skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a virtue to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of top-level submissions high. It is a virtue to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of comments in threads discussing interesting content high. Behaviour here is undefined. There is another website that handles it better. We all read it anyways. Keep HN beautiful.
The thing I find most disturbing about this is the lack of cultural awareness that people have been searching for sounds that act on the body for years.

From Hawkwind trying to get the audience to crap themselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRw_rvrXQiQ&feature=playe...

To Coil and their Time machines:

http://brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/discog/eskaton10.php?si...

The Hafler trios experiments (Andrew Mackenzie seems determined to erase himself from history so can't find a relevant link)

and many many more - there is probably at least one book in mankinds search for music that alters the mind - that I can't be bothered researching for this comment.

And of course - if any of this actually worked don't you think it would have been around and available for a very long time?

( and its not just sound either - Gysin was playing wih light - perhaps a more promising line of investigation given epilepsy can be triggered with light:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine)
Is the bias still relevant? CBInsights says 37% of recent Seed & Series A goes to single founders (dual founders are 40%).

Stats on slide 21: http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...
People would still report these emails as spam, and the sender IP address or email address or domains or urls would still get added to block lists.

"personalised spam would be unfilterable" assumes that systems only filter spam on the text content. Much more spam filtering happens purely on IP addresses and domain names.
Yeah - just booked tickets through that site and was pretty shocked by that one.

They really make you work to avoid buying extra crap.
A History of World GDP
Your mom would trust you and then her friends would trust her, then they'd all get burned because she meant to click No one time and it would all be your fault.
This, for once, was a great article on self promotion. Not something like "make something awesome and then everybody will want to write about it".
Placebo.

I found this article on the subject to be interesting: Digital Drugs Do Not Cure Stupidity by Steve Novella http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=2132

This opening is quite amusing:

I have never been a fan of the local news, where journalistic standards are often annoying. Often the local news is an exercise in insulting the intelligence of the viewer. But at least the local news was local. With the internet, however, local news reports are increasingly being picked up by larger national outlets and amplified manyfold. So now I get to be subjected to the worst of local news reporting from all over the country.
God likes good press. I should do a story on how to win God's heart. (God laughed) God loved David. God loved Jacob and hated Esau. God said, "excessive contricians wearysome."

"The eyes of the Lord scan the world..."

God says...

connects Honor predestinated echo descending truths USA
honourable

Guess it helps to be predestinated :-)
Wikih4x1nG Home - Wikih4x1nG
20 Excellent Free Wordpress 3.0 Themes
Today in this article, I have put together these excellent, high-quality, fresh, Free WordPress 3.0 Themes to enhance your blogging experience. I hope you like these free wordpress themes and appreciate the designers for their great work.
Video: The State of The Cloud, Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels
The article seems to suggest that it is rather the result of a press looking for short-term advantage over their competitors and an uneducated populace who listens to them. I think that it is true that increases in lobbying and decreases in bipartisanship have reduced the ability of much of the American government (not just the presidency) to get things done, but I think those issues would be mitigated if more of the voting population was willing to delve deeper into legislative issues. Soundbites might be easier to digest, but they are also less filling.
I've been on 496 days and reading a while before I bothered to create a login. I think you can detect waves of:

cheerleading -> group think -> counterexamples
-> lots of couterexamples -> not so much group think

The cheerleading topic tends to change with what is hot. Data Points, Django, Cloud, Bootstrapping, I Failed ... have all had their cycle.

These cycles seems to play out over 4 months IMO. Regular events like YC admission events create repeated waves.

Wild downvoting can occur if you try to give counter-examples in a cheerleading or group-think phase (yes I'm bitter ;))
"If you build something that solves a problem that people have (ie. is useful), and you arrange for people get to know about it somehow, then I think you can't help but be successful. But "successful" might not be a goldmine/lottery; it just might be making an adequate living, in a lifestyle business - like a fish n chip shop (as DHH denigrates). I think it's actually quite hard to fail at this, if you are aiming at creating something useful + communicating it."

