skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Who here struck out on their own without a plan?
When I signed on with my current employer, I ensured that I wouldn't be prevented from working on something on the side. I made it clear during the interview process that my intention was not to be there forever. Recently, I submitted a disclosure regarding the side project and today it was just approved by the Legal and Compliance departments.

I've become disillusioned with my current work situation, which is better than most places, but still has the usual fundamental issues (project mismanagement) that won't be remedied in the next two to three years. I've let some contacts know that I'm looking for a change of scenery while I work towards a release, however based on some events today, I'm strongly considering giving my immediate notice. Tomorrow is Friday, so the opportunity is there.

Who here has done just that: Just up and quit, then didn't decide to take up another job? (I've done part A without part B before) If so, aside from the obvious need to immediately produce revenue, what did you take away from the experience?

Thanks in advance.
Ars quoted the entire relevant paragraph. It says "Accordingly, Service Providers should not use the Consumer Secret alone to verify the identity of the Consumer."

The confusing part here is that "Consumer" here means the application, not the Twitter user.

So how else is Twitter verifying the "Consumer" (being the application itself) other than the Consumer Secret?
Music labels eager for Google-Apple battle
I imagine that the current codebase is tightly coupled to their internal infrastructure. They're writing the stand-alone version for the first time.
Wasn't google wave an HTML5 app that used google web toolkit? What other libraries would there be?
Brain Eating Vaccine? Will We Become Zombies? Truth or Not? | HealthMad
> Something involving alien life

If you find it on earth there is a bit of problem with right away drawing the conclusion that it is alien in nature. You could say the same thing about any other life on earth, or at least the initial life forms that gave rise to all the others. Just because it 'rained down' doesn't make it alien right away (rain contains tons of bacteria, in fact bacteria play a large role in the formation of rain! http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99093.php).

There exists such a thing as an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile , an organism that lives in conditions not normally associated with life.

These are quite fascinating, but still use 'our' DNA, it would not be too farfetched to suggest that an even earlier branch of life, split off before DNA was nailed down managed to live in some forgotten corner of our biosphere.

Most - but not all - geneticists agree that before we had the current 4 base DNA there may have been one using only 2 bases, so the evolutionary machinery itself is evolving as well.

It could be that if you go another step backwards, that you end up with cell like structures that have no DNA but that can still replicate. Certain clays have this capability, as Richard Dawkins noted in 'the blind watchmaker', and there are other variations on this theme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
JWZ is wrong to count overheating against the iPad's futurey image. If cutting-edge consumer laptops are any indication, everything will overheat in the future. Cars will need a 4 minute iBreak on the way to work. Your lamp will throw off any color you want, but only for an hour at a time. And I have bad news about the coffee maker.
Stephen Hawking's answer to God question tiresome
It didn't occur to me that the source of the OP's confusion might be that he/she is a non-native English speaker. The "much less" idiom simply seemed a poor choice to use in a sentence focusing on quantities.
I believe it, but it can't be common, since pot in end-user quantities is described by weight but actually bought by volume. An eighth looks like an eighth looks like an eighth - you eyeball it, say 'yeah, that looks like an eighth to me', and fork over your cash.

Say the dealer laces his pot so a twelfth of an ounce actually weighs an eighth. Unless the additive somehow plumped up the pot's volume, the buyers would look at it and say 'you're ripping me off - that's a really light eighth.'

Sure, the dealer could then bust out some scales, but that would be weird. Not to mention dealers love repeat customers and glass in the mix would put an end to that quick.
It's a little more Sydney-centric but http://siliconbeachaustralia.org is a start-up social group.

http://supercoders.com.au is a Melbourne developer-focused job site.

http://whirlpool.net.au/jobs/ is a decent IT-only job site.

