then some) like my Excel file here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/111770/CashFlow.xls

I use the above template to plan my personal finances and it works in a similar way to Pulse but at a very basic level. The funniest thing is just last night my wife said I could make a web-app out of the Excel and people would use it. Seems like Pulse did just that and a lot more.
Factor in the long tail. Do you think most views on youtube are not user-produced then?

Milly Cirrus has an advantage when competing with user-generated content because she has an expensive publicist.
I know he didn't state which direction he chose, but assuming that he's incompetent is pretty bad on your part.

I remember few months ago, wordpress had a bug where an attacker could keep on resetting administrators account password. He might actually have a point
Or that Jazz Flute Suite record by Bolling & Rampal.
Think of the medium. While it's entirely possible to listen to entire albums on the ipod/phone, it's just as easy to listen to a single artist/genre/list/random. It used to be a pain to get up and change the disc/tape/cd so people would follow the path of least resistance. Now the path of least resistance is to pick random. (Or something like genius or some other type of "smart random")
I used to use my schools' database connections, but lost them upon graduation. Oh the joys of being an adult.
Penenberg: Fake is real, right?

Fake: Yes. I can't tell you how many times I've booked an air ticket only to get to the airport and find out they killed my ticket because it goes into the system and the program tosses a ticket that says "fake" on it. Twice I've gone to the counter for a KLM flight through Northwest and have been rejected. They say, "You don't have a ticket." I give them a confirmation and after some investigation I learn my ticket has been cancelled because the system deleted it. For a while I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process I was asked for my real name and when I wrote "Fake" it rejected me. Finally a friend working for Facebook took care of me.

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/adam-penenberg/penenberg-pos...
Just as an anecdote: Since my English got much more fluent in recent years, I pay much more attention to (English) lyrics now, than I did earlier. Though it's still easier not to pay attention to English lyrics than German ones. I don't know whether or how that has changed my perception of music. I like purely instrumental music, too.

My sister prefers music with voices in them to purely instrumental stuff, even if she can't understand them, e.g. Japanese rock.

http://kahvi.org/ is a nice place to get (mostly) instrumental-only electronic music from the creative commons.
I imagine that's a byproduct of our productivity fetish. If we can do something else, but we aren't, we feel lazy.
http://ejohn.org/blog/the-state-of-json/
Writer Peter Watts Guilty Verdict in Border Incident
The state of music commentary on this thread is low enough to be insulting and pretty much validates the article. I find it humorous that a website that draws people dedicated to abstract thought can have such a mediocre understanding of music and music history. Do yourself a favor, find a piece of music that you think you don't like. Sit down and listen to it 50 times without distraction so that you know all the changes, turns, asides, tensions, contractions, contradictions, and undulations. If you still don't like, fine.

But I say 9 times out of 10 with this approach you'll realize you know so little about music and there is much more to know and you'll be practically giddy to expand your knowledge.

The distance between Arnold Schoenberg and Lady Gaga is less than you think.
Funny you should say that. Those who I find astonishing and disturbing in this way seldom see the problem.
I also don't really listen to lyrics, largely because it is hard for me. I think I actually have some sort of perceptual incapacity -- I have to really try to understand them, whereas it seems other people hear them very easily. Even when I try, it's hard. I'm smart in other ways, but in this regard I am comparatively deficient. Anybody else on HN share this 'syndrome'?

For me, music has always been about structure, tone, melody -- I like the Eagles, for example, but when I started hearing the lyrics (it took me a while, and they're pretty easy), I was like, "Man, these guys are cheesy!" In some agreement with this article, I love jazz. Check out my friend Daniel Levin for how far out I like it: http://www.daniel-levin.com (annoying flash site but has samples of his music)
The Psychology of Taboo Tradeoff
Show HN: omgmetoo, our startup project - a free/busy mobile friend tracker
It's well known that Google collects massive amounts of data, and does massive amounts of UI testing (such as the infamous testing between 85 different shades of blue), so I'm somewhat skeptical that it's design is mediocre because this guy says it is and he's a web designer. Data trumps intuition every day of the week.
I know I do. I finally gave up going to classical music concerts even though I love classical music because after about 30 minutes, my brain was too tired to listen to the music any more and my mind wandered.
I have this same argument with my girlfriend all the time--not about jazz, per se (which I haven't gotten into) but about the general topic of music vs. lyrics. Some of my favorite songs I still don't know all the lyrics to, but she knows them by heart even though she zones out during the guitar solos. And her favorite songs, I listen to the basic instrumental loop and get bored with it.

