skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, a great deal of programming in today's world consists of using tightly constrained IDE's to glue together libraries and gui kits at very high levels of abstraction. To suddenly ask someone from this tradition to whip out a merge-sort in bare C and then describe it in O notation might be a bit jarring.

The people who built my house likely never took Strength of Materials during their civil engineering undergads, they just follow the building codes and nail together pre-made pieces (sometimes very large pieces) of house.

Would I prefer a PhD in EE to do the electric and a 6 year civil engineer to nail together the boards, just to be sure everything is done right? Perhaps, but I'm sure not willing to pay the extra it would take to make that happen. I still get a decent house with those professionals working a few levels upstream from the builders.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-cla...

Summary of that comment: Attitudes towards scripture is the primary predictor, though WORDSUM and education still have significant effects.
I've seen a change from people saying "incubator" to people saying "seed accelerator."
If your targeting the long tail on Google then those click through rates are terrible in comparison. I guess it depends what your advertising, facebook are always going to be lower because people aren't generally looking for anything.
Is this a new feature?
Interesting that this correlates with my experience as well. I moved from New England down to North Carolina and the difference in alcohol intake (and religion for that matter) is truly startling.
This is what Apple already allows with the App Store. Except if your app smells like Adobe.
I'm surprised this isn't being upvoted more, from a tech Entrepreneur perspective that is the biggest thing to help small businesses not get screwed.

Ungh I so hate the patent system.
HL7 3.0 is a step in the right direction, and hopefully we'll see more modular EMR systems with the new mandates for 'meaningful use.'

My cofounder and I are currently working on a start-up in this area, so I'm curious to what 'foolishness' you've seen.
Free Software Types are Banging the Theora Drum, Hopelessly
MSR's MindNet, mention in the article, is online:

http://stratus.research.microsoft.com/mnex/Main.aspx
What you say is true, but I don't think that's what he's saying.

When I was in school, I saw my classmates fail to grasp basic concepts and abstractions. They had no deeper understanding. They managed to regurgitate the things they'd heard for a test, work together and manage to get an okay project together, and pass by by the skin of their teeth. They'd complain about how C was too hard, how badly they'd failed an assembly assignment, and that they couldn't wait to get back to Eclipse and Java. Of course, they'd only have one huge, giant class.

It's incredibly unfortunate. I'm not sure how to fix this. Maybe my standards are just too high.
Some actual results from stem cell research.
Some improvement in the education system (at least in my university :) )

Things That can happen:

1)New course based on (and with help with) industrial requirements.

2)Implementation of a more research based curriculum.

3)Option to submit a undergraduate dissertation to obtain a B.Tech (Hons.)

Things that should happen:

1)Implementation of choice based credit system.

2)More option of research on campus.

3)Establishment of a HackerSpace.
Interesting. I wasn't aware of techniques like COCOMO.

The different points have to be there in order for things to weigh differently. If it was a scale of 1-4 the question of whether your code can be reused weighs the same as reducing bugs (which I personally doubt, since the amount of bugs you get with rewritten software is usually higher, at least for the first 1-2 years, than with older software).

You could use 1-4 for everything, but then you would just have to use a higher number of questions for some heavier weighing ones.

I derived those values and numbers from around 4-6 projects of varying size that I've had to decide upon, so the scale is probably not very accurate. But running it through my projects/results and decisions provided the right results.

Deriving it from historical data of a large amount of projects is probably a much better idea.

Creating a larger project from this could be a great idea.
Recognition of the potentially enormous value of anti-aging research.
It's really nasty to put this as a top-level link in HN without explanation---this is not an article or announcement about the Delete Button, it is the delete button itself.
Here it is: http://www.hugetune.com/workspace.jpg
A democratically elected government in Egypt and a clean departure of the Mubarak regime. I am not Egyptian, but the example of peaceful transfer of power, from dictator to the people will serve as an excellent role model for the region.

