skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just started interning at one of BetaWorks startups (JumpPost), so i'm by no means an expert. But, I do think that there are a few global designers / developers that float between companies. The atmosphere is such that there is a lot of loose collaboration at least for the companies that are in house.

It's definitely an inspiring setup.
PDANet does tethering on jailbroken phones: http://www.junefabrics.com/iphone/index.php
Yes, but what is the brain doing?
http://www.junefabrics.com/iphone/index.php

Try PDANet
The point is that although our sales tax is high in Washington, partly because we do not have in income tax, it's still not as high as California, which DOES have an income tax--and a pretty hefty income tax at that.

Hence when we tell Californians that not having an income tax is not as great as it sounds because it means we pay an outrageously high sales tax, and then they realize that our outrageously high sales tax is lower than theirs, it is funny.

No ones pays as low as 6.5% here, though, because there are county and local taxes. The state is divided into a bunch of small regions for tax purposes (about 2.6 million locations), roughly corresponding to zip+5 regions, not not exactly. I've got a database giving the rate in each of these locations.

Checking that database, the minimum actual sales tax is 7%, the maximum is 9.5%, and the average (giving equal weight to each location) is 8.6%.

Here are all the rates, and how many locations have each rate:

+---------+----------+
| rate | count(*) |
+---------+----------+
| 0.07000 | 22526 |
| 0.07500 | 12404 |
| 0.07600 | 38365 |
| 0.07700 | 172606 |
| 0.07800 | 258871 |
| 0.07900 | 174886 |
| 0.08000 | 65948 |
| 0.08100 | 118239 |
| 0.08200 | 148568 |
| 0.08300 | 43973 |
| 0.08400 | 115138 |
| 0.08500 | 131129 |
| 0.08600 | 224180 |
| 0.08700 | 210720 |
| 0.09200 | 41020 |
| 0.09300 | 282441 |
| 0.09500 | 622649 |
+---------+----------+
We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate.

And re. net worth: That's exactly how I would plot it if I wanted to make a point about income inequality. Carlos Slim is worth US$53 billion. The per capita income in Mexico is US$13,500 and in the US it's $46,000. (Yes I know this is comparing yearly income to lifetime accumulated wealth but ignore that for a moment.) If I give the average Mexican 1 pixel and the average American 3 or 4 pixels, then Mr. Slim gets almost 4 million pixels. At 96 dpi that's roughly 3400 feet. Your monitor would have to be (much) taller than the Burj Khalifa (2717 ft) to accurately show this bar char. This is the picture I would draw if I wanted to make a point about income inequality, a person sitting next to the Burj Khalifa with a ridiculous laptop in is lap that towers over it.

If I just wanted to rank the top 10, I would just list them in order like they do in Forbes.
H.264 also needs to be legally tested to confirm that they do not infringe on patents held by entities other than those forming the MPEG LA. So there is just as much risk of the unknown in H.264 as in Theora.
So in other words, sit back and relax while we wait for VP8.
clickable link: http://www.SignAppNow.com

1) Would be nice to see a few screenshots of what a final product looks like, what the sheet creator sees, what the viewers see, etc.

2) Maybe in the "Used by" section of the home page, you can have a sample sheet for each type of role.

3) I bet for a lot of these, you can create a good template that's useful for 80% of cases - e.g. class sign up templates (might be a premium feature?).

4) I think freemium might be a better approach. You can add watermarks (free advertising!), or let people create some number of sheets for free. When I see your 10 dollar price, I am inclined to not even create an account because I probably found the app through a google search and am planning to use it a single time. On the other hand, if the app is free and the experience for my first time is awesome, then maybe I'd use the app a few more times, and then be willing to pay for extra features or a removed limit on the number of sign up sheets

5) When creating a sign up sheet, WYSIWYG might nicer. I see a number of fields, but I'm not sure where/how the data will be displayed. You can just show the final sheet with text fields for data instead of actual data.
You can get multitasking right now with Backgrounder + ProSwitcher. Palm Pre style.
Just a tip for jailbreakers. Quit the program with Cmd+Q and not hit the Quit button on the utility. It seems to start jailbreaking again.
Many low clearance cars like Ferrari and Lamborghini do not run on our roads, we just drive other cars, so why not wait and see what market decides.
Here's my current desk: http://img.skitch.com/20100503-qshhe5rbqyh4jtxb8hgrp185n.jpg

Made it look weird as an HDR to get both inside and outside showing well enough.

It's a beaut spot, especially since there's a great left-hander visible through the window http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3494/3774135230_63e8b02f06.jp...
You can use PDANet or MyWi to turn your iPhone into a router
These are my reasons, in order of importance:

- MyWi for tethering/mobile hotspot

- BiteSMS lets you send/respond to/view SMS messages without quitting your current app (press up on the volume control and then tap the volume icon to compose).

