skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone else not using the default Android player because it sucks? I've found Winamp to be much better. If this is almost identical to the stock Android music player (like the article suggests), that'd be quite a letdown. I was hoping Google would make some improvements soon.
Are you arguing that there is no truly objective test for good writing? If so, I agree.
Someone who is CS educated but hasn't done a great deal of self-teaching in programming is going get a heart attack when applying for his first job.
It seems this phone uses a web application that connects to a remote machine that provides the desktop applications. This is one of the ways of doing it; they bring the remote environment to your phone.

In our case however, the OS itself (i.e. linux kernel) runs on the baremetal hypervisor directly resident on the device.
I'd liken the current state of Apps, both Android and iOS to 1998-era PC/internet maturity, with annoying ads everywhere, popups flying at you every click, games that interrupt you with non-closable advertising screens, low quality shareware or shovelware feel, etc.

I think these practices are only hurting themselves, as I'm pretty adverse to downloading an advertisement that might deliver the app functionality promised nowadays. My Android phone has maybe a half-dozen apps installed that aren't published by Google. I've only had an iPad for a week, but it hasn't faired much better.
> (disclaimer: you must weigh less than 53 metric tons)

Damnit!
Show HN: Phaxio.com | A pay-as-you-go fax API for developers
URL: www.phaxio.com

The concept behind Phaxio is pretty simple: Powerful fax API, simple pricing and a clean frontend. Built for developers.

Response has been pretty good so far so I think we're ready for the HN critique.

You can go to phaxio for a beta invite or you email me at info [at] phaxio [dot] com.
Not sure why this is such a big deal. A human made an error, and I'm sure in Conde Nast's case 8 million dollars isn't that big of a deal. It was probably one of many transactions with that many zeros coming and going that day.

The bigger news is that the guy that did it opened the account in the US and kept the money there? I can't fault some random accounting person for being duped in that manner, but one would expect the criminal to be a bit smarter.
Why don't you need to be a Lisp expert?
You're right: they don't do conventional advertising anymore. Here's a blog about their strategy: http://taptaptap.com/blog/kill-yr-ads-the-donts-of-iphone-ap...

Also, look at those Daring Fireball prices in that blog post! I'm jealous.
WORLD BIGGEST GLOBAL CHAT ZONE
Yep. They managed to refute their own title in four words, I am impressed.
Just what dieters need: a calorie count estimate with no significant digits!
Github for designers
I had a random thought for a site idea today: A public version control system for designers.

I come from a design background and I don't know any designers who version control their assets, like PSDs, Illustrator files, InDesign, etc. Sites like Github are designed for apps, so the presentation layer is optimized for lists of files. From a designer's perspective, seeing thumbnails would be more appropriate.

Does a site like this exist? As a designer, would you want a system in place for handling versioning of your design assets?

Personally, I think it's very important and it should be part of any designer's toolbox. It could be as simple as building something on top of Github, just with a different presentation layer.

Shortcomings:
- No cherry-picking changes. Each commit is a new instance.
- Adobe stuff is integral for designers, but is limited in what data can be extracted.
I believe you can learn whatever you wish, but depending on your field of study it's pretty hard procuring multimillion dollar machines used in some (chemistry, nuclear sciences, etc) sciences.
I wonder if this change will result in Google focusing and releasing more hard core technology products or more social products.
From the about page:

In the period between 1975 and 1979, the Agency convened a rare series of conversations between an eccentric cast of characters representing a wide range of perspectives within the contemporary social, political, and cultural milieu. The ARPANET Dialogues is a serial document which archives these conversations. Even more unusual perhaps was the specific circumstances of the conversation: taking advantage of recent developments in telecommunications technology, the conversation was conducted via an instant messaging application networked by computers plugged into ARPANET, the United States Department of Defense’s experimental computer network. All participants in the conversation were given special access to terminals connected to ARPANET, many of them located in US military installations or DOD-sponsored research institutions around the world. Excerpts from each session will be published as they become available.
Hands-free taps harbour more bacteria, study finds
i meant free*. Typed this in a hurry.
I use a mix of Rdio and Pandora for my music enjoyment. I have about 100 gigs of local music on my Drobo that I never listen to.
Because Khan hasn't yet redone his lectures in the original Latin.
I think I understand now: it's a company that helps small media companies make money advertising on the web; nothing to do with journalism. I was waaay off, thank you. :)
It's the only language we don't use.
Why was the Secret Service involved?
How to connect across boundaries and collaborate online
I'm not such a great programmer, but it seems obvious to me that you'd want to write a kernel in the most minimal (as in close to the hardware) but portable language possible.