For general career sites, have a look at http://seek.com.au, http://careerone.com.au and http://mycareer.com.au
HDR app developers should be happy they have the opportunity to sell an app that improves or extends upon the native iPhone HDR features to an audience that had probably never even heard of HDR up until now. It's free marketing.
The libraries and infrastructure that power the serverside parts?
Very cool. This seems like quite a project.
Reddit Diggs Traffic Surge, Prepares For Expansion
As noted, pitch is insanely complicated. My knowledge is incomplete, but I'll try and clear up some things.

First off, an A is not always the same as another A. Some time in the last century (wikipedia if you want the exact date, in fact, if you want further reading, just wikipedia some key phrases from this response) it was decided upon that concert A should be 440Hz - this, as I understand it, was largely in search of consistency between manufacturers. Before that, A had been set at a number of points, going down into the 40teens.

That's only the beginning of complications. As it turns out, even if you can get everyone to agree on a base frequency, different methods of calculating the proper frequency yield different results. Pythagorean Tuning uses whole number ratios to calculate the frequencies, starting with 3:2 (a perfect fifth). [Quick note: if you've never seen Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land, youtube it now] But this method has the unfortunate outcome of giving slightly different values for the diminished fifth and the augmented fourth - which are theoretically the same note.

To ancient musicians, this was like getting a wooden train set and putting the curved pieces together in sequence, only to find that they didn't form a circle. The proverbial last piece is known as the wolf interval*.

So people started to fudge it. This is called temperament. There's a bunch of different ways (mathematically and mechanically) to do it, but I don't really have the time or understanding to get into all of them so I'll skip forward to present day. If you walk into your local music shop and play a chromatic scale on a random keyboard, you'll likely hear what's called Equal Temperament. In short, divide your octave into equal parts (in the case of this example, 12) and you have your 12 notes to a chromatic scale.

And it's just that simple. Of course I skipped over tons, but I'm similarly on my way out the door, so deal with it. Or e-mail me if you really care.

If you're not a musician, producer, technician, or the like, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_mathematics] should be more than you'll ever need to know. In fact, I wish I had known about that page 10 years ago.

Not enough? This is the textbook I used in school on the topic. It's a little less historical and more sciencey, if that's your bag: http://www.amazon.com/Acoustical-Foundations-Music-John-Back...
The four great truths in this article:

> It just so happens that sex and violence are the only two things that you can't fake, and we keep coming back to them as the definitive "measures of the man."

> No, we're not sexist, we're narcissists: it's not about you, it's about us.

[Ed: "we/us" here is men, "you" here is women]

> While we're at it, we can all agree this would be a completely different scenario if it was a white kid rolling up on a middle aged black man on a date; or a black kid vs. black adult. No matter how equal opportunity you think you are all of those are different. Black kid on white adult is crime/poverty; white kid on black adult is racism; and black on black is "one of those things, you don't get involved."

> The Bully Dialogue-- where they spend ten minutes chatting nicely even though both of you know you're eventually going to get stuffed in a locker-- is another Cognitive Kill Switch, which is about reversing power and dominance.
At first I have to admit I didn't quite get the point of Bespin, but I've realized its incredible power as I've come to appreciate the web as a viable platform for most applications. I will probably use it when I transition one of my current projects to the web, and look forward to seeing what others do with it. I have only one complaint so far: alt+left/right is used to move by words instead of the more common ctrl+left/right.

[This comment was edited with Bespin bookmarklet]
"Danes are magical"

I can assure you we are not.
You can also use :sh to get to a shell, then type exit to get back to Vim.
I know, I know...
I'd add.. I was surprised how quickly touch typing came. I'm not nearly as fast as I am on a normal keyboard, but still much faster than my thumbs on an iPhone. Certainly fast enough to write chunky emails or blog posts.. if anything, the minor slowdown is an encouragement to write more vigorously.
Don't throw out ActiveMQ if you want a lightweight solution -- just use it's STOMP support. STOMP is great, it is "enterprise compliant", but lightweight and very easy to understand. I am also a fan of redis and its pub/sub features, but using STOMP on ActiveMQ will let the complexity of your messaging infrastructure grow along with your needs. Evetually need persistence? flip a switch. Need a CBR or other ESB features? Start turning them on.
> our lamp will throw off any color you want, but only for an hour at a time.