This is what I'm doing, with some success. Now, if you don't count the net worth growth implicit in how the company is growing, I'm not making what I would be working for other people, but I think I'm a success. I set my own hours, my baseline expenses are covered, and when I hustle, I can make a lot of money. when I don't, like the last few months, well, like I said, my baseline expenses are covered. Also, eh, I've probably grown my reputation enough that my credentials now look better than they would had I spent this effort on college.

I don't know if I agree with the "can't help but be successful" part, though. I poured most of my income and spare time into projects like this for many years before I hit upon a project that actually worked. Now, part of that might be because I'm no superman... my IQ barely makes it into the 98th percentile, which really is kinda dumb. I never went to college, and, uh, I'm pretty lazy. I got a 2.16GPA in one of the worst high schools in the state. I mean, yeah. no two ways about it, I'm lazy.

So yeah, uh, if you are a Paul Graham, maybe starting a lifestyle business is easy. Maybe. but for me, it was a lot of work. Now, it was work that I liked doing; I think I enjoyed building my company more than I would have enjoyed taking the money and buying a porsche (and I'd be able to buy one with the cash I dumped in before it became profitable... two or three if I got a reasonable rate for the time I spent before the company became profitable.)

On the other hand, maybe what you mean is that you can choose to run a lifestyle business in such a way that you don't really fail until you choose to fail. This is what I did. When I ran out of money, I'd do more contracting, or get a full time job. When I was flush, I'd work more on my business. Really, I could have continued spending 3/4th of my income and time on the business for the rest of my life; unlike a startup with investors, there isn't anyone around to say "give it up" - it's just me. as long as I'm willing to work, there will be money.
What a weak argument! Yes, let's wait 10-20 years to come back to this comment to say "I told you so."
I confess. I'm an addict. I read HN religiously with a good glass of wine.
Try using twitter.com without javascript enabled. You can't even post a tweet; even though it's just a text field with a button, the button does nothing! Twitter is one of the sites I really want javascript disabled on. I don't want to be involved in their latest JS worm.
Good points. I'd add that in the AppStore, consumers feel safe. You don't have to worry about viruses, malware or even that apps don't do what they say they do. Apple has removed numerous reasons for hesitation from the buying experience.
i don't understand why #3 was not ambitious enough, could you explain?

There are a host of language learning tools, but a lot of them are simplistic, or very poor, or very expensive and only support a few languages (e.g. as you're hungarian, I've yet to find a good one supporting your language).

Language learning is not a solved problem, afaict :)
The actual success rate(people buying something in response to the mail) of Spam Emails is really, really low. Its only profitable for Spammers because it costs pretty much nothing to send millions of emails. Now, if you actually paid someone to write these emails by hand, sure your response rate would be better but I seriously doubt the whole thing would still be profitable.

Also, I think that personalized adds and recommendations(Amazon,Google,Facebook,etc.) have a much higher success rate, simply because they have more information about you and can therefore recommend products that you are more likely to buy. Spammers could of course also collect information about you to personalize their Spam, but considering that most add/recommendation systems work automatically(and are pretty good), I don't think paying someone to create these recommendations would be worth the effort.
Gauss seems to have proved lots of (surely publishable) things that he didn't publish. I don't know what his reasons were.
Thanks for the reply, but this story in long over. This happened like 3 years ago, so I think they pretty much gave up by now.
Chefs and Editors
Which will probably summon a quadro-kill-copter.
http://slideme.org/ - app for it comes with CyanogenMod
I find it hard to get excited about fullscreen Flash apps anymore.

It's basically just windows software boxed up and dropped into a browser, except without the ability to right click anything. There's no boundary pushing, since you can do pretty much anything you've always been able to do with desktop software.

They could have done this in the browser though.