Further, a language as expansive as C++ on a collaborative volunteer project probably wouldn't work so well. (Don't folks complain all the time about how everyone uses a different C++?)
There is no divide, like anything in life if a person simply uses it as a means to an end then the product is going to reflect this. This is true with anything.
I love posts like this. There are too many blog posts that make it to the top of HN that are just complaining or speculating of some type. I would much rather read a detailed write-up on the discovery and solution to a problem.
Agreed. I've learned that the only times I can't learn on my own is when the text itself is incompetent at teaching. Sometimes though there are some amazing lecturers that deserve your full attention.
I ran a startup in Kathmandu, Nepal for 4 years (www.olenepal.org) and this mirrors my experience there. The modus operandi of Nepali Schools is the "the teacher speaks and the kids repeat." this means that you can't judge applicants at all by their educational background. The best ones I had were almost entirely self-educated. Also, I think I found that only one in 50 applicants were worth hiring.

That said, I believe that the geeks I hired are totally world class. I also believe that w/in 5 years time they will be earning 100,000 USD per year, whether they are living in Nepal or elsewhere. cuz, they are worth it.
I can hardly recall Jobs saying anything about jailbreaking at all. Would be interesting to hear more about the case of him going ballistic over the issue.
Early Evidence Shows The Daily a Bust: What This Means for Tablets
You may want to include page views of wiki page in other (human) languages.
As I recall, to pass grade 9 typing in my Toronto area high school I had to type 40 WPM net.
The reality of a large corporation like Google is nowhere near as simple an engineer-vs-manager dichotomy as many of the comments on this thread would make it. Products need to be developed, but they need to be supported and sold too. Which of these functions is most important depends on your world view and your tolerance for angels-on-a-pinhead debate, but it's undoubted that each of them are crucial.

An engineering mindset of automation and solution-by-algorithm gives us the miserable customer service that Google is famous for; a realisation that people are tricky and messy gives us something more like Zappos. The people who are good at support and managing support teams are not like engineers, and the people running sales are an entirely different breed. Rare is it to find someone who can successfully manage all three. Indeed, I would go out on a limb and say - as an engineer myself - that it's easier to find a non-technical person who can make a positive impact in product development than it is to find an engineering who can significantly improve sales or support.
Indexing the Real World: The Enormous Potential of Hyperlocal Data
The Big Vote Is Today: Will San Francisco Hang on to Twitter?
Something similar is happening in Europe, with Islamic immigrants.
6 reasons why our startup company uses ColdFusion
Nice. Bug: when i have the dropdown for "what I'm homesick for" but hit discover, the dropdown stays over the new overlay.
Some of the comments I've read seem to misunderstand the purpose of this page. This isn't the objectively best writing style, this is a concise writing style. No, it might not be the most pleasant to read, because extremely to-the-point short sentences sound blunt. The guidelines provided for writing short and concise sentences are very useful, if that's the style you are aiming for.
No, at least not if the academic advisor knows anything. I was pushed into generals and certain key classes to get an introduction to my major and it's fit. In smaller US high schools there are vocational training paths, however it was limited to welding and nursing where I came from. There's supposed to be the tradition of "Liberal Arts" in the system, where a general academic background is impressed before any specific training.

Because of this, there's more fluidity (not in any traditionally siloed discipline, like medicine) in the US university system, see: the cliché about the 6 year student who changed their major after three years. Most of the structure comes from parental and academic pressure to buckle down and really dedicate to the subject.
I love when companies move back to their purer roots. I don't know where this puts Google's progress as a company over the next few years, but it definitely means we won't be seeing the innovation slowdown that Microsoft experienced after their years of explosion. As long as our tech superstars arn't just turning into company gobbling monsters, but rather are constantly iterating, innovating, and developing their product line like a company should.
Menyingkap Rahasia Cara Menaikkan Page Rank « Dwiki Setiyawan's Blog
I don't understand why they're bringing the traveling salesman problem into this at all. The core problem Uber has to solve is simply to get one driver (of many) to the customer as fast as possible, not to determine the most efficient route between all of the customers.
So the most comparable product of theirs is the Wrap 920AR. There are a differences in terms of specs: 1) higher resolution displays (800x600 rather than 640x480), 2) higher resolution cameras (hopefully hitting 1024x768 with the initial CMOS sensors, but that one's up in the air; mostly just a matter of figuring out which one will be the best cost-wise in production), 3) visual processing happens on the glasses rather than on the PC.

However, these differences pale in comparison to the difference in underlying technology. Rather than having displays in front of your eyes that are fed data from the cameras as with Vuzix' tech, we're using Eyetap technology. What this does is feed natural light straight into your eye after it's gone through a beamsplitter to be sent into the camera. On the other side of the beamsplitter is a display showing you overlays. This means that there's no "reality lag", and that you can do far nicer overlays.
thanks for pointing that out. will investigate and forward to jQuery UI.
peep that API: http://hyperpublic.com/developers
The State Dep. has $30M to combat Internet censorship. Why isn't it spending it?
It was a snap decision. It just didn't feel right to include PostScript in the list.

