skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you do a blind test? I cannot for the life of me tell the difference between 256 Kbit/s AAC and a CD in a blind test. (The best equipment I have are 150€ headphones, I tested with them. I did this test to decide whether I should start buying my music online instead of on CDs.)

Tests in which I knew what is what were completely worthless. I nearly always thought that I could tell the difference and that ability magically disappeared in blind tests.

I can tell the difference between 128 KBit/s MP3 and a CD, though.
Mmm, forgive me if I'm missing something obvious but I don't understand what your app does exactly. Care to make a longer description? Or maybe better if you have some time, a video?
> Lower cost of living means [proportionally] lower wages.

That is a false assumption.

http://swz.salary.com/CostOfLivingWizard/LayoutScripts/Coll_...
Quizlet just added Text to Speech Audio and it's Impressive
http://quizlet.com/blog/archives/1437

Any ideas what they are using? I can't track it down but I'm quite impressed. Technical jargon as well as full sentences are spoken at a fairly high accuracy. In 5 languages.
Well, anthropogenic (as in human caused, via greenhouse gas emissions) global warming is a scientific theory.

A scientific theory has to have a hypothesis (human caused emissions of gases cause the globe to warm in a significant way) and a null hypothesis (human caused emissiosn of gases do not cause the globe to warm in a significant way). No arguments there, that's not controversial.

However, for a theory to be scientific, they have to be falsifiable. That is, there has to be a way of proving them false. But nowadays Anthropogenic Global Warming, now packaged into the catch-all Climate Change, and has been linked with these following items: more droughts, more rain, less snow, more snow, higher temperatures and lower temperatures. As every single type of weather pattern or climate outcome is now predicted by the theory, and as such it cannot be falsified. It's not a scientific theory anymore in that case. It's morphed from a scientific theory (more GHG makes the global temperature go up) into a belief system (any type of human-caused emissions causes bad weather somewhere). It's commonplace for media and activists to now link any weather outside of normal benign conditions with 'climate change'.

Normal or pleasant weather (such as pleasant summers or mild winters) are never linked with climate change - only adverse weather.

Hence Bob Brown has linked both heatwaves and bushfires and cool temperatures and flooding with climate change. Because every type of weather related event now proves the theory, there are none that disprove it.

The current weather conditions in Australia are well within historic recorded variability, and Australia's climate record is pretty short. Climate change is meant to have started either in 1850 or 1940, depending on who you listen to. But in many cases, more extreme weather was recorded prior to these dates than is found now.

But climate change has stopped being a scientific theory and now is a politicised quasi religion for some. That's a shame because researching and undestanding the climate is very important for the resource dependent world we live in. But research cannot go forwards when it is viewed through the prism of a bad theory, in the same way the luminifurous ether had to be discarded to understand light.

And for anyone who doesn't agree with me, I ask this question : what would it take for you to believe the theory has been falsified?
Video converts and here is the proof: 46% increase in conversion rate
I think the misunderstanding comes from confusing "strong AI" with "human-like AI". It may be impossible for a meatbrain to build another meatbrain-like AI, but, if we are willing to compromise on that and make some AI that can function at or above meatbrain levels in some of their functions, we have already a couple examples of very clever parts we can, eventually, combine.
This reminds me of something I started many years ago (2007-03-10) I wanted to track my mood throughout the day and eventually over years to see how different events and times of the year effected me, does anyone know of anything that exists for that now?

(only slightly related, please forgive me)
Agree, playing hide and seek with crackers is waste of time. I decided to make the anti-piracy protection trivial in the latest version of my software. I just wrote a installation date into an .ini file.

I want customers that love the software and are happy to pay the price I ask. Software piracy can be solved by social means, not technical means.
Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated.

Urban legend.

You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs

That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs "whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and after you've been blacklisted, in order to get unlisted.

To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it properly.

Nonsense.

You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up

Yes, there's a few things to watch out for, but it's all pretty well documented nowadays and you only have to do it once.
SPF is pretty easy with http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html

you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously been used for spam

A quick check at a few of the largest blacklists (spamhaus et al) takes all of 5 minutes.
Another 5 minutes that you have to spend exactly once.

[..further marketing pitch for MTA SaaS snipped..]

Well, to sum this up.

It seems many people have a strong misconception of what SendGrid, MailGun and friends actually do. You don't magically get higher deliverability only because your mail is passing through them. They don't have mythical "whitelist" slots at the ESPs. They're not even on the radar of the ESPs.