Unless you want infra-red, then it can do it all day long, right?
yay liquid.
from my experience, slicehost.com is great.
I use pari/gp to study number theory, and it seems like Kona could easily be used to do the kinds of statistical analysis I need quickly and easily. Awesome!
Hawking is a charlatan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlatan

I would like to hear your opinion why he is -not- a charlatan.

I reason like this. Hawking writes ''God did not create the Universe'' because he claims that the laws of physics as interpreted by him says so. To invoke god as supporting one's own scientific opinion is the oldest form of charlatanism.

If you happen to read a Jane Doe who is a rational layman who is not a doctor of physics write ''God did not create the Universe'' you would ignore her. Because anyone can make this statement.

But when Hawking makes this statement he pretends to support it because he is a doctor of philosopy. Somehow we must believe him because he obtained a doctor of philosopy degree in physics.

I would appreciate your comments why we need to believe him rather than Jane Doe who makes the same statement.

The only reason that I can think of is that Stephen Hawking has the full power of the marketing department of Random House to support his declarations.
> No, we're not sexist, we're narcissists: it's not about you, it's about us.
[Ed: "we/us" here is men, "you" here is women]

I thought about quoting this as well but didn't know what to say about it. But it reminds me of a recent conversation I had with my two adult sons where I said, basically, that feminists are whiny cry-babies because the whole point of equality would be that gender doesn't matter. So the whole screechy "I'm a woman and I want my rights taken seriously" (or whatever) approach not only completely misses the point but actually undermines the goal. (This made my oldest son laugh. He informed me that a lot of men think feminists are whiny crybabies and it's funny to hear his mom say the same thing.)

So I just really liked the line. In a bizarre way, I find it encouraging. :-D I'm glad someone quoted it.
An overview of my entry for the Mario level competition w/ source
Well _I_ thought it was witty enough. cheers (:
That particular point doesn't seem like a huge win to me, as someone who never shuts down his laptop. I just open the lid and it's on, then close the lid and it's "off". The form factor/weight seems like the bigger win, at least for me. Although if you're going to carry around a Bluetooth keyboard to use it, like jwz apparently does, that seems like it eats away at the advantages there a bit?
Another complication to note is that pitch != frequency. Pitch is how we perceive the thing. The same frequency at different volumes can be perceived as different pitches. So you really can't ever find perfect without knowing some exact context.

See wikipedia entry on pitch perception for more examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_(music)#Perception_of_pitch
What are you talking about? So if I pay someone to broadcast something, they are responsible if I use it to break the law? If I photocopy a book, is Xerox responsible? How is this any different from the reasons for common carrier regulation?
For starters, it's a poor choice for streaming technology on the Mac.

Can we expect to see HTML5 video support for the Mac anytime soon? It pains me that Netflix HD streams on my iPad look better than on my 1080p projector hooked up to a Mac mini.
This turns out to be incredibly true for when I'm tutoring subjects at university. As a tutor you're of course worried a student will stump you with a question from left field but the thing that worries me the most is either telling them the wrong information or mind blanking on something that I should damn well know. As such I spend a lot more time studying the material than I would if I was a student in that course.

My marks going through those courses are all HD territory but if I sat the exam again at the end of tutoring I would have a much better understanding of the content due to the fact that I'm worried if I don't I'll be failing the students I'm teaching.
Has Twitter actually shut down any application anyone's heard of with this policy, or is this just scaremongering?

Because, again, Twitter has a variety of ad-hoc means at its disposal to block clients without going anywhere near OAuth.

