skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a newbie to JavaScript, who got in primarily for the upcoming "web audio API" in webkit. As I code, I realize how capable the JS engines have become over time - enough to do some "serious" math for audio. Also seeing WebGL taking hold, I must say that I'd certainly consider JS as a serious contender for the likes of .Net etc and am glad to see MS and HP also think along those lines. Add in the fact that you can use it on the server side as well, and the argument for it is even more compelling.

I don't have any qualms saying that those who choose to stay out are depriving themselves of what starting to be a productive app dev platform across the board, with C++ serving as the "dive in for performance" level.
Interesting possibility, but claiming psychopathy still reflects badly on a person's character, even if it means that person is almost certainly not a psychopath. It shows that a person is at least mildly histrionic and self-deprecating in an off-putting way (cheap, fake sincerity). Therefore, it's not a useful or skillful act, and the rational psychopaths aren't going to pursue it.
Don't ignore him! Its would be a very good thing if you'd just call him and explain the prior art to him and gently steer him toward not wasting his time and money pursuing a patent that won't be granted.

Of course you might head off the serendipitous granting of a ridiculous patent that might fall into the hands of a real troll ala Lodsys later. If he refuses to listen to reason, you might look into sending the prior art to the patent office in reference to his application.
Italian Seismologists Charged With Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake
I'd take this to suggest that XAML based tech isn't really going away in Win8. I'd also take it with a grain of salt
The linked paper (which really is written for a layman), explains exactly that.
Indeed. The other problem with metallurgy is that it's awfully complicated on all sorts of scales from the atomic to the micron scale.

Most materials and chemicals out there we now have a pretty darn good understanding of, thanks to being able to sit there and simulate the atomic structure of the material in the computer. But metals like steel are far too complicated since you're not just interested in hundreds or thousands of atoms at a time. To understand steel and predict its properties you need to understand all the impurities and the grain boundaries -- these things occur on scales which are far too large for simulation.

So metallurgy remains somewhat like baking a cake. We can bake all sorts of tasty cakes, but there are other cake recipes out there yet to be discovered which might taste even better and we have no idea how to get there from here. (And for this analogy to not completely break down let's just assume that "tastiness" is both objective and measurable even though it isn't...)
Academically Adrift
Privacy concern for Facebook photo scan
Well no, because nobody does or legally could possibly have a patent on cooling metal with water. So I'm not sure what your point is.

It strikes me that many of the folks who most stridently object to patent law don't actually know much about it.
I've done one of those things and its true what they say "All the good ones are taken." Most people I met didn't seem qualified to run a business.
There is a huge difference between something be "impossible" and something being theoretically impossible. The first is an engineering problem. The second is a much deeper level of problem.

The Wright brothers didn't have to overturn any accepted theoretical constructs to build the airplane. On the contrary, the theory at the time said they were on the right track. It was the general public that thought it was impossible.
Maybe on an article which mentions patents?

Patent law does seem to be one of those "classic flamewar topics" which I doubt anybody has anything especially new to say about. And the fact that somebody invented a new metal doesn't change the terms of the debate or provide anyone with new information, people have been inventing new metals (and things analogous to new metals) for a long time.
Ask HN: MusicWalla - A Social Online Radio : Review my product concept
Hi guys,
I recently came up with a concept for a social online radio. It is just a half-baked idea as of now but the following presentation should give you a gist.

I'm a user experience researcher so all it's features are a result of different user data acquisition techniques. I am working on adding game dynamics to this model(foursquare style badges and user upvoting).

I would love to get some valuable inputs from you guys!

www.vikasvadlapatla.com/musicwalla

Direct link to presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/vgvikas/musicwalla-business-pitch-7864740
I've started with one server in approx. 2003, in 2003/2004 they had once or twice half day downtimes, I can't remember any downtime since 2006 at least, sometimes certain routes are a bit slowed down, but I guess that's to be expected (they nicely inform about stuff like that in the forum) Oh yeah in 2009 they moved data centers which resulted in 6 hours scheduled downtime during the night.

I've just seen nowadays they guarantee 99% Network availability.

None of my 7 servers has ever suffered a hard disk crash or similar, which is nice but not actually a meaningful data point. (Another nice point, internal traffic is free, even between their data centers)

Their support is top notch in my experience, answers within 15 minutes with the free support. Just read a random post in their support forum, they switched a defective power supply within 2 hours. They once phoned me because one of my servers was behaving suspiciously.