HTML5 is far enough along to do this with no problem. But you could have done it in IE6 if you wanted. The key is to use Flash where you need to, but only where you need to. For something like this, that means a little 1x1 pixel dot in the corner that lets you record audio.

In 2010, the fact that they built the whole thing in Flash just seems like laziness.
small company? that should suffice for most people.
Love Dropbox?? Try Airdropper
Point, it is way easier(and far less work) to copy than to design something from scratch.
I guess the issue is on the definition of "stupid things".
I love to watch a movie, and I enjoy a quiet lunch and talk over the coffee and dessert.
I don't travel by bus, but when I used to commute I would spend the time reading.

Things that are stupid relaxation to someone, are the actual goal of someone else.

(yeah I can still cut on reading hn of course :)
It's quite funny because of the cliche of calling youth music satanic or otherwise immoral.

There is a kernel of truth to its drug-like nature. After all, music is cherished for its power to alter our mood, typically for the happier. If music didn't get us high, there would be no reason to listen.
JetBlue's AYCJ is Back, with Online Booking
In general, yes, it is pointless to add times. But I wouldn't call it meaningless.

For extremely large values of "in general." The only edge case where it appears to be meaningful is the one you pointed out, where one of your endpoints is the origin of the scale. If you had started Deep Thought at literally any other point in time, the addition would fail.
20 Best Health and Fitness Mobile Apps: iPhone vs. Android
I wasn't trying to imply that that a site had to accommodate disabled javascript, Sites should handle it gracefully though. It doesn't take that much effort to at least add something like <noscript>This site requires javascript.</noscript>.

BTW, I just revisited it and they fixed the previous problem. Earlier, if you clicked one of the js links you would get text page of raw html.
This film should be good http://www.thestartupkids.com - will have interviews with quite a few YC founders, self included.
The Haskell / indie rock comparison is remarkably cogent. It makes all the more ironic that I think it really was better in 2005 before it got 'popular', before the age of dons and reddit-spam monad tutorials.

It's unfortunate that OCaml sucks as hardcore as it does, seemingly everything they added to ML is either useless or harmful (except for camlp4), but unfortunately even fewer people use ML. SPJ expressed interest in a new Haskell-replacement with eager evaluation, but I don't see that coming anytime soon.
Jetliner crashes on Colombian island
• “UNIVERSAL INFOTECH part time job
> I wonder if that's representative of the economy changing, or if it's representative of the site's audience changing.

Fewer rejects. :)
Mobile game isn't a game: Commercial Android malware spies on your location
Alhambra - For a better World

Since 2006 I'm involved with a non profit organization which provide school kits to poor orphans in Morroco (North Africa)

I've used my marketing skill for coming up with the idea
of the non profit logo :

Logo : http://picasaweb.google.fr/tarek.demiati/AlhambraLogo#550632...

Proof that I did request this logo :
http://www.ikarma.com/id/9572 (check at the bottom of the pagge)

Proof of our actions :

Young kids saying thank you to Alhambra :
http://picasaweb.google.fr/tarek.demiati/AlhambraLogo#550633...

School kit distribution :
http://picasaweb.google.fr/tarek.demiati/AlhambraLogo#550633...

Inside the school bag :
http://picasaweb.google.fr/tarek.demiati/AlhambraLogo#550633...

I can't afford to pay, because I've had a sciatica which has disabled me to do any Freelance work for 6 months, I'm freelancing to finance the release of an upcoming product idea. I'm pretty much a bootstrapped single founder, with a stay at home mum and 3 wonderful kids ... So my budget is tight
Infosec Island Security News Digest for 8-17-2010
"Myth #1: I don’t have any time"

If you think this is a myth, you need to re-examine what you want from life. Everyone needs time to relax. Playing games, surfing the web, going to the gym... Everyone does it differently, but everyone needs it.

You can give up your 'free time' for a while and work on something, but it will eventually crash in on you and you will start hating your life.