- Notifier, puts notification icons in the title menu and on your lock screen (notifications for email, missed call, voicemail, text messages, instant messages).

- SBSettings gives me quick one swipe access to turn off the phone, toggle 3G and other settings.

- Backgrounder + ProSwitcher for Palm Pre style multitasking

- 3G Unrestrictor for using Wifi only apps over 3G

- Netatalk/SSH access for custom theming

- MxTube lets me download and save youtube videos.

- Add vibrating haptic feedback to the keyboard

There are other reasons, but those are the ones off the top of my head.
Many of the Cydia apps are made for iPhone/iPod so it'll crash the iPad. Apart from downloading hacked paid apps (which I'm not fond of), what are the reasons to jailbreak an iPad?
SOURCE: OECD Health Data 2005

That data set is not very recent as well.
I'm going to forget what I actually meant to say above by morning, so here's the translation typed out:

"This comment is voice-posted from my Nexus One, without edits.

"I find that the speech recognition on my Nexus One is adequate for basic search queries. I tried all the phrases listed in the article as search queries. 'Rest in peace' parsed correctly. 'Serve as the inspiration' came out as 'Sudan inspiration'. 'Serve as the installation', remarkable, came out exactly correct. Saying 'one' into the phone gave me a number instead of a word. Saying 'recognize speech' came out okay.

"The problem with speech recognition of long passages seems to be that there is a large amount of information beyond the words themselves. This looks like netspeak, for example. Humans are also very sensitive to misplaced words. The 'woods' in the last sentence completely changes the meaning of it. I also found that speaking to a machine feels very unnatural. I have to stop and pause between each sentence because I can't remember what I'm thinking about.

"As you can see from this comment, speech recognition has a long way to go before it becomes practical. But you can at least sort of get the gist of the conversation.
See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1314089
I really like their tea, and the atmosphere is very nice. Definitely recommended to any tea-lovers visiting Santa Cruz.
It's probably the media that changed the way it covers things. Einstein became a celebrity because his theories challenged that of another famous name, Newton. Famous scientists almost didn't exist, so Einstein's celebrity was a noticeable exception.

Leonardo was not a big celebrity in his day, he was known in the art world, like the programmer who made Java is known in the CS world.
I am hoping that a space object crashes into Apple Inc when Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are visiting Steve Jobs. Something big enough to remove them from the news in the long run.
Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

Well, we could just pay people five cents an hour to pollinate our crops. We can make iPhones without bees, after all.
Screw $10K/mo, I'll take the mega-lottery any day :)
To be fair gmaxwell has been defending ogg as a container format on lwn, but I am not aware of him writing a dissertation on it.
The speech recognition example from a Nexus One phone elsewhere in the comment thread was pretty good on the level of individual words. Pattern matching learned with a massive teaching corpus seems to go pretty far.

The example didn't make sense on the level of sentences though. Problems start with homophonic words. Speech is pretty noisy, and there are words whose sounds you can't distinguish even in theory, but which still need to be picked correctly when transcribing speech. My guess is that humans are good at this by reconstructing a word string that roughly matches the sounds heard and seems to be saying something sensible. (You could test this easily by having one person read out computer generated word soup nonsense and have another person listen and transcribe what they hear.)

The big problem with speech recognition would then be that recognizing meaningful messages from the various likely interpretations of the speech sounds is pretty much AI complete for the general case. You could try to do the Google translate approach and use a huge amount of existing text to teach the system about the type of sentences people write a lot, but this is still a bit limited.

Things might work better if the language for the recognized speech is assumed to be somewhat artificial to begin with. There are a lot of stereotypical phrases which the system could know to expect in various professional voice protocols like the ones doctors or aviators use. The system might also work with a computer command language that has a regular grammar by rejecting unparseable interpretations of the speech sounds, but that might not be very comfortable to use.
Bowers & Wilkins P5's. Absolutely beautiful. Best headphones I've ever owned.

http://www.bowers-wilkins.com/display.aspx?infid=4571
Very interesting. How often do problems get past your testing? Do you do any sort of automated UI testing, or is this only for backend code?
I'm pretty sure they count only the quantity of ethanol consumed.
I have some Grado 225's that I've had for the past 2 years. They sound amazing, slightly expensive, but they will last forever if you take care of them.

http://www.gradolabs.com/product_pages/sr225.htm
Funny microbenchmarks for JavaScript object access
My dorm-based workspace: http://cl.ly/gd8.
Ask HN Is Verizon blocking access to Hacker News?
I'm scratching my head at this one. I'm at home. I have Verizon DSL and today I can't get to Hacker News through my DSL connection. I can get to www.ycombinator.com, but the connection times out on news.ycombinator.com. If I VPN to work (on the same machine) then I can get news.ycombinator no problem.