There are ways to learn to listen to instruments, though. You just have to consciously do what an instrumental listener does unconsciously, which is to focus on instruments instead of vocals. You can start by picking out one instrument and following it throughout the song, though as you learn the song better you start learning when to switch between instruments and eventually how to absorb the gestalt of them.

I'm not totally uninterested in lyrics, but they have to have something to play against that enhances them rather than just being there.
To "print". Mm...
Oracle shuts down Sun's OpenSSO, a Norwegian company picks it up.
It's very true. A lot of the visceral oomph of music like Jazz comes from its early association with dance. "It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing." The sensuality of a certain kind of step, a certain kind of movement is transmitted in the beat and the music. Understanding this brings many people flat-out joy. In my opiniion, understanding this makes one more human.

That last part, you just have to experience to truly understand. But believe me, if you are doing it right, it really is something close to transcendent. It really is magic.
The point here (in the orig article) was that in some cases you do (i.e. if all you have is a SAX parser - Obj-C iPhone SDK being singled out as an example where only a SAX parser is supplied by the SDK)
The formula for producing (potential) hit songs are pretty well-known. Not all follow this schema, e.g. Blue Monday from New Order, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
Founders should be CEOs
I was under the impression that a musical is a spoken word play where the actors break out into song and dance on a regular basis, whereas in an opera the singers rarely dance or speak.

If that is the case, the difference between musicals and opera is more than just the language. and actually supports the author's point that American culture needs visual stimulation (the dance) and words they can easily understand (the spoken lines).
I don't see how you can say a computer program doesn't exist? It exists as a state in a computers memory.

I have no opinion on the subconscious -- in fact I don't really know what it is. It may refer to certain mental processes and then I'd say it exists, but in my opinion it is a very general term. I think that psychology is still too early to say for sure what does and does not exist.

If I had an irrational fear of 1000 legged toad and it affected my behavior it doesn't mean that it exists. Now of course we get into all sorts of epistemological problems that aren't solved about our knowledge of reality, etc...
I'm sure he can afford it, it's just a lack of willingness to pay...
Earlier today, in fact. But it's not so much the attention span thing that gets in the way (I play reeds, by the way) but the intellectual masturbation of a lot of jazz that turns people off.

I've yet to run into anybody who turns their nose up at, say, Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", which is certainly rhythmically sophisticated but tuneful, or Kenny Burrell's "Midnight Blue" (an album that's usually the first up for visitors). It's the "I'm an artiste, dammit" attitude, the cleverness for cleverness' sake, the removal of anything remotely engaging at a visceral level -- the attempt to emulate in the jazz idiom what Schoenberg perpetrated on "serious" music -- that forces people to decide that the Emperor is without skivvies to cover his shame.

Lyrical content is a red herring as well. There's a lot of dance crap (and some that's not crap) that gets heavy rotation in the wider world that is entirely word-free.

Okay, jazz is all about painting oneself into a corner and finding imaginative ways of escaping the trap you've set for yourself, but there's no harm in playing something that manages to capture a tune along the way rather than merely tracking the letter of the changes. Too many jazzers forget that it's still music.
Wrong. Every native English speaker I know would answer 10 fingers.
Inspired by the Internet Free/Busy protocol, we created a little tool, which lets you signal your friends if you are free, and what you feel like doing today. You can invite friends to what you are doing, or RSVP really easy. It requires a Facebook account right now, but you'll be able to register without one starting next week.
Ask HN: Review my FB app, Photo Memories
Hi HN,

We just launched our first FB application called Photo Memories http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=384777439272&ref=nf

Basically, photo memories will load a random photo you're tagged in, ask you what you remember about it, and let you publish it to your friends. Its a fun way to stumble across old photos of you and your friends, and bring back good memories.

Thoughts, suggestions, bugs? We know theres a bug where it randomly won't load a photo, seems to be on FB's end though. Thanks guys
Is Your Face Real?
I mean, they are not boring in their everyday life. They are boring when they do a show.
As a native English speaker my answer would be ten. Second most likely would be five. I'd be unlikely to ever say eight.
The criticism of rap in the middle of the piece seems both misplaced and undereducated. Some of the most musically complex instrumental music I've heard in the past few years has come out of the hip-hop world. Take a song like T-Pain's "Chopped and Screwed" [1] and try to pick it out on the piano -- it's got enough 7's,9's and alt chords to make any jazz listener happy. Rap is probably the only pop genre where fans pay enough attention to the background to like a song/artist for the lyrics (Nas) or the beat (Kanye) or both (Jay-Z).