All in all, if you can live with 99% uptime I don't know any provider that's cheaper or has better support. (They do have failover IPs (http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/flexipa...) and high availablity packs (http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/option-...) but that doesn't help with the 99% network availability)
That you write OSS is fairly irrelevant to the situation, so far as I can tell. IANAL, granted.
Also check out this independent uptime data: http://www.webhostlist.de/provider/1782-Hetzner-Online-AG/ve...
Supply and demand. In '98-'99 kids got big heads because they knew HTML. It will sort itself out in a year or two.
This article is extremely good. We always criticize pop-science journalism but in my mind, this is what good technology journalism looks like. I wish to hell that I could subscribe to a magazine like this instead of the hand-wavy baby talk that and sensationalism they are currently filled with.

I think it's a real shame that even scientists are often getting the baby-talk version of each-other's fields. Biologists, chemists, and astrophysicists should be able to read intelligent summaries of the findings in Quantum Mechanics without having to go to the journals.

The writing is challenging but the concepts themselves are challenging. Too often I think the scientists themselves try to summarize their work into a nice pull quote that sounds mysterious and interesting but they miss out on the opportunity to educate.
This what I love about human ingenuity: we constantly strive to improve upon something even if other people say it can't be done.
IANAL, but it may be good to get the patents he claims to have claim to, and discuss this with a lawyer.
Not technically - international law today "allows only three situations as legal cause to go to war: out of self-defense, defense of an ally under a mutual defense pact, or sanctioned by the UN" [1].

Iranians may construe stuxnet as an attack that they are hoping to prevent from reoccuring, and thus use the self-defense justification, but 'casus belli' must be the absolute last resort of a nation. Assuming they follow international law that is.

Another important aspect to remember is that retaliation and the use of force does not mean 'war' in and of itself.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli
I've been considering buying standing desks for our new office with stools instead of normal desks, but I'm a wee bit worried about how potential hires would react when they walk through the office on the way to an interview.

I do worry about people's health though and as long as there are stools, it shouldn't be any worse than sitting at a normal desk (though I guess your feet do dangle).
IMF hit by 'very major' cyber security attack
Let me guess, smarty guys like just like you should dictate curricula and taste?
Since this post made it to the front page of HN, I'd say it's got to infuriate at least some people. That, or a large HN demographic likes the report that .NET developers are infuriated? This seems much more likely to me.
yeah, I didn't expect to get downvoted for that. I wasn't trolling. I was puzzled by this too, since when I searched for les paul,

I only got two results: one for the logo, and one for the list of logos.
Thanks. One of the only times le goog has failed me. I should have just went to wikipedia, or maybe wolfram
The best book on video editing, bar none, is Walter Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye" so, get that and read it like 20 times. Then get yourself a copy of FCP and use export for web.

To shoot good video, the choice of camera (at least, prosumer) is not as important as lighting technique, I recommend getting a film production textbook from eBay(they're all pretty good really) and a trip to home depot to buy materials for a green screen, and make yourself a cheap lighting kit. For compositing and effects software, I can't really recommend after effects, but that's what I've used before. (eagerly awaiting an open source JavaScript replacement :( #wildestdreams

That should leave you in good shape. as for actors, yeah, it's worth budgeting for. Some folks can do multiple voices. That's how you can tell the good ones. Plenty of talent in any city though, just go to a local theater show and ask around.
Unless, of course, they stole it from someone else.
Ruby Ring [1] offers an unlimited VPS for $2.49! I'm a flat-fee junkie, and although I hope I some day have the prospect of actual overuse, I love the peace of mind associated with flat fees.

Just for the curious, yes, you do get quite a few interruptions in your service, but the staff is pretty good about it, and it's a reasonable thing to expect given the conditions. Certainly it is OK just for learning, which is my case.

[1] http://rubyringtech.com/
I had an email along these lines last year -- someone accusing me of violating his patent application.

Just junk it.
>Let's say I'm living in IL

>Aside from the legal discussion, in practical terms what part of this equation involves the state of Illinois?

In practical terms, the argument goes that you benefit from the safety and health services that are (at least in part) provided by the state during the hours you work, marketing for Amazon. By extension, Amazon is also benefiting from these services provided (at least in part) by the state, which can be proven by identifying a single payment made from Amazon to an affiliate that is a resident of IL.

Legally, this could be grounds for one to argue that, by providing marketing services for Amazon while working in IL, nexus[1] has been created.

[1] http://www.bna.com/state-tax-nexus-p9122/
Oh, while you're at home depot, get yourself a little cart to serve as a ghetto dolly, and don't forget to buy a tripod. You can fake a good steadycam with these two, but you should always use a tripod. Oh, and add "Guerilla filmmaking" by Robert Rodriguez to the reading list.
One thing I've always wanted is something to extract multi-page forum threads and render them in a normalized readable way. For example, Reddit comment threads like IAMAs.

Anyone know of a service or library that does that?
@wikileaks tweet regarding tonight's piece on CNN..

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/79662853447094272
Cloud Save
The private sector with in-house apps pays better than startups? Is that what I'm reading?