Does anyone else experience this or something similar with Verizon?
I know from experience that a number of people who make important software used by the financial industry aren't the greatest programmers.

I think this is part of why there is so much process and quality control at these sort of companies.
I've been wanting to try out BSD *nix for some time...

Community seems nice, I've spoken with admins regarding some registration issues and everything was sorted out immediately.

I'll probably pay for the background processes even if I don't need them, cause they seem like a nice bunch ;).
Besides all the good things this man mentioned: - not having to use iTunes.
I don't think that's why most people don't drive Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
Only X/console apps. I primarily use it for vim + zsh.

The easiest way to set it up is to download the Haskell Platform, then cabal install xmonad, and get urxvt through homebrew.

I have my dotfiles up if you want to have a look: github.com/cloudhead/dotfiles.git
As usual in WA, only works with that exact input. Give it any international city - silent fail.
People always shoot the messenger for pointing this out, so I'll expect about a million downvotes for it, but in case you case didn't know it already GNXP is the cryptoracist camp along with Charles Murray and Steve Sailer. Seriously, check out some of the comments.

Okay, now you can downvote me.
Fewer and fewer. As soon as an issue gets by our testing, we get the person who shipped the bug, and a few of our testing gurus together to figure out how to add a test for it. We've built some really impressive testing infrastructure, which we're working to open source. If I was forced to put a number on it, we may see a small issue every other day, and a larger one roughly once a week.

As soon as we rolled out the Deployment Manager we saw problems staying on production for shorter and shorter times. We see the DM as more issue mitigation than testing. The self test production framework we're continuing to build out has been hugely helpful.

The blog post is mostly about backend code. At the moment we're using selenium in more of a monitoring role (think keynote but free). We need to get selenium up and running as part of frontend automated testing, but right now we're pretty reliant on Test::Unit and some basic integration tests.
Fantastic beer too.
Bungie Has 10-Year Plan for Secret New Game Series
The article highlighted that that recognition accuracy has plateaued around 80% and this hasn't really improved much in 00s. Glancing over your trial, it seems that Nexus One is below 80% recognition accuracy. Thus, if the claim of the article is to be believed, speech recognition might never become practical.
The largest reduction is in housing (45% less in Seattle). However, unless your goal in moving IS to save money, I bet that most people would pay the same -- either upgrade to a larger place or move to a more desirable part of town.

Also, note that housing costs are based on housing sale prices. Rent is definitely higher in San Francisco, but it does not always follow housing sale prices.
No surprise. We are sheep. Lemmings. Geese.

Reminds me of the ol' goth thing- being non-conformists in exactly the same way as everyone else (though the original quote was put in a better way)
> We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate.

Yes, but doubled relative to what? e.g. what's twice as big as 50F? Is it 100F or 559.67F? The first one is relative to 0F and the second is relative to absolute zero (50F is 283.15K).

Your point about how to illustrate income inequality is fine, but that's not at all what I was talking about: I was talking about a graph that depicts the distribution of net worth amongst the top 10 richest people. No, a rank order doesn't fully convey that. A table of numbers is hard to understand in a holistic way.
Has this person been convicted of a crime? No? Well now... Does anybody remember Richard Jewell?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell
Whatever it is, it plays by the same rules as everyone else.
Try the ip address directly? news.ycombinator.com -> 174.132.225.106. Could be a dns resolution problem.
I'm very happy with my ATH-A900's. http://headphones.com.au/psingle?productID=143

Different people want different things out of headphones. What was important to me was good isolation (I can't hear my officemates, and they can't hear my music) and sound quality. I didn't really care about portability. I find circumaural (Princess Leia-sized pieces that fit entirely around your ears) most comfortable.
Do you think it is spammy ? I think it adds value. What happened was It occured to me as a useful thing to post and then I considered which of my websites to put it on.

I think google does a pretty good job of providing good incentives. I mean there are a lot of people competing to create content that other people are interested in. That's a lot better than many of the alternatives.

My 2 cents.
Online Javascript Console
I'm wondering if the article in Wikipedia is really based on "alcohol consumption" and not Alcohol reported to be sold in the country?

There is a clear reason why Luxembourg is on top. The taxes on alcohol is (very) low in Luxembourg and a lot of people from the countries closed to Luxembourg (Belgium, France and Germany) are buying their alcohol there. We don't forget the travellers (Luxembourg is a crossroad in EU) making a stop in Luxembourg...
You dishonestly pretended to be interested in friendship with someone and you tell us that he lesson is not to accept friendship requests from strangers?