However, you are definitely right: PostScript is Turing-complete, and hence a programming language (as well as LaTeX and Batch, AFAIK).
It's not necessarily true. There are a lot of people that take mainly "general education" classes that are required to graduate during the first two years, or alternatively get an associates degree first. Also, given that you're not in a particularly demanding major (like the max-unit engineering degrees) and have a lot of electives, you're not out a lot of work by changing majors within your first two years. Most majors don't have chaining dependencies that take the full four years to complete. For my degree, there was a set of 8 classes that were required to become an upper-division student that only had a 3 semester-deep dependency chain (let's use a computer -> object oriented programming -> abstract data types), and then upper division had around 8-10 classes, and there was only a 3 semester-deep chain (data structures -> processor design -> operating systems). The number of classes you can take per semester is the limiting factor.

Also, considering that people are working jobs and going to school at the same time, four year degrees sometimes take longer. It's pretty common for the challenging engineering degrees to take 5 years due to the sheer number of units required to graduate (I took 6 years, without switching, although I did get a double major in math & computer science).
The Secret Service was originally created to investigate counterfeiting. While the role has mostly shifted focus to protecting the President, it still investigates financial crimes.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service
First impressions after using it for an hour or so:

- code completion destroys XCode, it's much more accurate.

- tabs make everything better.

- code generation is OK, more accessible and better than XCode.

- seems stable, no crashes thus far.
Max Levchin's greatest lessons
Ah nice! I wasnt aware that Atrix was remote access. Well I wish you much success - anything that allows more OS flexibility is a win in my book!
I would expect a trademark complaint from Tiffen the second this gets published in the app store.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steadicam

Other than that, great work!
A bit of background about me before I add my 2 cents: because of my rank in an entrance examination (JEE), I ended up majoring in Civil Engineering and managed to work towards a minor in CS (which was, and is my passion). I'll be graduating in a few months.

I've experienced a bit of both worlds—I picked up books on Data Structures (including Red Black trees), attempted to implement Rjindael in C++ (without understanding any of the underlying math) in high school, learnt PHP/JS/CSS/C++ and started building from there.

What I've observed is—as a self taught programmer the biggest disadvantage is that you don't know what all is available/standard—as someone else mentioned in the thread, I did not know about parsers until I managed to take a course in Programming Languages.

Since I realized that there was so much I did not know, I've tried to make it a point to keep asking my batch-mates in CS what they are reading, picking up textbooks recommended by professors in class; reading other books as recommended on HN, and elsewhere (SICP, Learn you a Haskell..., started reading TAOCP, etc.) and have attempted to at least match my batch-mates who are CS undergrads. At the very least—try to get a fairly broad idea about known solved and unsolved problems.

The biggest advantages an avg CS undergrad has over me is that s/he has the credentials (which, I've tried to match by having my own open source project, doing interns in well-known companies, etc.), and that s/he is exposed to much more theory than I would ever be without actually having to do much beyond attending classes (for which I have to go the extra mile).

The advantage _I_ have over the other, standard CS guys is that I have the freedom to find out more about what I really want to do, and explore/follow certain areas which I find more interesting without being bound by academia (tests, reports, stupid & pointless assignments), and in general, perhaps—have a lot more fun while learning.
Isn't that how it works in the US as well?

In general no. Some specific programs may have a special admissions program (art and music are culprits here) and sometimes you need to apply to a specific school (e.g. Engineering vs Arts & Sciences). But usually, you can major in "Undeclared" for your first 2 years.

I've always hated the notion that we expect 18 year old people to invest $25-100k on education in "Undeclared Major" with the eventual hope that they will figure something useful out. It's almost as silly as dropping $25-100k on "Undeclared Stock or ETF", though unlike "Undeclared Stock or ETF", there is some hedonic benefit.
New update solves most of the issues raised by you guys. Thanks a lot for all the feedback.
So here's a question for potential HN entrepreneurs:

If your company got as big as Microsoft or Google, would you split it up, spinning off subdivisions as separate companies?

And (in the case of MSFT/Google) why haven't they done that?
Some thoughts:

1.) There's a lack of contrast in the page. A visited link is the same color as a comment that is rated < 0.

2.) The up/down vote arrows are visually far away from the name of the user. Knowing the context of who's saying something can mean the difference between a troll post and an insightful one.

3.) The page is no longer fluid. While this is more preference than an actual issue, I think that a fixed width format is detrimental for those of us who have widescreen monitors (or for those of us who like to tile our windows in small patches).

