skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds a bit better outside of Flash, actually. Flash prefers 22050 or 44100 audio and doesn't do a great job of resampling others up to 44100 (which I think is what happens behind the scenes). Give it a listen in Chrome or some such and see what you think.

We aren't using those libraries right now, but we'll check them out. How do they compare to something like SoX?
Yes, it's non-zero. But for many, many organizations and many individuals, the non-zero is pretty much zero. The Internet Archive, for example, could absorb something like this without even blinking. As could Google Books.
I feel like it will be a difficult sell to any government (even "liberal democracies"), let alone an ISP.
I would be so down for number one. How annoying is it to go to your seat and have the overhead compartment seriously packed.
U.S. Consumers Relying on Credit for Basic Necessities
(money aside)

That's the mistake in your reasoning. The money makes a talent acquisition significantly different from getting a job.
Getting Funded: Step 4, Due Diligence
And yet Wikipedia manages to do so without charging $19/article. :) Even for historic scanned books, e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake,_a_crit...

Likewise, archive.org does as well. I expect these papers will eventually end up in both these places.
2011 MacBook Air benchmarks outperforms 2010 MacBook Pro
Mainly due to environmental strain and unethical practices. More info if you click the said fish.
Here's another fun one: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-bil...
A lot of people seems to miss the fact that LulzSec #antisec etc. are the new Yippies[1] and pastebin is their new TAP[2]. Their goals are not very different and the means of action are just 40 years later. The "for teh lulz" part was already there too.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Yippies

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Youth_Interna...
Here is the ideal: we pay people for the time/effort/resources to create, then we all copy and use that product freely and unrestrictedly. Everyone gets compensated for any loss, and everyone has freedom to access all gain.

The idea of property really does not apply. It is the wrong way to think about the problem. We want new and better systems of organisation, but the restrictions of property are what we want to avoid if at all possible.

> You have no fundamental right to enjoy the innovations produced by others without compensating them.

That seems quite wrong; in fact the opposite is more like the truth. The form of a moral obligation is to put the interests of others before yourself. That is, to put it simply, you have a duty to help others. If others enjoy your products without compensating you, that is good -- it is pretty much what a moral act means.

Now, you might object that someone has sacrificed effort to produce, they must deserve something. But that adds something else: the idea of loss or harm, and this is precisely where IP/abstract-goods and property fundamentally diverge. Abstract goods can be used by any number of people without reducing anyone else's use or causing loss.

If you want to solve the problem you must see that thinking in terms of property is to make a mistake right at the beginning.
This is an interesting change.

First, anyone would be a better CEO than Rob Kalin. The period when he was not CEO at Etsy was blissful by comparison... for once, the company was being run by someone mature and normal, someone with actual experience working at a professional company, whose goal was to serve customers and investors. Kalins goals are mainly self aggrandizement and extracting revenge for sitting alone during lunch at 6th grade, as far as I can tell. His actions and writing give me the impression of someone who is mentally unstable and has adjustment difficulties. He is given to grandiose flights of fancy where he places Etsy (and #1, himself) at the center of an imaginary cultural revolution which will topple Wal-Mart. It was never clear if this was a total sham, or whether he believes it himself, but these self indulgent rants distract from the actual purpose of Etsy, which should be providing a superior service selling arts and crafts. As a long term Etsy customer, I have had absolutely no respect for the company's management for years. The direction Kalin has taken the company in since returning as CEO seems to be investor-driven ('social commerce') and as an Etsy shop owner, I am not impressed.

Chad Dickerson has done an adequate job as COO. I can't say I'm blown away with Etsy's achievements, their staff or their engineering culture, but they've managed to keep the site running. On a technical (server) level, Etsy is fast and responsive. While many of their changes and improvements have a somewhat amateurish feel in the product and web design, I believe the technical underpinnings are sound. However, the culture of 'we push 900 changes a day!!! our PMs and Dotty dog push code lol!!' would impress me more if the site was 100% reliable. The API is a mild disaster and in my opinion, the people running that project are not qualified (it's written in PHP, we should note).

So, good luck Chad. You couldn't do a worse job than Rob Kalin. I think you're a nice person. Etsy seems to be entirely in the thrall of investors and techies these days, and the employees appear to have no understanding of who their customers are. I hope you can change this.
What do profits have to do with it?
I heard someone say on a podcast recently that when Apple Computer became Apple (jan-07), that's when they started leaving power users behind.