I have too many hobbies. Every once in a while, my hobbies will start to run my life and I'll start getting depressed. When that happens, I stop and decide which of them are things I really want to do, and which aren't. I prioritize my hobbies. That relieves the stress again and I can relax.

If you can really relax while working on a programming project, then go ahead. But when it starts to stress you out due to a deadline or other outside influence, it stops being fun and starts stressing you out.

Being stressed out will affect everything you do and it will all go down in flames.

I have a few programming projects that I'm working on in my spare time. Nobody knows about them, so there's no pressure to finish them. I just have fun with them and work on them at my leisure. As soon as I release them to the world, they are going to get very stressful. Yes, someone else might think of the same ideas first and beat me to it, but I'm taking my time, doing it right, and I'll release when it's convenient for me. If that turns into something big, I can quit my day job. If not, not.
Dia dhuit! The lessons are currently static, with the exception of the sound recordings. Are you suggesting a one-to-one check of exercises would be useful? I try to have something as passive as possible, not requiring a response, but I recognise that it would be a nice proposition.
The McShane and Wyner Gordie Howe Treatment Of Mann
Why would you think all of it is thrown away during "compilation", and when you say "compilation" which phase are you referring to?
But with pg making comments that are just a link to the readability bookmarklet, I think this battle might be lost.
Disney, others spy on kids with zombie cookies
Later claims add specifics. The patent office is general and can clearly refer to any patent office (WIPO, EPO one of the OAPI offices, etc.) whilst this claim is specifically for inventions before the USPTO.

Why do that? Well if there's prior art that knock out the antecedent claims but doesn't include this specificity then you still get a patent. Also for infringement purposes I think more damages can be extracted for things which are specifically claimed as opposed to generally claimed (depends on jurisdiction). Finally it helps prevent someone else from getting an addon to your invention patented - "our invention is the anti-patent invention but with the innovation of doing this before the USPTO, were awesome like that".

I don't see how claim structure like this has any bearing on innovation?
Somebody I know very well was making small talk with Steve Ballmer and asked "So why did you guys get rid of Ensemble Studios, I have lost hours of time with those games and loved them". Steves response was: "who?"

Gives you an idea of how things are at Microsoft.
My product/approach was too simplistic. It was just a word learner tool, basically a 'flash card' program, which tracked and modeled the user's knowledge, and 'annoyed' the user time to time with questions. My main mistake was that I did not research the market enough before building the tool: the problem exists, but there are too much competitors, and there a free ones amongst them.
Otherwise this was my smallest 'fail', because this did not involve that much work from me. My other 2 'fails' especially the first was a more severe one. (Google translate did not exist when I started my first project. I already had some paying customers when google translate had been made available in my language. Then I realized that I have no chance to keep up with them.)
Human-shaped pylons carry electricity across Iceland
Prior art has to be extent in the public domain before the priority date. Court records count, they have well established dates which makes them good. Disclosure of an invention in public, outside of the allowed uses in the US, will also invalidate a patent.
The Android app store is just about useless.

This mindless Apple/iPhone fanboyism on HN is really getting old.

So you didn't find a friggin' hearts-game that you like and that makes the android store "useless"?

Everyone has their own priorities of course, but can we cut out the generalizations?
Billig reiseforsikring, kredittkort og forbrukslån
Lån uten sikkerhet enkelt, kjapt og online hos ireiser. Du kan også lese mere om lånetypen lån uten sikkerhet, og søk kjapt online om et lån. Det er flere lånetilbud å velge mellom, så sjansene dine for et lån er store.
You could do all this work to get your product into the press. Or you can just make something that people actually care about, and the press will come to you.

