skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of my favorite programming tutorials; the FFT is not a particularly easy thing to explain (though from a mathematics POV, it's not a difficult concept).

I saw the article on the front page and thought, "Hey, didn't I submit that already?". Glad to see it again though, and it's worth taking the time to read if you've never dealt with DSP before.
This is perfect for a project I'm working on. One component downloads zip files (10s to 100s of MB) from websites for indexing, and I archive them on S3 because it's just easier/faster to deal with them from there on EC2 instances that do the processing.

I don't need super redundancy, because I can always download the files again, and so RRS would make the S3 bill even cheaper.
It is attracting precisely because of the chance of a lucky kick. You can very rarely turn off when winning, especially when good teams play each other, because there can always be a moment of magic to tie the game.

It means as a supporter, you are always on the edge of your seat, cheering your team on, because you know what can happen if they falter.

It also means that the rare occasions where you are 3-4 0 up and the game is safe are just that much more satisfying ;).
"we need an alternative to academia" is correct

"stupid people are in charge" is technically correct but misleading.

The idea that really smart people could lead better than the average man has been around at least since Plato. All it takes to cure somebody of this is a good look at places where really smart people were in charge.

There is more to solving political problems than intelligence.

The issue isn't that the average man is dumb, it's that people who are highly motivated and don't think through their positions are more effective in democracies than less motivated, more educated voters.

This was interesting, and I hate to say anything bad about Chris. But I got a whiff that being smart and having a bad academic experience left some emotional marks on him. So the answers for him involve, not surprisingly, smart people outside of academia.

It's a shame, because I think he's on to something with his description of academia getting in the way of true breakout thinking.
I didn't stick around after reading the title when the youtube page loaded, however I'm pretty sure it was Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up.
<iframe src=...
The StorageCucumber
Hehe, tricky guy :)

Well, let's say that as long as we're talking about files and there is enough local free space I might be able to do that.

But once committed that's it, no rollback past that point.

Or I'd have to charge significantly more.

We'll take this on a case-by-case basis.
Let me guess, you still call it "eight megs and constantly swapping". 1980 was a fun year...
New Google Design Avatar
Finally Google has revamped it’s design while making it a lot more easier for us to search. The new Google design has been divided in to three parts.
It's the Hotel California of online storage.
Wedding Reception Venue | Fine Dining
Using the finest and freshest ingredients available and making all of our original recipes from scratch, our classically trained 5-Star Executive Chef is dedicated to not just staying on the cutting edge of culinary trends, but creating unique trends of his own.
The point of Emacs is that you can write code to solve immediate problems. The point of the iPad is that you can't run your own code on it.

Problem.

But what's great is that you can just buy yourself a $300 netbook that will run Emacs just great, and you have plenty of money left over to donate to the FSF.
Retweeting links and replying “cool stuff ” is not a discussion
A blog post on how immersive web and VOIP can make better discussions happen online
At first glance I thought it was some sort of backup solution, where storing was very cheap, but restoring would be the pricey bit. As soon as I reached the Abacuses and 3,5" floppies I definately knew it was a fake :)
Hmm, must be using a very optimistic locking strategy.
S4 should respond with a "No Redundancy" feature.

http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/
Actually, alcohol has therapeutic value for angina.
It certainly rises to unseen levels of nuttiness. Here's a quote about his theory of the 'true nature of reality':

http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Supr...

"Because physics is governed by the scientific method, it deals exclusively with phenomena. Thus, it effectively diverts attention away from the cognitive, categorical aspect of perceptual reality, without which neither phenomena nor scientific theories could exist. Because physics is irreducibly dualistic and takes the fundamental separation of mind and matter as axiomatic, it cannot provide us with a complete picture of reality. It can tell us only what lies outside the subjective observer, not within."
Address Plaques are Always Classy and Stylish | Home Improvement & Health Care
It's not like Twitter started it with millions of dollars of other people's money without those people's consent, though. VCs have been practically begging to throw money at them! So it seems like the people whose money it is are 100% on board with spending their own money...
Not too long ago I found this company from the UK that still develops games for 8 bit micros:

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/

And they sell cassette versions! I've been thinking of writing one myself, just for fun.
Never confuse "never" with "foreseeable future". I, too, won't give up my hard drive for cloud storage for the foreseeable future. But I already did that for e-mail and do a lot of collaboration through Google Documents. All the source code I write is versioned on private servers that could, conceivably, be called a "private cloud", albeit a very small one.