Basically they stopped being a computer company and became a consumer media company.
Why does Anonymous focus so much on attacking the US government (and related rich democratic countries) when it could instead be focused on fighting the governments that are actually oppressive? Nothing the US has ever done, even at it's most oppressive, could ever compare to what North Korea does to it's own citizen's on a regular basis. I would probably be much more sympathetic towards their cause if they focused most on attacking the organizations that are the worst rather than attacking the organizations that will get them the most attention. I read somewhere that an Anonymous hacker used to fight oppressive governments in Africa. Why did he stop? Why does he all the sudden need to deface PBS because they printed negative press coverage of their favorite website, WikiLeaks?

Are they really doing this for the good of mankind or are they just trying to get attention? Anonymous though they may be, they still seem to be just trying to get on the 5:00 news.
Claims secret Nato email docs leave phone hacking for dead
No, really. Someone explain this to me.
I wrote a thing about my exceptionally short urls a little while ago: http://qntm.org/urls
django Q and F functions? they let you build funky where clauses.

see: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/topics/db/queries/#com...
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/queries/#fil...
Please do more to make your argument than just tossing out a link to Wikipedia.
The heavy use of |arguments| may be an issue here. arguments is an object that is only created if actually needed in most JS engines, but it looks like here every single function will need it? That might be a significant amount of additional overhead.
My attempt at understanding burgerbrain's comment leads me to believe that "we the people" are the victims, and our kidnappers are the government and corporate super powers operating via government action to provide legitimacy. While the Antisec people are trying to save us.

I'm not saying I agree, but that's my interpretation.
I would love to see a subsequent visualization illustrating where all this capital goes.
Also, JSTOR does NOT get those documents for free. They may have to pay the publisher to host them on their server.

Academic publishing is a bitch and there is a lot going on lately towards a common, world wide reform. However, JSTOR is not really the bad guy here. Other publishers (e.g. Elsevier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier) make billions by publishing mainly work payed with tax payer money.
> Is modern copyright even valuable?

Is political censorship valuable to North Korean goverment? Probably yes, otherwise they wouldnt pursue it. Is is valuable to the population at large? We dont know, since the North Korean population was never directly asked. Theoretically, North Koreans might also consider it valuable, but probably not.

The same way we dont know whether for-profit censorship (which copyright enforcement is) is beneficial to our population, since, similar to the North Koreans, we also never have been asked about it. Copyright has since the beginning been kept out of reach of direct democratic vote, so we'll never know whether the people consider it valuable to keep in its current form. Probably not.
A) it's expensive
B) doesn't work all that well all the time to block out any passing road/truck noise

What's working nearly as well for me (I've tried the bose headphones - not comfortable for long stretches for me) is $5 in-ear earbuds running whitenoise, sometimes with classical music overlaid.
Thanks. I want you to solve my problems too.

My biggest problem is that I seem to have lost the ability to enter a highly productive state because of interruptions. What do you suggest to help me enter that state more often that allows me to still keep on top of the things I am responsible for?
That's exactly right. If I could elaborate a bit:

For sure, web developers and programmers can do most of what CDF can do, on their own, in HTML5. It might take them a lot longer, but they could certainly end up with a nice finished product.

This doesn't solve the problem. The problem is neatly illustrated by the fact that news organizations, which have a huge incentive to make compelling, sticky interactivity that wraps their news properties, haven't gone for it. I've only seen two non-trivial uses, the NYT and BBC News, and its clear these were bespoke jobs that cost them a lot of money.

The same goes for textbook publishers, scientists, NGOs, etc, anywhere were technical communication could be significantly improved with interactive documents. This problem remains unsolved.

CDF aims to make it possible for someone to crank out an interactive figure or document in a matter of hours, not weeks, with very little code.