After that, maybe by 100 years, a one-nation state in the Holly Lands; where Palestinians are acknowledged as rightful natives of the land and taken into the fold of the Israeli state as equal partners.
One of the dirty secrets of online advertising is how much of the profits accrue to the sleaziest players -- for example, diet pills (snake oil) with a "Pay us $2.99 for a free sample (and we'll continue to bill you $80 per month)."

A lot of folks saying that FB ads are not performing -- and I'm in that category -- might be unconsciously scoping their comments to "ads placed by legitimate businesses." (Similarly, they might unconsciously scope their comment to cut Zynga out of the picture. Zynga has very different economics from other advertisers -- it is quite literally made to advertise to Facebookers.)
Wall Street to stop being a bunch of jerks.
Not to mention copyright infringement, prostitution, assisted suicide, those few sodomy laws that are still on the books, obscenity...
Please note that some of the graphs there start with 50% as original y-axis. It creates an appearance of males drinking twice as much as females, for example.
Traditionally facebook's "delete button" holds on to all of your information for another 14 days and if you log back in that period your account is restored.

Sort of like "we dare you to go cold turkey" - I'd love to know what the re-login stats are.
Ask HN: Review my startup - SignAppNow.com
Hi All! Please review my startup - http://www.SignAppNow.com

I released the free, no registration required version (minimum viable product) last July 2009. I received feedbacks and feature requests and recently implemented them as a basic one-time fee paid version (with registration) for $9.95. There's a 30-day free trial period.

Was offering a one-time fee paid version a good idea? Only one person paid so far.

My goal this year is to release premium features as a monthly subscription version (I'm thinking $4.95 per month).

I get around 4000 visits per month (mostly coming from the US). I didn't really target any specific users when I released the app. After a few months, it seems teachers where majority of my users. What can I do to market the app more to teachers?

Also do you think this could earn at least US$2500 a month? That's my target goal for now.

By the way, I'm a one man startup from the Philippines.

Thank you very much.
Live Brand Experience and Live Marketing
BlazinStar Experiential are regarded as the leading Experiential marketing agency in the UK and by breaking the traditional agency mould our Experiential marketing agencies stand apart from the competition and delivers outstanding results.
Political reform in the UK.

More scientists and engineers choosing to work in science and engineering instead of finance and consultancy.
It knows about us!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hacker+news

And about me. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=piesquared
I've got a lot of problems with news (world news, sci/tech, political, etc) and how I get to it. It's hard to stay current with news. Articles are full of fluff, information is spread across many different sources, and getting updates on stories is tough.

The other thing on my mind lately is another content related problem. I feel like more of my web searches are leading towards MFA sites with sub-par content and irrelevant ads plastered everywhere.
I think his point was that some very important software might end up being written by those people who could not grasp the fundamentals of CS. I've seen recursion fail to fit into the minds of some otherwise very bright individuals.

What I'm not entirely sure of is that decent financial/industrial/important software can't be written by someone who can't write an algorithm to sort an array. You don't need to know much CS to call array.sort(), only that you want the array to be sorted. Now this level of engineer might not know what to do if it doesn't work (or worse, works but badly) but if he's got enough domain knowledge otherwise, he'll know to spend some money on a few high dollar hours with someone who can fix it.

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.

The author was surprised that candidates came to him with actual accomplishments on their resumes but didn't seem to know the basics of CS. My counterpoint was that its probably possible to accomplish quite a lot without knowing the basics these days, and if you do it cheaply, that might be just fine.
nice to know this exists, but I wouldn't use this any sooner than I'd delete my gmail account
In Australia, people of all classes drink like they have just crossed the Mojave desert, barefoot, after escaping Alcatraz.
Living in various places in Washington, whenever there is a sunny day, I don't want to work. I just want to go outside all day because I haven't had a sunny day in weeks and won't have another one for weeks either. In eastern Washington summers though, it stays sunny for days or weeks, and I get over it. (Though working in a dark cubicle across the room from the nearest window all summer was depressing.)
IPad 3G is not locked in to AT&T
Turning a Top2005 EPROM Programmer into a Desktop Test Bench
It's pretty hard to delete your account on accident it goes something like:

- click delete

- put password in

- fill out recaptcha

- confirm delete

- don't login for 14 days

It isn't like the link is malicious but considering relevant news items a large portion of people (on this site) want to delete their accounts it may be quite useful.
I'd like to see +$10,000/mo net without having to take a real job again
Apple, Microsoft Come Out Against Open Source Video Codecs
It's a nice-to-have, for when you don't know exactly what you're looking for; I just wish that there were a way to make more people aware of things like Gnome Do as a complementary solution. http://do.davebsd.com/
I have conflicting anecdotes:
1. it's used heavily and successfully in medical dictation situations, ie medical professionals dictating case notes.
2. I was so excited about speech control in OSX, and I tried it, and it was shit because I had to speak with a terrible impression of an American accent to get it to do anything.
Great article.... Like a lot of things it all hinges on P=NP.
According to this listing, Australia is not even in the top 20: Luxembourg, Ireland and Hungary seem to be the top three.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_co...
I'd say they aren't really conflicting. Commercial speech recognition really started in the medical field. Accuracy is much higher with a controlled vocabulary.

Speaker-specific characteristics, e.g. accent, by contrast are much harder for recognizers.
Thanks for reading. But I think a key take-away is that even with infinite computing power, you only increase the chance of being right a little. It's still a guess.

That's the real surprise. It's not a question of computing power.
Do you have any anecdotes?

It would be far more useful and in the spirit of the original question than advice/opinion (which I see no dearth of on this site).
Do I have to float through life?
Ask HN: Startup Social media marketing Help
Our startup is in the process of launching a product that is in communication (voice, SMS, messaging etc) space. I want to hear from HN veterans for any tips on how to create buzz in the market.
1.How to generate enough awareness of the product
2.How to approach popular blogs like, techcrunch, gigaom, twitter stream, facebook, YouTube etc.
3.Is there any other forums/newswire I should checkout for spreading the news.
What other strategy should we adapt before the launch. Appreciate any help in this regard. Hope I can get some feedback from HN folks. Thanks.
Take a weekend and check out Central or Eastern Washington. Lots of sun here, though not much of a tech startup scene.
This one always gives me a giggle: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=are+you+skynet%3F
For those who haven't dug into the audio analysis and synthesis field, it is really hard to understand why speech recognition is so complex. As living beings, we interpret sounds in a fundamentally different way than computers. Our brain has the ability to interpret sound-waves and provide meaning and context to them without us even realizing it. Once you hear a cat's meow, even if it happens in a different frequency range later, you can still associate it as a cat's meow.

This is what computers "hear": http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/images/waveform.gif - in fact, this is ALL they can hear. When you hear 44.1khz, audio, that is 44100 bytes of information (a value between -128 to +127 per byte) per second. There is no hidden metadata behind the waveform. At 100% zoom-level, the waveform IS the audio. Theoretically, you can take a screenshot of a 100% zoomed waveform and convert that to actual sound with absolutely no loss of data (of course, you'd need a really high resolution to show a graph 44100x256 pixels in size. Now given such a waveform, how would you convert that to plain-text?

As an example, try recording "ships" and "chips" into a mic and view the waveform. See if there are any patterns you can identify between the two waveforms. I've done it over a hundred times. There isn't an easy way to discern if the letter was "sh" or "ch". Yet our brain does it so very easily thousands of times every day. So, failing easy pattern recognition, we have to use frequency analysis, DFT, and tons of AI.