What you get from SendGrid et al is a (hopefully) properly configured MTA and DNS, to push your mail through. From there your outbound mail is suspect to all the usual blacklisting and scrutiny at the receiving endpoints.
And that's all - no black magic at work here.
People used to train pigs to hunt truffles, but more recently beagles have been the go-to animal as they tend not to eat the prized catch.
Which would be a very clever answer and even hint at some sense of humor.
Actually, the photos are taken from a plane.

http://twitter.com/#!/NearMap/status/26841599145156610
Incredible Gadgets You Would Kill For – 20 Examples
Gadgets are more unusual and more clever than normal technological objects and that makes them gain popularity. These wonderful gizmos ease our daily routine and keep us in contact with the innovative movement, making sure we don’t get stuck in the past. But of course, in the world of gadgets there are also some devices that take it a little bit far, making us gaze at them with hope that we will get our hands on them sooner.
I think the police usage of Facebook was inspired. It's free for the police, there's an existing distribution mechanism in place, it's highly scalable and it's canonical, which can quickly cut down rumors. Twitter became a festering swamp of rumors and BS, whereas being subscribed to the QPS facebook page meant high quality information.

I tried to get onto the Moreton shire council to find a road closures list, and was faced with a downloadable MS Word document. There's the two extremes for you.

One thing that governments everywhere should learn from this is that maintaining and using Twitter and Facebook from established, trusted accounts is a very good way of getting information out there. Even if only a tiny fraction of the population are subscribed, they can quickly disseminate information to neighbours and family members.

I think the BOM should look into it.
>>> "You don't magically get higher deliverability only because your mail is passing through them. They don't have mythical "whitelist" slots at the ESPs. They're not even on the radar of the ESPs."

That's absolutely right, you don't. But email deliverability turned from a massive mystery and headache for us, into a sure-fire deal, the day after we implemented SendGrid. We develop translation/localization related apps, not email apps. So for us that's cool :)
Tricks for managing information overload
Facebook's 3rd Biggest Advertiser is a Bing Affiliate Scam
simply said: it uses google chromes filereader object to enable drag & drop (for images), after a successful (image) drop it does some blob recognition algo (outline detection) on the image canvas, then replaces onmousemove a circular section of that canvas with the data from another canvas (of the same image with another color "filter")

or to put it a more complex way: it magically transforms images into magic digital coloring pages.
Security in general seems to be doing fine (ask tptacek), but I'm not sure how large the market for really good pentesters is - you'll need to be a lot better than Metasploit etc, which is difficult, and will penetrate almost every network, which is embarassing to your employer.

You can make a fairly decent living running Metasploit and turning the results into a nice report, too - but that's not "penetration testing" (as it is/used to be understood.)
Big Breakfast Generally Doesn't Help Weight Loss
Ask HN: Any good books on money?
I more interested in knowing:
* Fundamentals
* Govt role
* When new money is printed and whys

Thanks
It's all in the headlines: A HN experiment
Build confidence | Your Game Spot Articles
Good initiative. I'm interested in such program as startup founder. However, if implemented as proposed, it wouldn't give me any benefit. Amount of 150K is too high.
> I also believe that lack of transparency and honesty is
> terribly irresponsible since their stock price has been
> skyrocketing the last couple of years[1].

Skyrocketing because of the CEO health, or because of the performance of the company? Don't forget, Jobs was also on medical leave for the good part of said couple of years.

Of course I am biased there, because for me, as outsider, all stock market stuff looks to be driven by most stupid things.
one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that

Where are you getting that from?

I see nothing on the SendGrid page to suggest they track your blacklist status or feel obliged to help with unlisting when it happens.
I think it is a great move to exploit the fact that USA immigration laws are hell bent upon shutting doors in the faces of startups unless you are the next Facebook.
What really bothers is the high fee of $150k. I mean companies bootstrap or seek angel investments in the range of $15k-$100k. What on earth makes them think, if I already had that cash, I would be willing or even think of relocating?
If my business already has enough traction, then why would one bother. And if at all I had to relocate spending that much, I would rather do that in making the right inlays into US.
I use SendGrid, too. It was a no-brainer: $80 a month is cheap, I am expensive. I was quite expensive indeed dealing with persistent minor clusterflops like, e.g., automated forum spambots for the forum I host for college debaters (an old hobby) caused the BCC mailserver they were freeloading off of to have enough of a spike that a large multinational advertising company decided BCC "Thanks for paying me $30 Cindy, here's the software you just bought" emails needed to be consigned to the seventh circle of hell sandwiched between Viagra spam and their own customer support requests.
Blog is down... "Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; No Preferences Found"
If they're a good deal for you then there's no arguing with that.

I didn't mean to say they have no value proposition at all; the API and stats they provide can sure be useful for some.