Within three months of launch, SproutRobot has been on TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and on CyberGuy on 40 TV stations across the U.S., and we didn't lift a finger for any of it. We just built something people were excited about and the press found us.
It's a gateway drug to the heavy stuff, 100% of people using other drugs have been shown to have previously been users of music.
A compiler takes in a stream of symbols and translates it to another stream of symbols. describes a more general class of programs called "translators". Those are interesting, but compilers are required to solve additional problems, such as emitting machine (often virtual) code (sometimes in the form of assembler).

Calling bitmaps a computer language is a bit of a stretch.
ah here we go again - society bashing!

if you actually spoke to the artists, you'd realise they're pretty happy with the PRS. it does send them cheques after all, which can be a nice thing if you're a struggling artist.

if you fundamentally believe in the role of copyright, then the collection societies have an important role.
I think your argument here almost supports his hypothesis though - he argues that there is a correlation between large payouts and a desire to continue and earn even better. So the idea that those people who have smaller payoffs don't still have a burning avaricious desire is consistent with his suggestion.

The question is, /if/ his hypothesis is true and there is a correlation, what is the causation? Does winning big give you a taste for it and make you want to try again? Or is it (more likely in me eyes) that only those with such a strong drive to beat out the odds will ever make it to the really big payouts without cashing in early for less.
Not with zero employees.
Woman to Woman - Berfrois
The attack of red buttons: proof that they work better than green buttons
The addition wouldn't fail; it would just not be very useful. Interval scales do support addition, which comes in handy when you want to, say, calculate the center of mass for interesting events.

What would fail would be trying to determine the factor by which 2010 is later than 1666.
"You can spot a newbie designer from a thousand yards by suggesting they kill a feature that doesn't seem to be contributing much. Their nostrils flair and their voice rises. A litany of denials, excuses and accusations pour forth. And you know immediately that their project is going to be an incoherent piece of crap. This is a good coaching moment. :-)"

Ah, memories. However, I don't think that's limited to newbies... It also applies to anyone who is egotistical and controlling. They think any idea they have is an idea that everyone will love, and can't accept it when you tell them otherwise. This obviously makes them bad designers.
Although you also face the possibility of disenfranchising someone who thinks their idea was way better and should have been picked.
Isn't that just a half-formed version of GTD?
I love this idea. Most of the time I prefer function over form, but this is just awesome. Choi+Shine added: "Like the statues of Easter Island, it is envisioned that these one hundred and fifty foot tall, modern caryatids will take on a quiet authority, belonging to their landscape yet serving the people, silently transporting electricity across all terrain, day and night, sunshine or snow."
As a typekit user, I have insight into this. It's as PaulHammond said: Embedding fonts means downloading a copy of the whole font.

TypeKit tracks how big the font files are. Each font might only be ~20-30K - but that's one weight/style. If you use multiple weights and styles, that's 20-30K per each. It's easy to rack up 3-4 weights, and of course I want italics on some of those == 4 weights times 2 italics times 3 fonts = 20-30k times 24 and now we're talking half a meg or so...

If I'm demoing 18 fonts on a page, even at a single weight and style - that's approaching half a meg right there.

I think using an image is the right call.

But if you want to see TypeKit in action (I get no benefit from pushing them - I'm just a satisfied user), here's a couple of sites I'm using it on:

http://picklepatchpcb.com/

http://daychilde.com/

http://music.isaac.im/

http://oilspillupdate.us/

http://panamacitypc.com/

http://rockincompany.com/
Tatjana van Vark
Over the past 6 days this user has submitted 27 articles, all from the same blog. They've garnished precious few comments, none useful or instructive, and very few upvotes.

In that time the same user has made no comments on any other submissions.

Basically, it's spam.

I've started to flag them all. They're the shallowest of "articles" and completely pointless for this audience.
Lovely, but is this anything more than a correlation?
>Underserved search terms: find some way to figure out what terms have a lot of search traffic but very few good results

Industrial espionage at Google/Bing/Yahoo .. ?
This is a wake up call for me. Too little networking..
Cristian
cristian top class
The eBook Universe: 2010