My unscientific gut-feeling is that we're going about all of this the wrong way. We are using the wrong tools. Discrete, digital computers will never be able to tackle problems like pattern recognition in their current state. Switching to analog isn't going to improve anything either. I don't know what the correct instruments/devices will be but I know programming them will be very different.
1. Reduce the paragraphs of fine print. Poorly-edited text is a waste of time to read. It is deceptive: you either don't understand it, or don't remember everything; and when it's changed, you're never shown a nice "diff". If you need a lawyer to figure it out, you spend money. Many documents can be written as a few bullets of basic English, so they should be.

2. Allow actual threat levels to dictate the allocation of resources. A big one: driving. Statistically, car accidents hurt many more people than the other things that make the news, and yet there's no uproar over clueless drivers and badly-designed intersections. A relatively small investment over 18 months could definitely improve this.

3. Start reviewing the people put in prison for minor offenses, and review the "sex offender" registries. Why are people in jail for years on charges like drug possession, people who didn't hurt anyone but themselves? Why are 17-year-olds who slept with their girlfriends on the same list as offenders who are actually dangerous? In 18 months, a whole lot of people could have their humanity returned to them.
Foolishness is a harsh word, but when loved ones are involved it tends to get emotional.
Some of the problems I've seen are:

1) Tests, often uncomfortable, which were already done, only stopped because I informed the staff that they had been run only hours earlier.

2) Medicines which had been marked as not to be administered due to adverse reactions, readministered due to lack of documentation or notification.

3) Physical disks containing MRI data transferred personally, but utterly useless because of format problems
Credit cards do the exact same thing. Sure they will deactivate it, but if you put a charge on it for 60 days it is reactivated. This was a pain for me because almost all my bills are automatic payments.
I read this today: "Peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not possible because Islam won't permit it and militates against it."

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/05/the_crux_of_isla...

People everywhere just can't and won't swallow it.
Good to see that Hacker News has now become a place devoted almost entirely towards griping.
I guess if you're the kind of person who likes looking at bars instead of reading the text that gives them meaning as well.

I think a floor set at number like 0.5 and with a linear scale is pretty reasonable for readability, unless you're a lout and ignore those little letters that tell you what things actually are.
I've had a coworker who used to work at Microsoft say the same thing. She liked Seattle, but when it came down to not seeing the sun from Nov-Mar in Seattle vs. not seeing a cloud in the sky from May-Oct in Silicon Valley, it was a pretty easy choice.

I'm curious how both compare to Portland, which has been a popular destination for burnt-out Bay Area hackers of late. I've heard it's somewhere in-between. The one time I visited it was nice and sunny, but then again, it was August.

I'm also wondering how they compare to the east coast. I was born & raised in the Boston area, which has a reputation for terrible weather. But Boston is highly seasonal: you get to May, when you have wonderful 70-degrees sunny days, and think "This is what I shoveled all winter for." I almost think that's nicer than the Bay Area, where you get inured to the nice weather after a while and start to take it for granted.
That answers it. Half of my social circle in .au are Irishmen ;-)
Hardly a departure, the value is substantial for all those but the user.

The friendship limit you speak of has been hypothesized by an anthropologist (Robin Dunbar) as being in direct correlation to neocortex size. More recently, it's been called "the monkeysphere".
Umm... buggy H.264 in Linux? Come again? H.264 playback using Open Source software is not buggy. Far from it. Whether VLC on Linux or MPC on Windows - it works extremely well.

In-browser H.264, maybe, but that's has nothing to do with the quality of open source H.264 decoding. Maybe a plugin problem, and likely a temporary one at that.

I use open-source codecs to watch H.264 all the time. I have watched hundreds of hours of it on Linux-driven devices without a problem. This article is nothing but FUD itself.

And if you want to talk about the quality of H.264 encoding, I'll put x264 up against any commercial product any day, period. It beats the hell out of everything I have seen.
Ask for a new one and then cancel it. All those automatic payments will bounce off the first card and you won't have that problem anymore.
Every time a university switches their Intro to Computer Science course from C or C++ to Java, a kitten dies.
Ask HN: To Wordpress or not to Wordpress
As a developer. Building a site (non-blog) for yourself that only you will be updating. Would you use Wordpress, or would you not worry about a CMS? Not having to build in SEO is a great feature but, wp also has a lot of options that I would never use and I feel that I would spend a lot of time trimming off all the extras.