I take the lesson as "Beware, even the nicest people will rationalize dishonesty."
It works for some of the bigger cities in the US though. I was comparing where I live now to where I lived before and it seemed pretty accurate.
He didn't make any advance that has made its way to a full word recognizer, he's merely recognizing phonemes (which are linguistic subunits of words) several researchers in the field have criticized his methods. Additionally, none of the top five phoneme recognizers have ever been deployed as a word recognizer, and there is little chance that they even will be in the next few years.
I really like the Beyerdynamic DT 880 PROs. Semi-open, good clear bass, and very crisp highs.
What kind of music do you listen to?
I'm on FiOS and HN was down for me for the last hour or so, not sure if it's related. That wasn't a DNS error (I use GOOG DNS), just a connection issue.
In other words, we should dismiss a priori the possibility of any racial correlates?
> If history is any indication, history isn't any indication. (E.g., Apple is always the niche player, right?)

I agree with your comment in general, but that statement isn't true. Apple are still a niche player, except maybe in America.
Oh, so you noticed my Arduino board ? :D
Yes, and they tend not to utilize them.
Agree. Wordpress or other cms software make it easy to fend off spam and to use their templates for quick sites.
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If you are going to read this article, read it all. (He starts off saying he does not believe in evolution, but he really means to say he considers the word overly broad, for example.)
I've actually found that if I speak slowly and clearly, the nexus one figures out exactly what I'm saying for more than 90% of the sentences. This is very useful, and much better than any voice recognition program I'd seen about ten years ago.
That's just silly. What does C++'s language cruft have to do with CS? The C languages are actually missing a lot of the important concepts, like lambdas, and discourage other important things like recursion.
From another article: "In the 1998 to 2004 data, each point higher on the Wordsum test causes a $1,200 decrease in income." [http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/higher_intellig.html]

So where does "smartness" fit in? I hate to imply causation, but maybe:

"Wordsat smartness" -> annoying person who uses big words other people don't understand all the time -> social isolation -> less money -> alcohol!

Whew!
"I'd rather have someone who's a very good EE who didn't quite grok recursion working on my power grid software than a very good programmer who can't tell an amp from a volt. At least the EE can tell when its broken."

A great deal of terrible, buggy, unmaintainable software has been written due to exactly this type of sentiment. I have maintained, re-written, built on top of this type of software. The correct way to build power grid software (or any science/engineering-related software) is by having very smart software engineers (who do understand or can quickly figure out things like recursion), working closely with electrical engineers (or biologists/chemical engineers/etc). As in, they should be in constant (at least weekly) contact with each other. The software engineers learn about electricity, and the electrical engineers learn a little about software architecture.

This is based on my experience developing software for engineering applications. I currently work on software in the Aerospace industry, and I communicate regularly with other engineers. My software team is full of brilliant software engineers. Smart people can learn about other fields on-the-job. If you accidentally hire one that can't, don't fret: there is always work that doesn't require an intimate knowledge of electronics, such as build scripts, support software, utilities, etc.

That being said, I do think there is a place for a software engineer with a passion for other types of engineering. My degree is in Bioengineering, but my greatest experience (and greatest interest) is in software engineering. So, while I grok differential equations, control systems, and metabolism, I also understand recursion and polymorphism. And deterministic finite automaton. And closures. And I'm not the only one.

My point is this: If you have a really hard engineering problem that requires really smart software, hire really smart programmers, really smart engineers, and a couple really smart people who understand both sides. Like me!
The market is the biggest problem - mechanics probably don't have a decent internet connection at work to start with, don't want to learn new software, and wouldn't even think to look for new software.
"... I didn't give them any private data. ..."

Maybe, but your interactions are still inferable. If you have friends their interactions with you are also inferable. Anyone or any group you associate with in Fb has the same problem. In some ways what Fb can infer is just as much a problem. So the question remains, "how useful is inference of data to Fb really going to be?"
Actually most research effort in speech is more on the language side rather than the signal processing of the speech signal. So I think many people have a similar intuition as yourself.

Bear in mind though, that humans significantly outperform machines in tasks where isolated or streams of non-sense syllables are said: i.e.
"badagaka" is said and humans can pick out the syllables whereas computers can have a lot of difficulty (in noise in particular).

Computers start approaching human performance most when there is a lot of linguistic context to an utterance. So it appears that humans are doing something other than using semantics.
I use mplayer with vdpau (nvidia gpu acceleration) on my Athlon II X2 240 and it happily plays 1080p.
It's not dead. It is in fact used a lot more than ten years ago. I've yet to get a voice message that google voice was not able to decode sufficiently, and most of the transcribed messages have been 100% accurate.

General speech recognition has a long way to go, but it will happen last in speech recognition. Meanwhile, in the real world, speech recognition is noticeably better for everyday use than it was a decade ago.
> I knew that blacks were more likely to be teetotalers, and expected that women would be as well.

Is there anything scientific about this at all? The whole article sounds fishy.
Adobe May Gift Entire Workforce with Flash-Friendly Android Phones
He won't open it either.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Open+the+pod+bay+door