Meanwhile: "using OAuth in a way it wasn't intended" is not the same thing as a "compromise" in Twitter's OAuth system. And yet thats the headline of the article.
I'm aware that the Standard Model is provably not accurate in many instances (that's not what I meant by "standard" and I certainly didn't mean Newtonian as I thought was plain from the context; perhaps something like exoteric is closer to my intended meaning). I don't think I attempted to pass of anything Newtonian as current thinking, indeed I thought my slightly hand-wavy dealing of QFT made it clear that I understood how such things that give rise to Heisenberg's UP allow tunnelling phenomena.

>Secondly the only meaningful way to talk about this stuff is with math or data.

I've been out of theoretical physics for some time, in any case I don't suppose that I'm going to give a treatise on Hawking radiation in a HN post (even if I could). Indeed, as I thought - and have now checked there is a variation of the theory for quantum gravity that seems to have more predictive power, but that doesn't mean that Hawking radiation is not a working theory. That would be like saying Newtonian mechanics is not a working theory - it works as a non-relativistic approximation. Just as general relativity is considered a low energy approximation of an unknown gravitational QFT.

>Talking about a "ocean of virtual particles" sounds right but it's not accurate.

I subscribe to physical laws and unfalsified theories being the best description of reality and not being reality themselves. As such, in the context, it made sense to me to consider the vacuum as particle-antip pairs as it aids ready understanding of the assumed mechanisms taking place in Bekenstein-Hawking radition.

Malcolm Browne, "New Directions in Physics" (as quoted on Wikipedia)
>"According to quantum theory, the vacuum contains neither matter nor energy, but it does contain fluctuations, transitions between something and nothing in which potential existence can be transformed into real existence by the addition of energy.(Energy and matter are equivalent, since all matter ultimately consists of packets of energy.) Thus, the vacuum's totally empty space is actually a seething turmoil of creation and annihilation, which to the ordinary world appears calm because the scale of fluctuations in the vacuum is tiny and the fluctuations tend to cancel each other out."

Anyhow, these esoteric details aside I'm at a loss to see where this is relevant to the matter at hand?
Well, you sort of can use current laptops that way. I rebooted my MBP last two weeks ago (probably because of some update) and wake from sleep works reliably fast.

I can see how the much longer battery life and the much more compact and unintimidating appearance helps with that.
TrueHDR requires you to manually 1) tap on a bright region 2) wait for the image to stabilize 3) take a picture 4) tap on a dark region 5) wait again 6) take a second picture...

Sounds like a user experience that needed Apple's attention to me.
edited: "feminists are whiny cry-babies because the whole point of equality would be that gender doesn't matter."
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism
If your AMQP broker is slow, you're using the wrong broker.

We do something like 1.2 million cluster durable messages per second through RHM on Intel SSDs.

Once you add all the necessary stuff to your hacky ZeroMQ/Redis/beanstalkd implementation, you'll end up with a poorly designed implementation of a decent AMQP broker.

If you don't need persistance, durability or clustering, then by all means, use whatever works for you.
thanks robin. i have however noticed in general that a hash table invariably has performance issues in comparison to a trie when storing a large dataset of strings. i guess this is because a trie does guarantee constant time lookup given that in normal circumstances the max length of the string is fixed. a hash table on the other hand does not guarantee constant time lookup due to collisions. another advantage with an optimized trie is that the key does not have to be duplicated. so if there are two keys - "bhavin" and "bhatia" - the first 3 characters do not need to be stored twice making the structure relatively more compact (offcourse this only applies to one of the space-optimized trie structures. in a regular trie since each node would store 26 buckets the total space consumed may actually be considerably higher). lastly i would assume since hash tables are sparse by nature they would take up extra space that tries and trees otherwise do not

- Bhavin
This may be the dumbest piece of advice I've ever seen hit HN:

"Hi, my name's Sean, what's your name?"

"Get your punk-ass away from me, I don't want to know you."

Congratulations. You just got yourself in a fight. It wasn't going to happen anyways (and it didn't in the show). But now it will.
BigTable.
Moving a question is far too easy. It's impossible to vote against a move, so the tables are tilted firmly towards the over-eager question-movers.