Thoughts? Suggestions?
I see, was it easy to install the software you used to play H.264 on Linux? Did it come out of the box with the Linux distro you were using? Maybe I shouldn't have used 'buggy.' I certainly wasn't trying to contribute to FUD, just compiling a likely senario with history of proprietary format support on free software, sprinkled with some over the top sarcasm. I just find it a little far fetched that the tweets and blog posts of people who care about open standards think it will do any good. I mean I support their effort, it just seems like the fight is already over.
Matt Cutts from Google deactivates his Facebook account
Hopefully, the web will do the right thing and support open codecs (theora, or even vp8 anyone?).

It's horrible how often in the last days i have heard "yay, see? Flash is bad! Apple wants HTML5!" when in reality they are saying "flash videos are dead, but MS and Apple want HTML5 with videocodecs to earn even more money and exclude competition". In my world it should be "flash videos are dead, but the majority of browsers settled on an open codec and so should MS&Apple".

Yes, Flash for video will hopefully be dead, but please don't exchange it with just another closed technology!
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell shows up on AtariAge.com to defend himself
- IE9 adopting HTML5, including Canvas

- Chrome with NativeClient ready

- NPAPI released so NativeClient can integrate with browsers

- Serious consideration of NativeClient as a standard

- Start replacement of plugins and browsers with NaCl modules of functionality

---

- A theory of more things in physics

- LHC finding something

- A theory of more things in brains, social systems
Indeed, computers are not good at listening. Even pitch detection is hard. Even monophonic pitch detection is surprisingly so (I just finished reading a bunch of papers about that).
Deployment Infrastructure for Continuous Deployment at kaChing
Classy people use small words.
According to what law? There should be no reason a doctor with a new practice should need to keep paper copies of their charts. Remote backup copies yes, though I don't know the rule here, but not necessarily paper copies.
What word(s) are we looking at in the .gif?
I'm calling these Lean Incubators. You may attend my conference next year for only $4500 per ticket.
Yes, infinite computing power with current methodologies will never work. The article mentions that the number of possible sentences is of the order 10^570 and current methods attempt to crack that (or sub) solution domains (primarily) using probabilities of association. This method will never work, except on small sub-domains (e.g. numbers or medical field transcription) as the article mentioned.

However, if P=NP then there are better algorithms that can solve the problem. Does P=NP? Nobody knows but to me it seems to be true because when anyone interprets speech they definitely are not searching a 10^570 domain to solve the problem.
Why do people want other people to delete their accounts along with them? Are they trying to save us or something?
Lost my jailbreak when I messed up an OS update a few weeks back and bricked the phone - I was forced to go to legit 3.1.3. Spirit worked; it's good to be back.
on purpose

by accident
Does DuckDuckGo have a following outside of the tech crowd?
Yes and yes. Extremely easy all around. Also extremely easy on Mac and Windows. Double-click an installer, and then run the app. Check it out for yourself. Google VLC for Windows or Mac. Or the K-Lite Codec Pack for Windows which comes bundled with Media Player Classic - full open source high-quality high-speed H.264 playback.

To say the fight is over may be true for Theora. That is a losing battle because, despite its promise, Theora just can't match the quality and efficiency of H.264. But again, you are mixing two things together if you think that the death of Theora is the death of open source video encoding and decoding.

VP8, by the way, has already been open sourced by Google. This will very likely change everything.

EDIT: Correction: No they haven't yet, but multiple sources report that they will at I/O. My bad.
calling idealabs an incubator is the same as Mcdonalds trying out McPizza in the canadian markets. idealabs does not take in outside ideas/entrepreneurs.