A side comment: I say this without any real proof, but WRI specializes in doing interesting things that are economically self-sustaining, rather than things that make a lot of money. Mathematica is far from a cash cow, and WRI is a small company (~500 people), but it has lasted 25 years, and it regularly adds cutting edge technology to its portfolio. Obviously, it gets to balance profit with "interestingness" mainly because it is privately owned, and Stephen likes collecting interesting people and interesting projects for them to do.
It's really not still there though. Mission Control always groups by app. No way to get an immediate spread of all open windows. Instead you have to explore the bundles of windows grouped by app.
Medical doctors were very unhappy to pay for research papers that were funded by tax paying Americans. That's why since April 2008 all articles funded by NIH have to be freely available: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ . Remember, it's impossible for law to work backwards.
Nocturne on OS X http://www.blacktree.com/
I agree. The only time I notice my colors are "off" is when I'm sitting there when it transitions. Even when it transitions I just say "Oh, I didn't expect that right then" and go back to work as normal.
Backtalk - MIT SENSEable City Lab tracks e-waste
I didn’t have to do that until now. I could always tell the windows apart.
The End of 140: Why Twitter Should Double Its Character Limit
I am not an expert on the subject, but I also think he is misguided here.

In the Western world, where we read from left to right and top-down, we also expect our UIs to follow that order: first you type something and then you click on a button. Also I don't know if these visual fixations are really relevant here. Power users will use the enter key, so for them it's the best, anyway, if the button gets out of the way. Computer novices, on the other hand, will look away from the screen at the keyboard, while typing.

Even Google places the search button at the right of the input bar. I am sure they have A/B tested every possible variation and this turned out to work best. Last but not least it's simply what we are accustomed to.
I'd guess it was written by a lawyer who was more concerned about a customer telling the world how great their software isn't. And a blanket "do not mention" statement is probably safer than a "do not mention negatively".
Farmed salmon as a good choice? Think you better check that one out, unless it is in an inland pond (rare), farmed salmon is a pretty bad choice. Also having only a single listing for "cod" over-simplifies things. Many diverse fish are marketed as cod, and some of them are quite sustainable. Sablefish aka Black Cod from Alaska is a delicious buttery treat and quite sustainable.
"Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay"

Is it any surprise that the fed is attacking torrent sites? Even a tech news site puts incorrect titles on its news articles.

He didn't upload papers to the Pirate Bay, he uploaded a 165kb torrent file to the Pirate Bay.

It may sound like semantics but it has real legal repercussions.
I've no doubt they can monetize it, but I suspect there'll be "traffic forwarding" libraries popping up on Github, if this idea takes off
Apple Revamps Security in OS X Lion
Motherf*cking JavaScript T-Shirts
startupriot.com
Justin.tv/TwitchTV looking for a designer to create the future of pro gaming
What can they attack in NK? Most governments that are truly oppressive don't have the kind of web presence and dependence on the Internet that make anonymous-style exploits viable.
This isn't a useful question. With Canvas, HTML5 can do "anything". With Turing Equivalence, any programming language can do "anything". The question isn't what the global space of possibilities is, it's what is easier or harder.
Err.. No. Your statement was 'works on 2.3.4'. Whatever Wikipedia claims, that's exactly what I run on my device.

So my statement still stands: 2.3.4 does support audio/video calls, but only _for selected hardware_. If LG magically brings out a stock firmware with 2.3.4 tomorrow (and if I'd care enough to want it), they'd need to patch GTalk or rather press Google into supporting my type of handset - or they would have no audio/video support.
How to Measure PR Coverage
Ask HN: How big does my target market have to be?
I have an idea for a business - a service that solves a particular pain point for a well-characterized market. The thing is that this market is not large - I would say at most a million US citizens, at least 150,000, plus perhaps a hundred thousand more worldwide. This market is currently served by a brand that is horrendous, but which is a solidly established market leader due to network effects and a freemium business model. By offering a better service, with backwards compatibility (Spolsky 100% sold me on this point), I plan to disrupt and replace the current market leader. In addition to the matter of size, this is not a market with a potential for explosive growth - if I get it right, it'll have perhaps a year or two of fast growth, but will plateau into growth at single-digit percentage rates after it's soaked up market share from the current market leader. As well, this idea requires more lawyering up than the average "here is a website through which we provide a service" startup, because of concerns with user-generated content and the normal way that a startup that makes money becomes an appealing lawsuit target (this one more so than most). On the bright side, apart from retaining counsel, the business costs are perfect for the lean startup model; create the software, scale it up with EC2 and other on-demand cloud computing/storage services as needed. It's not like it's unusual, either, for a startup to live in a position of "if we get sniped by a lawsuit, we go out of business."