You can't even vote to un-move it once it's happened, unless you happen to have enough rep on the recipient site.
Source code written by monkey
There will always be someone who can do it cheaper
A Quick Intro to mongosniff
Agreed, with a 12 megapixel camera I never felt printing anything over 16 x 20 was acceptable, even with my 22 megapixel 5dmk2 I don't go much larger than 20 x 30.
I find it funny how hands-off the article is. CNN tries too hard not to offend anyone, and unlike most articles, it doesn't actually present its own opinion.

Which would be nice to see in everyday reporting, but it seems the risk of offending people is the only way to garner true neutrality.
Point taken. In Netflix's view, they focus on a specific market niche so that they effectively compete in a smaller, less crowded space. But in analyzing their business, it's not unreasonable to take into account "nearby" competitors even as they differentiate. Netflix themselves do: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/netflix-opportunity (slide 31).

Overstating BitTorrent's influence would be a mistake, but ignoring them altogether would be a distortion as well.
... for 40m ;P
Your work is not normally taxed; your income is. If your company is worth something, it's based on some kind of future earnings. And those future earnings are taxed.
I expected bad things as well, but it very useful. You get used to not pressing as hard as you would on a normal keyboard, since you don't have to depress any buttons.
Blekko
I've been intrigued by the new entrant, Blekko, into the search engine realm. Do you think that Blekko has a shot at giving Google (and co.) a run for their money, or are they happy with targeting niche audience? Is there competitive advantage good enough?http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekko-search-engine-prepares-to-launch/
Everyone always leads in with the "I thought it was useless" bit.

Did they really? Haven't they used a digital picture frame and though "Gosh, wouldn't it be cool if this could show the weather...and had a web browser...and let me play movies from my server..."

I find it difficult to believe that so many intelligent people (of which jwz is definitely one) purportedly couldn't see the obvious appeal.

I've been using small devices as PMPs for a while (whether smartphone or touch or zune) and the desire for something larger is, again, obvious.

Though I'll hold my breath for the Galasy S Tab.
Ask HN: Help me verify my news app
We've been testing an app that determines news the second it appears online.

Since our new version is up, one major US news event has happened which is the hostage situation at the Discovery Channel.

We broke this story at 1:07PM EST on September 1st, 2010. We need to determine when other sources also published this event.

Any idea? How do I go about this?
Hm ok, didn't think of battery life...but as I have a droid right now, I'm in the habit of plugging my phone in whenever possible.
I would doubt that a "large scale web application" would be covered by donations, unless it were truly exceptional, like Wikipedia. I certainly wouldn't want to bank on it. But it's possible.

I was interpreting your comment about not having an eye for "riches" as meaning that you weren't looking for the big exit that many of the founders at HN are looking for (see the conversations a few weeks back about how retiring on $4MM might not be "possible"). "A successful startup" could just mean that it covers its own costs and teaches you something along the way. At least, I'm open to that interpretation. Some at HN would describe that dismissively as a lifestyle business.

Bottom line: I don't know what your needs are for launching and maintaining the app. At some point, you'll need to decide who's going to pay for the costs: you (out of pocket), the users (through donations or subscriptions), or a third party (advertisers or data miners). Without some external source of funds, it'll fall back to you. That might not be a bad thing, but if you truly are talking about a "large scale web application" along the order of ... well ... even modest successes like Quora or Outright or something ... well ... the money's going to need to come from somewhere. I wouldn't count on donations being the source. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
He's being humble.
One: never 'svn up' the actual web serving root. Use 'svn export' and then rsync (or something) the changes into your web root.

Two: Use git. Saves mod times.
That's true, but feels very specific still for a whole site. Imagine if stackoverflow itself was on that specific a topic area. It would have never got big originally.
I am listening to Peter Gabriel, truly the man is a prophet ... he did a song called "Red Rain" years ago .