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtP6arjZmzI
Ok I've done Lindy Hop for like 5 years now and I think I sort of understand the meaning behind that statement.

When you dance to music you really, really need to listen to the music and where it goes. I notice that good dancers listen to the music and change what they're doing accordingly. If the music is high energy, they dance with high energy. If there is a break in the music, they hit it a break in the dancing (or they try). One of the most amazing jack & jill competitions that I watched seemed like the couple was interpreting the music.

Try asking a person you know who dances what some of their favorite songs to dance to are and why.
Clickable: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=384777439272...
Researcher plans to announce 20 new security holes for OSX
Thanks for bringing this issue up. I read about this research, yes. I've also read that basically it's not the language itself, but the exposure to any sort of musical training (including learning a language with tonal differences) that affects the development of perfect pitch in early years (source: http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Research-Education-Young-Chil...). Thus, I should correct myself on the statement that different cultures are just about the same in their ability to appreciate music. On the other hand I don't think that those differences are somewhat significant, because in both european and asian languages - it's still a language with words, right?
I like the article and there's a lot of truth to it, but I have two critiques.

First, the music that people like is heavily based on familiarity. People want one or two original elements in a song, but if the overall structure and composition of the song isn't following familiar patterns they will be unable to enjoy it. This is why artists like Frank Zappa are more appreciated by musicians than the general public. After repeated listenings, you find a lot of musical meat, which can then be broken down into more repetitive poppy elements. Jazz in general is much the same, but even further away from pop music today than Zappa was.

The other critique is about the assertion that "rap" music is just about lyrics. One of the foundations of hip-hop and something that sets it apart from other music throughout history, is that it is the first form of music to be built primarily from the manipulation of other recorded music. And it does so in a way that maximizes the impact of the music via looping and sampling. The degenerate form of hip-hop that is dominant today in the form of club music with banal hedonistic lyrics, autotuned vocals, and repetitive plain rhythmic styles is nothing more than familiarity breeding popularity. However the art form of hip-hop is alive and well and still progressing (hopefully sampling can see a proper fair-use legitimization in court soon).
so you're shipping the code with the product or is the code the product (website/app)?
The reason why I don't like jazz is that my ears can't find any pattern to it. There's no melody, except at the beginning and end of the piece, so the notes just sound random. So to me the music is largely indistinguishable from noise.

Once I discovered that jazz is apparently about the chords it made more sense. (The notes appear to be unimportant as long as everyone is in the same chord)
I would argue that the original proposition is flawed. If we did an experiment, most people who would listen to live jazz or a good recording in an easy atmosphere would enjoy it. It's just that jazz music can rarely be fit into your busy life full of 30-second interruptions. So you stick with music where a 30-second lick/rhyme/lyric/beat can stay in your head.
Way to miss the forrist for the teres.
Design is problem solving. Nothing else.

You don't apply aesthetics to a design you apply a style to a design.

Whether something is aesthetic i grounded in culture, history and so many other things.

The google style is bad by print and 1999 standards, but we have come to like it because judging visual things is not only about how they look but how we feel about them.
A lot of people believe in alternative medicine with a more scientific method that you think: They try it and it works for them, is not superstition.

No, it's the placebo effect. If alternative medicine works better than placebo, it becomes medicine.

I have news for you: electromagnetic radiation causes cancer and is able to kill you and kill you fast. That it does is not questionable, the question is how much energy is needed to interfere with the human body. Again no superstition, just being cautious with the live of those you love.

Large amounts of any of the fundamental forces can kill you. Gravity can kill you. The strong nuclear force can definitely kill you. Even the weak nuclear force can kill you through beta radiation. Of course those forces are also necessary for life to exist.

You're also not discriminating between ionizing (cancer-causing) and non-ionizing radiation. The only ionizing radiation most people get is in the form of UV rays from the sun. Non-ionizing radiation (light, IR, microwaves, radio) is at power levels too low to harm us.

Nobody knows what causes autism, so hypothesis could be done.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say in the second half of that sentence, but it's incorrect to say "nobody knows what causes autism." The word autism probably refers to multiple conditions that we haven't differentiated yet. All of them involve changes in brain chemistry or brain structure. Some of these changes are caused by genes. Some are caused by environment. That is a much smaller region of hypothesis-space than "we don't know."
I don't think it's so much about lyrics (although instrumental music tends to be less popular in general). Nor is about musical ability. I'm only a mediocre musician, but I can appreciate musical structure very well and like to compose in unusual modalities, especially phrygian. I know far better musicians than myself who don't like jazz; meanwhile my Dad has a complete tin ear and couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but he loves jazz despite having little or no musical knowledge. I can't stand it, but not because I think it's bad - I'm really impressed by the depth and skill of jazz musicians. I just can't take it in any significant quantity.