And, BTW, by being on your machine, they may not be vulnerable to government agencies (unless you cross a border) and Google employees, but, as was shown a couple weeks back, it's vulnerable to borked anti-virus updates.

Not to say the viruses themselves.
I tried to purchase a screencast using PayPal but I still need to enter full name, phone number, email address, and full address at the FastSpring site as well. Is there a way to avoid entering all that personal data over there?
Even within science, IQ is only weakly related to achievement among people who are smart enough to become scientists. Research has shown, for example, that a scientist who has an IQ of 130 is just as likely to win a Nobel Prize as a scientist whose IQ is 180 (Hudson, 1966, p. 104, cited in Sulloway, p. 357).

His chance of doing anything is the same as everybody else.
Thanks! Will continue using balsamiq of course but is always nice with more tools for specific purposes =)
Personally my experience with appengine and ruby was not stable. Things break too often. On the other hand Heroku is much easier to setup, and update.
Thanks. Looks promising!
Quick note: The "50 million page views/day" is a typo. I meant 50 million per month!
There's also a game by Ian Bogost called Guru Meditation

http://www.bogost.com/games/guru_meditation.shtml

for Atari VCS (2600) and iPhone.
How to ask a question
Craigslist is an odd case, because I think he did actually get rich by global standards, or at least, he has more money than most VC-backed entrepreneurs with exits have. Estimates vary, but he appears to make somewhere between $10m and $50m in cash dividends from CL per year, possibly more, which would put his cash net worth comfortably over $100m, not even including Craigslist equity. There are plenty of startups that don't exit at a level that pays the founder $100m+, and Craig still owns the business even after raking in that cash.
I was expecting to see someone jump out of a plane with a boy scout's backpack.
He's kind of like what would have happened if Douglas Adams had taken himself way, way too seriously.
This seems like a good opportunity to recommend the book "Why is sex fun?" by Jared Diamond.http://www.amazon.com/Why-Sex-Fun-Evolution-Sexuality/dp/046...

(Or apparently "The Third Chimpanzee", some reviewers claim that is a superset of the book).
Thanks for posting this link. This is Chris on his own terms.
Not really, you're not distributing an app, you're distributing source code, which is not the same thing. Of course, IANAL...
This is cool. But it wouldn't really help our internal team "understand" the bug in question - if that's important.
Are You Too Smart to Be Rich?
I wonder how the dart-throwing monkeys did in that same time span... =)
Having a kickstand or third wheel deployed when battery voltage gets low, or perhaps just when the robot has been static for a while to save on power, does make sense and if this is a separate piece of electronics then that's probably good enough as a safety system to prevent toppling.

From a safety point of view as long as you've identified the possible hazards and done something which mitigates against them to some reasonable extent then that's probably good enough.
Office Furniture Suppliers
Viking in the UK have built a reputation on a fast, reliable service selling top quality products at superb prices. No other company sells more office products to companies in the UK.
It just takes a lot of time. Network effects and lock-in ensure it takes a while, but the industry is changing towards models that are incompatible with what Microsoft offers.
I don't know if you noticed, but I tried to be very explicit about the fact that the tutorial is nowhere near finished. I wrote that up in 1 hour yesterday. I'm well aware that it needs filling in with less difficult stuff. I intend to start serious work on it today.