All I was saying is that their raw deliverability is no different to running your own server. And your own server doesn't charge a few pennies per mail...
It is actually very easy to create a Friend List just for 'Game Friends.'

When you are adding a fake game friend, you can immediately add them to this list. Facebook makes this step easy.*

And to my surprise, it is also somewhat straightforward to exclude this list from your various privacy setting items. I assumed I would have to explicitly include - piece by piece - sets of friends with whom I do want to share data, but Facebook provides functionality to exclude a friend list. Bingo.

Now if I could only have a way to exclude a friend list from contributing to my News Feed.

* Furthermore, by assigning a fake friend to an appropriate list in the same step that you send a friend request, you can avoid the security gap within which a fake friend would have access to your private data before you were able to manually add them to such a list.
Seems like SendGrid caused the vast majority of comments so far. I feel like Xero, Apigee and RightSignature should get more love. What do you guys think?
It doesn't matter if it is 5% of a city or the whole city, it's not going to happen. The areas that were flooded now were mostly populated in 1974. There's a popular meme going around that huge areas of previously-vacant land was built upon. While that might be true in some instances of outer suburbs, in general the flooded suburbs of Brisbane were the same ones as all the previous floods.

As I've already stated, if you want to clear the city from the low-lying areas, you'll have to forcibly acquire a large amount of private property, which is either an expensive (if the law is followed) route, or a suspension of the current law. So suggesting the low lying areas be forcibly cleared is clearly unworkable. And it involves acquiring and demolishing the majority of the CBD. If you think that is even remotely possible then I've got the Story Bridge to sell you.

Everyone who purchases property in Brisbane is well aware of the 1974 floods. I know, because I purchased a property knowing full well it could be flooded one day as it was in 1974. And last week it was. But I'm not about to sell it or have the government confiscate it because it gets flooded once every 40 years.

About the best thing that could happen is something along the lines of
a) new developments must have critical infrastructure (electrical circuits etc) about the 100-year flood leve
b) flood prone suburbs could have prominent markers, such as bands around power poles to remind people of previous flood heights. There's a popular one in the Breakfast Creek Hotel.
c) new housing in flood zones could have a mandate not to use water soluble materials such as plasterboard in lower levels, and could be mandated to have the main living area above flood height. People with older houses often came out with no problems because the old houses were built with floods in mind.

This idea of avoiding flood risk by avoiding waterfront areas is silly. By the same token, all residents should abandon Cairns and Townsville because of the cyclone risk. And cyclones in the north happen far more frequently, and with more devastation than Brisbane floods.
Don't forget that at the moment an "App" is also equivalent to a website.
[arxiv] SafeVchat: Detecting Obscene Content and Misbehaving Users
Chop – efficiently dispense with the current git branch
How are the fb ads different now?

They're for Farmville & company, and the goal is not achieving a transaction during this session but rather just setting the hook for gameplay. Many who start will successfully spam their friends (viral factors greater than zero mean the average CPA to get a new signup is lower than the CPA you paid for the signup from ads), and a few will become extraordinarily lucrative buyers of virtual goods that have very high margins.
If that was their intention then yes it's smart but it seems it's rarely thought out that far in advance. And when by "that far in advance" I mean "tomorrow" it's a bit scary.
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Sure, I think it's a valid point. No beef there.
I dropped the idea of using Postmark after I read this blog-post: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmai...

In there they admit that mails sent through Postmark still end up in Spam-folders or black holes. That was basically the only added value I'd get from using them.
Ask HN: Auctions
This thread brings up an interesting point:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2113139

Should an auction be 'blind' or not for something like a web site? If it were a good way of generating higher prices, wouldn't sites like flippa find a way to do it?
Should be OK now. 600 concurrent users is big for us.
For us it's just another thing that's not our core competency which we're happy to have outsourced so that other people worry about security/maintenance etc... Similar rationale for using Spreedly [1] for subscription billing.

In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well.

We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch!

[1] - http://spreedly.com/
[2] - http://postmarkapp.com
Can you explain this to me?
Clickable link to the previous conversation: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2113139
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RMS Cart
RMScart is a powerful Webstore solution. A few clicks of your mouse on New West Technology’s interface, RMScart creates product pages for all of the products in your RMS database.
Google Releases the High Replication Datastore for App Engine
Funny idea! The magic slider doesn't work in FF 3.6.13 on Mac OS X.
a). They didn't link to the study. Or if they did, not anywhere I could see. Inexcusable in 'science' journalism!

b). Any control group on the babies to see if it's actually fear of spiders they learnt, or just fear?
More found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_car_rental
Couldn't he use anchoring (e-bay style) with a minimum price?
Race against time for raiders of the lost lake
Gaming Unleashed on Android (C/C++ Programmability)
I'll second that Xero is an excellent service and it really doesn't get as much press as it deserves in the states. They're very easy to use and have done an heroic job building out both the software and support.