4.) Whitespace. There's a lot of it. Without your plugin, I can see all of the articles on the front page in ~1400px. With the stylesheet patch, it's about 3x that. I visit HN a lot, and will click on just about every story. As such, when I'm done reading HN all of the links have changed color. When I visit it later in the day, I can at a glance see every story that's new. Sometimes I have it autorefresh every few minutes on a separate monitor, and keeping everything concise allows me to do that.

Those are my thoughts. At this stage I'd say that it's pretty, but not yet functional. Work on the functional portion and I'll keep this plugin installed. Great work, keep it up!
I've helped organizations transition from waterfall to agile, and there was absolutely no decrease in the workload for management.

You still need some form of functional management to get the right staff, make sure they have what they need to be able to do their jobs, and deal with day to day issues. This might sound trivial, but it really isn't, and somebody who does this job well will enable a lot more success than somebody who treats it as a minor task.

And you also still need some form of product and project management to ensure that the work being done is aligned with strategy, marketing, sales, finance, etc, and to serve as an interface with those groups. Failure to do this effectively creates massive inefficiencies.

As such, I really don't think any moderately intelligent competent manager is at all concerned by Scrum, Kanban, XP, TDD, Lean, or any other Agile practice.
I don't see the option you mentioned on their site. From the pricing plans it looks to be the same price as braintree
most companies fail, even the ones run by those who "understand the market" (if that phrase has any meaning outside of speaking completely in hindsight).
You can set RACK_ENV now, cool.
It'd be interesting in seeing the quality of those leads for final businesses.
agreed, especially in light of the stories we just heard about technical skills being valued less in managers there. I think this is someone just coming up with a nice narrative.
What I meant by that was that we weren't giving away 500 hours on a micro or small instance. We've not found them very useful for Rails/Ruby web apps. It costs us more to give away 500 hours of mediums, but we think the experience is a lot better.
In addition to the Presidential protection mission (added later, after Lincoln), the Secret Service's original function was as Treasury police -- to prevent counterfeiters, financial fraud, etc. Until 2003, they were actually part of the Department of the Treasury, not DHS.
agree with dman...channeling this initial phase is very important...keep everything completely ready...because when the initial phase runs out, youre gonna need some progress done to get you through that next phase
SomaFM is also very nice.
Local markets benefit from fragmentation
I'd still say that's targeted based on "interest." Everyone needs tax work around tax time. It's much harder to target say "people who need a new furnace."

|The key is not to target too broad a group. <-- That's the key in almost all direct marketing.
The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not
I'd say the only exception to this is when it is illegal (or possibly immoral) to carryout the lessons outside of a sanctioned learning environment.

Dissecting cadavers comes to mind, or operating a small fission reactor, etc.

Of course there are ways to learn about these things without actually doing them, but there are probably some edge cases where experience is important and difficult to obtain outside of the university.
Large corps are hardly run for employee productivity or happiness. They are run to maximize short term personal wealth of managers, and (less importantly) shareholders.
Layoffs are routinely used as an opportunity to flatten organizations by removing layers of management.

I don't think I've ever seen a corporate reorg where middle management wasn't amongst the hardest hit groups. They're expensive, and you can usually fire a huge swath them without thinking, tell the remaining ones to start working late and limp along until times get better.
3 week update on Japan's nuclear crisis
Careful though: older versions of flash will still store cookies even if you're in incognito mode (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=072d...). This is especially true with many linux installations, as often times they have older versions of flash for compatibility purposes (64 bit flash... ugh...)
Works great with the Collapsible Comments extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hockhafcdegocajmjh...
An update has been posted that solves some of these issues (2, 4).

(3) Fluid has a deterimental effect at lengthier line span (when it exceeds 50-60 chars). Hence limited at 700 px.

(1)On HN visited links are read emails for me. Hence they are of not much use and thus same treatment as the dead link.

Also it is funny since the reason most people gave for requesting flushing commenter's name to left was that they upvote or downvote with help of points/commenter's name! Atleast that was my interpretation. I had thought of the exact opposite reason and hence put it in right earlier. Upvote should have nothing to do with who said it or how many points it has already received.
I've found Evercookie to be really useful in eliminating spam.

Despite having captchas and per user send limits on my site, Nigerians were submitting tons of forms through my site a while back trying to trick users with the same scams that are popular on Craigslist. They know to clear their cookies, etc. Adding Evercookie cut down on the number of spam messages considerably just by keeping a count of the number of messages sent from a particular computer and blocking messages after more than a certain number per day.

Perhaps most satisfying, I implemented it so the message appeared to have been sent successfully even when it was blocked. So there are Nigerians happily working away all day "sending" message on my site still thinking it is working. I sometimes get hundreds of blocked message notifications per day.
As an ex-academic I believe formal education is about credentialing ... but I fundamentally believe that all learning is really self-taught.

As an ex-academic with this view, how much stock do you put in credentials?