Also, I'm trying to get Michael Fogus (author of Joy of Clojure) to write the tutorial. If he decides to do so, I can almost promise you quality. ;)
Is Atheism Logical? + Einstein vs God
Actually, I'm mostly the author of try-clojure. Heinz hosts it for me and collaborates, but I'm the majority author.
Well... It is a stretch calling Emacs Lisp an interpreted scripting language, but the idea remains - an Emacs that's not programmable is just a text editor with hard-to-learn keyboard defaults.
You have a weird idea if fun, sir ;-)
IBM to offer commercial Hadoop distribution
Hmmm... An Emacs front-end to a cloud-based file-system.

That could be the basis of a very, very nerdy startup ;-)
Google Has Been Snooping on Your Wireless Network
From TFA:

> The students will be able to view the images with or without their parents, and request that the court block their parents from seeing "sensitive" photos if they so choose.
It uses the same thing that tryhaskell.org uses. I was wondering about paste myself, but I suppose it's better for learning, just not for practicality.

The console works fine on my FF 3.6.3.
PayPal subscription without PP account
Don't know if this is old news or not, but thought i'd share anyway - might be of interest to other HN SaaS people.

PayPal subscriptions used to require that your customers have a PayPal account - this was a show stopper for me.

Just noticed that they have a product called 'Enhanced Recurring Payments' which allows subscriptions without the PP account.

About as easy as recurring billing can get.

Cheers,
eli
It's (almost) Official Google's VP8 Goes Open Source
Now Surf Facebook For Free From Your Mobile Via 0.facebook.com
Lau Jensen and I worked pretty hard on the new layout. And I'll add your damned logo! Just give me time. ;)
I think they're completely fine with it. Foursquare has been extremely open about how people use their API and this is what their API is for. In the end I don't think they care how people are checking in. They're still gathering useful location information for businesses which is their real value add.
Does someone has any example of a small company screwing up under competition after publishing financial infos ?
Similar thing happened to Jeremy Clarkson when he put his full bank account details in his newspaper column, thinking that no one could actually withdraw money from his account - he was wrong, someone used his details to sign up for charity direct debits.
Facebook to Simplify Privacy Options
Licenser (Heinz) and I have another project called clj-sandbox that provides sandboxing for try-clojure and sexpbot in #clojure. You're safe.
Personally I'm glad that Apple ignores people like you and hope the trend continues. Hackers (a kind of slang word for "producers") already have a capible device. It's called a desktop computer. Everyone else is mostly a consumer. Apple has given us the (almost) perfect consumer device. Finally a machine that can be with us literally all time.

We've tried the "I know! Make it a real computer!" route before. They were called tablets. Tablets failed for two reasons: horrible interface (stylus, yuck) and it was a real computer. Netbooks got closer by fixing the interface but they still suck because it's a whole computer. It took Apple figure out to forget the computer. Give a good interface in an instant-on device.
Say it with Apple:

The iPad is not a web browsing appliance.

They are selling it as a computer, without mentioning the word "computer". Just look at the ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fihOmQY-JxY

A device that can do all that has usually been called "computer".
Signetics write-only memory datasheet
> It's sometimes easy to forget that making the world a better place can still be a very selfish act.

If only those people would not try to impose their morality on other people, that would truly make the world a better place. Unfortunately some things we never learn.

> Cooperation pays dividends

Only if you're collaborating with the right people. On the other hand you can get screwed pretty badly ... by people who either steal your work, claiming it as their own, or by people that don't appreciate you (which is a problem when willfully collaborating because that's when you have an inflated ego).
I'm still experimenting with code snippet colors.
In a way this is a variation on a very old theme, here is the original:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360704
Note that try-clojure uses the same jquery-console that tryhaskell.org uses. ;)
Facebook users warned about 'sexiest video' attack
* effective
That's a problem with Chris Done (tryhaskell.org)'s jquery-console. I believe he's still working on proper history.
"really realtime": it's sad to have to use such an expression when it ought to simply be realtime.
Still working on those colors, but I'm not sure about making examples clickable. It's hard to learn if you don't pay attention to examples. :p
Safe House
Interesting house.
> And their very first motivation wasn't money. It was Eben Moglen's talk[1]. Pure idealism.