HOWEVER, their entry-pricing is incredibly irritating. For $228/year you can't add any more than 5 invoices or reconcile more than 20 lines of bank statement per month. For the entire price of quickbooks every single year you should be able to at least use your accounting system.
Could be fun for children on the iPad/Galaxy Tab I guess. If you provide a couple outline-images (Disney-licensed characters would be best I guess..) and better tools to color them, e.g. other brushes. Right now it does not appear to be a finished app.
You mention proximity to US investors in Bay Area - my experience is that investors in Bay Area tend to only want to fund Delaware C Corp companies with founders based locally. Anything outside of that is unlikely to get funded in many cases (Aside from the proximity issue, I'm guessing for local Canadian employment laws and to get this visa you would have to be running a Canadian registered company).

All of your comments about Vancouver are true, but none of them has anything to do with whether it makes a great place to do a startup.
Infosec Island Q1 2011 Membership Drawing
FWIW: Worked fine on my FF 3.6.13 on Mac OS X

...on 10.6.6 mbp

EDIT: no extensions on my FF
How is the Fermi Paradox evidence for evolution of computation being logistic? Does the logistic function appear somewhere in the Fermi Paradox?

I have a feeling you are not using very strict logic here.
Beautiful men, women are more likely to be smarter with high IQs, too: study
Agreed. I picked up twentytwelve.net a couple of years ago (I was surprised to find it completely unregistered at the time) and have several ideas for making a bit of side-money out of it - but having ideas and making plans is worth nothing if you don't find the time and enthusiasm to actually implement something and support it afterwards.

Maybe at some point this year I'll pull my finger out and find time to do something meaningful with it, before the window of relevance runs out...
Your dogfood can be in the back-end analytics systems you build.
hm strange. for me, the first time I loaded the page and whizzed the slider back and forth, it felt like each face was loading separately (faces were half-loaded etc).

or it could have been just the large sprite was still downloading as I was sliding the bar.

in which case, probably best to preload it :)
70% are free I think, and drive traffic to the other 30%.
I hear Netscape is coming out with a new version soon, too.
I've just started integrating postmark on an app I'm working on; their API & docs are excellent, they're not too pricy either.
> That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs "whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and after you've been blacklisted, in order to get unlisted.

That's nonsense, lots of people do that. Only you don't usually go direct to the service provider, see following links:

http://www.returnpath.net/commercialsender/certification/

http://www.spamhauswhitelist.com/en/

http://www.certified-senders.eu/csa_html/en/266.htm
Want to know what a VC term sheet looks like? Sample here.
Report: Mobile App Market Will Be Worth $25 Billion By 2015 - Apple’s Share: 20%
Crowdgather: The Importance Of Forums On The Internet
An interesting read for anyone contemplating taking money. Shameless plug: if you find this confusing, I posted a thread on Sunday that provides a good way for founders to broaden their legal knowledge. Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110713
We use Postmark, (we've sent a few million emails through them) and they indeed do this for us.
Too bad all the good stuff got deferred to JDK 8.

* good stuff - Project Lambda, langauge support for collections, reified generics (TBD?)...
I wonder if Bing has seen an uptick in searches for 'why has Google changed colours' and 'why is Google now spelled Bing'?

I suspect the mystery of the changed homepage and new toolbar is, to many users, alongside the mystery of why the printer sometimes doesn't work or my cell phone drops out when I'm still in the living room. 'It's technology. It happens. Nothing I can do about it.'

Which I guess means Zugo [Edit - actually, Make-my-baby.com] is manipulating the uneducated (in a tech sense). Borderline business behaviour, though a well thought out and executed strategy.
Wow, having used EE, I always thought it was cumbersome to use, prone to running out of memory very easy, and did not offer much over regular php or Drupal/Joomla.
http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html
Any control group on the babies to see if it's actually fear of spiders they learnt, or just fear?

What would comprise the control group? Psychopath baby crickets?
Most interesting features:

* Added an invokedynamic instruction for faster execution of dynamic languages on the JVM

* Small language changes (e.g. strings in switch). See http://openjdk.java.net/projects/coin/
Yeah, office Glico is the besssssttt!
A brave new world of fossil fuels on demand - The Globe and Mail
It's blatantly obvious the content is ripped off other sites and it's not "user submitted" like they claim. These corporation is hated on the forums where it hunts for memes. It's disgusting.