Forgive me, but I believe I can safely disagree here.
I actually started playing with the concept one weekend for IAmAs specifically. I was trying to do it all client-side and the issue I was running up against was reddit's jsonp responses get VERY slow on large threads.
I'm a .NET dev. I wouldn't say I was infuriated, but annoyed/disappointed probably covers it.
$7 for 10 TB transfer with 512MB RAM. No SLA to speak of, but it makes a fantastic backup machine.
Don't forget DRM, too (a la Netflix)

I don't support restrictive DRM, but Netflix does have to bow to their content owners to stay in business
I agree with your sentiment generally, but the HN community is overwhelmingly against software and business process patents. Therefore, as a matter of balance, when an article appears where patent law might be applied as originally intended I believe that it's responsible to highlight examples of the good use of patents.

Frankly, I think that it's incredibly interesting some people don't think that this new method of producing steel is worthy of patent protection, and is a valuable discussion to have. The reasons for being against software patents usually revolve around software being reducible to math, but here that argument is not applicable.

Given that I want to know more about their reasoning, are you suggesting that in order to have this discussion I need to go to the trouble of writing a blog about this article as it relates to HN's community sentiment, submit it to HN's news feed, and cross my fingers that it makes it to the front page where the people who responded to this article might see it and contribute? That seems unnecessary and overly burdensome.
The wikipedia article about this goes more in depth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
"In fact, the most common reaction we hear is Wow! literally."

Strike 2, RazDog.
I have had my share of cheap VPS's and in my experience you can find good value at $7/box. Rule of thumb is to go with Xen PV and to always pay monthly. There are some exceptions. For example BuyVM has a $15/year offer for 128 MB that is not oversold.
It may be displacing a local purchase... in a third, unrelated state. Only the affiliate lives in Connecticut, the purchaser may live in Colorado... or Czech Republic, for that matter. I think you have the argument about capitalism backwards. Any time someone says "that's unfair, we should change the laws to help (inefficient business X) compete more effectively with (efficient business Y)", they are directly contradicting the idea of capitalism.

Where the social good lies is sometimes hard to work out; but I'd guess in this case Connecticut residents would be better off with an efficient Amazon and the ability to become Amazon Affiliates than with the small amount of tax revenue that this legislation tries to capture.
"... Hardware support is a big part of the Linux desktop problem, but it’s not the only problem. Half-baked DE like KDE 4.0, Ubuntu’s Unity and GNOME 3.0 are just as dangerous. ..."

All my problems with @nix/@bsd and desktops start with "X".

The big wakeup for me is that the bug known, marked severe and has existed since 2005 without resolution. [0],[1],[2] It doesn't matter what distro or OS I choose. The core of the desktop has problems. I don't blame Linux, X or gnome devs for this, nor do I contemplate switching back to Windows or deserting to Apple. The culprit here is crappy software (eg: try reading through the various GDM shell wrappers) and closed binary drivers (nVidia) and the solution is writing better low level software.

[0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=182517

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/63905

[2] http://www.xfree86.org/current/chips7.html
WhatTheFuckShouldINameMyStartup.com
The phrase "Mainstreet Fairness Act" sounds like something directly out of Atlas Shrugged.
I'm not a patent lawyer, but from what I can pull up from my patent law class notes:
Troll is quite possibly blocked by the public use doctrine. Anything that's been in public use without being patented for a year or more goes into the public domain (35 usc 102(b) for anyone who cares). If he filed on or after June 23, 2010, he failed.
You're still making the same tradeoff, though it's less obvious.
I have quite a few friends doing .NET for a living, and I can safely say that I make more than them using Ruby at work (at an ad agency, no less). They would definitely not call their jobs a "gravy train."
Port Details and List of All Classification of TCP UDP ports
Very good point. But Microsoft has made a STRONG commitment to declarative UIs starting with WPF continuing with Silverlight. Windows Phone 7 was a total reboot of their mobile platform centered around Silverlight. There's no pussyfooting when it comes to Windows 8. They're severing the ties and going all in.
Let's start making it more complicated again!

Wind meter on the other side of the conveyer belt and an air horn whenever it drops below a certain level...
I briefly checked out the first 20 or 30 reviews on Amazon and was not surprised by the comments, but by the ratings. My take on the comments? True: if you are a long time follower of the signal vs. noise blog then you will have seen some of the material before.
True: some of the advice is ambiguous, but necessarily so - this is not a "how to start a web company" step-by-step manual. It is an aid to seeing business from a total non-traditional platform.
True: the book is short on pages and word-count - you can easily read it in an afternoon. Every other page is an illustration (no informational value) of some kind taking away from actual information space - I did feel I was mislead by this.
True: They do use their own company as an example quite a lot which took away credibility. Their biz is the extreme example in a few ways but it is very interesting how they embrace obstacles that others run from i.e. having globally spread employees.