If you believe in pure idealism, then you must also believe in Santa Claus.

> Four geeks in their proverbial garage set out do destroy an evil corporation is exactly the right kind of incentive

Even in the open-source world, people don't brag about their pet projects until they've got at least a preliminary design to show.

I like developers that deliver ... like Linus, when he was criticized for Bitkeeper, he came out of nowhere with Git.
Sizing up Amazon's Kindle in its many forms
It's more than that. CEOP (which isn't even the government, it's just an advocacy group that sells "diversity training" and so on) wants their panic button on EVERY page on FB.

But the case they use to justify this was a kid groomed by a paedophile on MSN, which does have the CEOP panic button, but no-one bothered to press it.

Basically CEOP are publicity whores who have just latched onto "won't someone think of the children!" as their vehicle to fame. And it seems to be working for them.
Ask HN: Review trendiction.com (search engine - german content only)
Hello everyone,

It has been over a year and a half since we last asked for advice (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300460). We changed our name since then for good :).

Today, we launched a new version of our search engine I would like to get your advice on how we can improve future versions.

Our public website is mainly targeted at the consumer. For businesses, we offer APIs to integrate our search (or the raw feed) into other application.

What can we improve? What would you change?

The link is: http://www.trendiction.com

Thanks!
Interesting, insightful article. It portrays the story taking the early years of cooperation between Apple and Adobe into account.

> I was working at Apple when this process happened, and I can tell you that it was searing. Apple had invested countless hours and dollars marketing those products as prominent reasons to buy Macs, and then we saw that investment turned against us when the apps were made available on Windows.
Latest jQuery and jQuery UI Theme links on Google CDN
Does anyone else see the irony in proposing any Google service as a remedy to privacy issues? Remember Buzz.
I can't get the theme to load on my site - going through the obfuscated/minified projekktor.js code reveals it may be loading things from hard-coded paths.
Yes Folks, The Official iPhone Twitter App Is Here
I disagree. Does it have, or potentially have a full OS? Sure. So do tons of embedded devices (e.g. home routers), but I bet many of those devices would void your support if you "jail broke" them.

It's meant to be a device, regardless of what you think it's capable of. There is a reason nerds/geeks are never consulted by sales. If you don't like the device then don't buy it. I'm sure plenty of nerds will be out there saying "but! Lets make it a whole computer! Then we'll kill apple!". Buy one of their devices to go with your Android phone. Don't mind all the people laughing as you trudge your way through using them.
Grid Systems in Design
My First iPhone App – A N00b’s Story
Why not use OTRS ? http://otrs.org/
I agree - and I have two.
Waitress fired because of Facebook
Painfully Slow Spontaneity: Dave Barry Describes His Writing Process
Nonono, don't discard the imaginary part! If you don't care about phase information, use sqrt(real^2+imag^2) to give you the magnitude of each component.
When a country has enough people that think getting music and movies without paying for them is the most important political issue (ahead of foreign policy, the environment, poverty, world hunger, and so on), that's a country that needs a war to knock some sense of perspective into people's heads.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Voice is better than chat. Why is this here?
Aren't most of those studies looking at piracy as it now exists? Do any of them analyze the case where internet file sharing is completely decriminalized, so that every song and movie anyone tries to sell quickly becomes freely and legally available at no cost?
Comprehensive evaluation of entity extraction APIs
LinkTV did a comprehensive test to determine how OpenCalais, Zemanta, Evri, Alchemy, Yahoo APIs and others perform tasks of 'content understanding' such as named entity extraction, related content search, image search, etc.
The PayPal links work!
A Data Center Power Supply That Moos
I'm with you. I'm about to put a healthy bet on GLL (2x short ETF).