My problem with it is that I get frustrated by the fact that it isn't necessarily going anywhere - the exploratory and whimsical nature of it upsets me because it conflicts with my desire for structure and resolution. I think my Dad likes partly because of this; it doesn't demand that he model structure and tension, he's quite happy to just be a passenger and enjoy the musical scenery. This is not to say it lacks structure or harmonic tension. Harmony is the weakest part of my musical ability and I'm just not able to appreciate the relationships between complex chords and for that matter I'm not much good at polyrhythms either. Strangely, on occasions where someone has tried to get me more into jazz, if we agree in advance on a musical modality I am able to improvise reasonably well and we can have an extended musical 'conversation': it's easier for me to play than it is to listen to, or at least it was when I practiced on a more regular basis. But the emotions it arouses in me largely consist of 'Aaagh! Please stop fucking around and get to the point!!'.

Most commercial music is highly structured, both rhythmically and harmonically. Jazz reminds of those art projects where they make blank molds of some kind of sculpture and then hand them out to artists to decorate as they see fit, such that the shape of the sculpture is less important than the mix of color and pattern the artist wishes to explore, a 3-dimensional blank canvas if you like. Very often the results seem to have nothing to do with the shape, but I find myself thinking that if the shape is so unimportant, go paint a piece of canvas or something. I know these artists are saying something about deconstruction of the form by projecting things onto it which don't fit its obvious structure but I'm at a complete loss as to why you would choose a specific form if the primary thing you want to say is that form isn't important. Or maybe it's just that I find some such work innovative but have no patience for the ensuing horde of people copying the same idea and just doing so with their own favorite patterns and colors. It's like saying you feel liberated because you put on a straitjacket and then took it off again.

/handwaving
IE9 Takes Advantage of the GPU (AMD leaks IE9 canvas support)
You are skeptical because you believe that this is a data problem. He believes (as do I) that it is not a data problem.

Making more people click your button is not, on its own, good design. There's more to aesthetics than conversion rates. You can argue aesthetics aren't important, but it's simply not the same subject as the kind of data collecting A/B testing that Google does.
You don't have to tell me about APL syntax. For our senior year CS project, we implemented APL with unlimited precision arithmetic.

Wrapping your head around APL wins my respect. Lisp? You get a pat on the head for that, maybe.
"Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat" is entirely sung (Well, apart from "and I don't speak Egyptian very well"), but is usually referred to as a musical. Maybe just marketing though. Personally I usually expect opera to mean a particular style of singing more than anything else.
Do you like Gershwin? Start with "Rhapsody in Blue." If you don't like that, there's no hope of building a bridge from your love of classical to jazz, you'll have to try a different way round. If you do like it, watch the movie "An American in Paris" and if you like any of the songs, look for instrumental versions of those jazz classics.
I think the point of the post was that the author assumed all the adds were actually for the same position. The problem (if that was the case) being that C++ programmers/Flash programmers/HTML designers are not interchangeable.
That's why I prefer dance music (including very abstract stuff like Autechre which many people find unlistenable). If you want me to explore the music, don't ask me to sit still for it.
I had this idea that what if Google was involved in a project where they would make online courses of educational material available for free. Not like bits and pieces of video lecture available from stanford or short video tutorials available from http://www.khanacademy.org/. But actual course material, perhaps starting from 2nd grade to all the way to graduate level courses. There will be a combination of texts and videos and it could be semi wiki like where, certain qualified people can update course material to keep it relevant and up to date.

It would probably cost them less than buying a video codec company, but might have bigger and far reaching effect.

Imagine a single site will all the educational material, regularly updated. The only difference from a formal education (other than social interaction) is a certification.

Crazy (stupid?) idea?
"He loves some of the shittiest songs (imo) because of interesting lyrical content, where as I totally ignore them. If I like them it's because of how they were sung not because of me diving through looking for "meaning"."

Yes, this. One of the reasons I love metal is because a great metal vocalist like Dickinson or Dio just plain sounds awesome, no matter what he's going on about.
Conceivably, if asked as a science question:

"How many fingers does a gorilla have on each hand?"

One might hear, in English, "Four fingers and a thumb."

Otherwise, as a native English speaker, when asked "How many figures do you have?" I'm answering "ten".