I got over my own negativities when I read the book for the second time three months later. The book is written in such a way that, to me, the message will adapt and be meaningful regardless of the current situation. Kind of like the bookd Who Moved My Cheese is still taught and changes meaning for each reader, each time they read it.

In my opinion it's definitely worth reading - take that for what you will.

Other suggestions? I've got plenty if you want 'em. I read a book or two a week. Here's two more of my fav business-type books.

Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin &
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber - a classic

Here's a short cut to the best reading on business and entrepreneurship - take the following links and cross reference. If a book is on both lists it's usually very good.

http://sivers.org/book

http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
English version: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/omiekjeapoonbhieme...

Or just delete the "?hl=ko#" at the end of the orginal url. It had me really confused for a while.
Sounds like a good idea, now build it!
These types of articles are are dangerous if they serve as collective ego strokes for somewhat talented developers. If you are one of those rare multi-talented first-class developer/designer/entrepreneurs, more power to you but implementation is both under-rated and over-rated. You will still accomplish an order of magnitude more by finding the right team.

Steve Jobs is not an implementer. Wozniak was one of the most brilliant. With the collective talent at Apple, surely they could stop "working for the man" and live their dreams.

Bad or slow implementation can kill the best of ideas but a great implementation of a mediocre product will go nowhere.

It's more about assessing your true strengths and weaknesses, finding a team where your talents are a good fit but get a stretched enough that you're always growing at a healthy pace.

If you feel under-rated maybe it's more about your communication than being under-appreciated as an implementer.
Please do this the right way. Any issue concerning IP and claims of infringement or violation of rights requires due diligence on both sides. At a very minimum, you should read the transcript of Andrew Tridgell's talk on patent defense at http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents.

That your software is open-source is entirely orthogonal to the issue of infringement.
It's an example. And hyperboly at that. But you'd be surprised (at least I am) at the patents that are granted that really shouldn't be, but once they are have nearly magical powers given to them by existing laws to resist being overturned. The point was that it's possible to have an extremely stupid patent that really shouldn't have been legal or possible get granted anyway and cause big problems to small guys like this. He's got a great idea but not much money or clout. The patent system will almost certainly do him more harm than good.

It strikes me that many of the folks who defend patent law as it stands now most stridently are largely oblivious to the innovation that is being stifled by it's operation.
You know, to a certain extent, unfriendliness is what I like about Linux. I like "friendly" systems for browsing the web, email, and watching video. But for hacking, Linux simply can't be beat. I really don't see why Linux needs to be an OS for Joe Internet User. What's wrong with Linux being a server/development OS?
When the problem with secrets is the reversed equivalent of the problem with no secrets, perhaps you should stop thinking of it as a problem and start considering it a fundamental limitation of the ability to withhold information.
I'd be interested to see a more concise and less sarcastic modern summary of how Linux is Not Windows.

This reads more like a rant at how windows people Just Don't Get It more than a genuine attempt to be helpful.

edit: Here's an example of a more helpful style, comparing linux and BSD, and he even self-deprecatingly files it under rants: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01
Russian ATM uses voice analysis to tell when you're lying
Downvote? Really? I just thought that maybe the guy might actually not be the awful troll that we instinctively leap to the conclusion that he is. He might just be a guy who really doesn't grok how all this works.

Could a simple call to find out really be that bad. (seriously IANAL so I really don't know)

I think he's just an idiot who happens to be inadvertently trolling. Not a professional troll. It seems like he really does want to sell his goofy cloud motion and probably thinks he's the new new. Whatever.
I misinterpreted your comment and replied accordingly.

Your point was that causal relationships also exhibit correlation. I thought you were trying to say that correlation between data occasionally (but not always) identifies a causal relationship...and that's why I made my comment. My comment is also missing the word "occasionally," as in "correlation occasionally results in causation."

So, in sum, I was trying to make the same point you made. Sorry about the way I went about it.
Interesting idea, though I think I like it more on a broad friend sharing stream than all listening together. There doesn't seem to me to be a benefit of only having people in the same room.

You've also gone with a 'fair' way of playing users tracks, though as a group, you may have better luck with playing the tracks recommended by the most popular users.

As a user experience researcher, you should know that you'll have the majority of the users just as listeners, and a much smaller percentage who are actively building the playlists, so you'll have to account for that.
Hadoop is a fairly low level framework. So it requires the programmer to write logic to incrementally calculate the map (i.e., input_data_may -> map_results_may, repeat for june).

Similarly, it's up to the programmer to write a reducer which allows incremental additions of data. And even then, you still need to make a pass over all the data.
This one's funnier: http://whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com/