You ever getting the feeling we never learn from all of these bubbles? I see people on every street corner dressed in pimp suits waiving signs to sell my gold at an abandoned gas station. I see people on blogs telling me gold can't lose it's value like the US dollar can.

This guy cracked me up:

And sometimes not, but nobody has ever gone hungry that had a safe full of gold when there were riots in the streets (like in Greece now) due to the debasement of the national currency.

Dude, if you have a safe full of gold, you also probably have enough other resources to ride out whatever instability is happening. Gold is a metal. It's not a currency. It's worth about $450 an ounce at the moment.

If you want to survive the apocalypse, stock up on oil or corn.
Yeh, in case it didn't come across - I am entirely in agreement with Facebook on this.

Especially as CEOP claim it is a "brilliant solution" when we tried to open a debate with them at a panel meeting....

I can see how it might be useful in a few circumstances (if done tastefully...) but a "big red button" is just silly, scaremongering and ultimately useless.
Toughest test comes after graduation: Getting a job
I recently was tutoring a high school student who was instructed in their data-management course to create several graphs from the same set of data, comparing rainfall in different Canadian cities.

Unfortunately this data didn't make any sense to be plotted as a line-graph, a bar-graph, a histogram and a pie chart, as the comparisons didn't make sense for any but the bar-graph. It was if the students were actively being taught how to use graphs incorrectly. Creating pie charts when the entire pie doesn't mean the whole of anything I think was the worst culprit.
I can't get it to run on my Amiga...
Yeah, the bully only hits you if you force him to by not handing over your lunch money. He's not really a bad guy.
Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates
People do pay for gmail. It's called Google Apps.

I guess the thinking is that your so impressed with gmail for personal use that when you do start up a company you will use them for your business.
> Facebook's privacy controls does not work for most people.

[citation needed]

In all seriousness I've been messing around with Facebook privacy for the last 18 months. Most of my friends are either a) unbothered or b) were perfectly capable of setting up their privacy

There was a little bit of a learning curve (this is what FB must must improve) but from my occasional tests/observation most people have locked up their profiles sufficiently.
Don't bother reading the article: only bats fellate each other, no hot bat-on-academic action exists.
No new, or official info, just headline trolling.
This is very well done.

As a fan of StarCraft I must say that a lot of detail went into the making of this parody. The protoss turret sound at 1:05 cracked me up.

Here is the awesome 8-bit theme which could have been its soundtrack : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3in8Z-w-uHY
I guess we've got a very nice case of irony : an article on how cool voice is and how uncool chat is, on a text only internet forum...
"Academia is a heartless cold bureaucracy"

This man might be intelligent, but he is very known for making his mind up about something and then not changing it for anything.

"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell has a whole chapter on this guy and people like him, according to Gladwell, Langan has barely had any contact with academia, so the above statement doesn't seem to have much backing. He got thrown out because he couldn't understand the "social norm" of speaking up for himself, something he hints at in the video.
The havoc the XML purists wrought
Last World Cup England's "great players" like Frank Lampard and Stevie Gerrard never turned up. Their only consistently good players in that tournament were a guy who used to ply his trade in Germany (Owen Hargreaves) and Wayne Rooney of course (yes I'm a Man Utd. fan). Manchester United bought Hargreaves as a result of that showing.

The media has hyped a lot of England's "stars" into the stratosphere so that a lot of people believe the rubbish that's published about them. Every time the World Cup rolls around all England have to do is show up and they'll win it. And when they don't it's the end of the world. Just cos you invented the sport, doesn't mean you have a divine right to win it! In Europe, I would admire the likes of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands a lot more than England as they have a lot of fine, natural footballers (not to mention they generally play better as a unit) and I'd suspect one or two of the should reach the semis at least.

ps. I hope France get annihilated in the group stages. Yes, I'm Irish. Those rotten cheaters should never have been permitted to get on a plane to South Africa. Even if you're French you shouldn't support your own country. C'mon Mexico!