That's the background for my question - am I targeting a big enough market to seriously pitch this idea to angel investors? It's a tempting thought, because $100,000 would buy me two years of runway as a solo founder, three years if I did a good job of running lean - but because of the business model I'm targeting, I probably can't offer investors the classic startup upside of "if we win, you get a 20x or more payout." This is not a business idea that's headed for a big acquisition or an IPO - the reason that I'm not telling you the specific business idea, in fact, is not because I have a Winklevossian fear of my idea being stolen, but because the idea sounds like a joke, especially in the context of an IPO or a high-octane acquisition. Should I go for bootstrapping and/or friends-and-family funding? The tradeoff there is that at that level, I can't quit my job to work on this idea, and on the nights-weekends schedule, I estimate it'd take 2+ years to get the product developed, marketed, launched, and ramen-profitable. I'm a hacker: I'm greedy and impatient, and I want to be able to quit my job and work on my great idea, dammit! But I've created enough hacks in my time: I know that the ideal way to do it, sure as heck isn't the only way to do it.

Which, in turn leads to another way to phrase the question: is this a proper startup, or is this a lifestyle business?
CONGRATULATIONS. This exists since over a year.
As a developer my biggest problem is my organization's lack of testing across the board(unit testing, automated testing, poor testing done by the test team.) I have been pushing for better testing pretty much since I got here, but haven't made much headway.

As an entrepreneur my biggest problem is enough confidence in any idea to go for it.
I find it hard to believe this is anything more than a desperate attempt to add more fees and theoretically, more revenue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Library_of_Science

It's difficult, but it's already working. PLoS journals are actually quite reputable, currently.
Any idea how much Google or other companies pay for acquisition like this?
It's somewhat crazy to realize how much certain 'businesses' rely on government contracts, as apparently this company does.

It's also infuriating that for all of the sanctimony, especially that which is assigned to what amounts to a completely arbitrary number (e.g. $200,000), she completely ignores the fact that there is ridiculous, egregious amounts of government fraud & waste.

And to a couple of the specific talking points...

- How is the economy doing in the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation anyway? As mentioned the income is very low there but there is at least one 'government-connected' (one that does 50% of its business with the government) company that is profiting quite well there. Great.

- She says she's making great money (again, with a lot of great government contracts) and lives on the beach in a great place. By her own logic, she's being a d@*%! Why doesn't she commit a much larger percentage of her income to the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation, off of whom she is making all those evil profits. Why doesn't she move there? Is it not good enough for her? By her own logic, total hypocrisy.

Paying taxes is a reality, that's fine. But there are layers and layers of waste that most people just can't abide. If I'm a d&%$ for taking that position, oh well. By the way, I don't make nearly $200k a year.
Maybe this acquisition will bring the interests of someone like myself, that are non-public personas and wish to keep it that way, to the table where we can participate publicly. We would be able to use a single handle in our Circles marked 'public', so we could be blocked but still not be stalked.
Does it really come as a shock that people prefer to protest the powers that are oppressing them and their friends, rather than the powers that are oppressing someone else on the other side of the planet?
Fantastic idea, horrendous implementation, unfortunately. It needs over half a gigabyte of drive space to install the reader, which pretty much kills this for widespread adoption. Great tech insights, though!
FontBook, Now An iPad App
Google Closure is what I'm talking about too. However, it's important to know _which_ Google Closure, as there are a number of components. It seems that the component most used in ClojureScript is the JavaScript optimizer, which is most likely just run as a post-processing step.

Of course, ClojureScript could also be using the Closure Library within the code, which would integrate Closure deeper into the system.
F.lux changes the color temperature. It's the difference between using fluorescent bulbs and incandescent bulbs... significantly reduces eye strain at night.
I'm gonna seed the fuck out of this. There's always place for knowledge on my HDDs, and there will always be bandwidth I can sacrifice for spreading that knowledge.

I dare to say: For science!
The message I was replying to wasn't saying that. It was taking a snipe at free marketers by [sarcastically] claiming it's OK for a corp to do whatever it wants, just like people. It was just straight up a stupid statement.

Something like your statement I wouldn't have blinked at. A libertarian I may be, but I think I could stand to see some corporate veil-piercing over this. Corporations shouldn't have the power to destroy your personal life over what amounted to a business scuffle. (The little-l in my libertarianism is because I don't believe in laissez-faire capitalism, but in something more like curated or harnessed capitalism, regulations designed to maximize the good of the market while muting the bad. This may sound self-evident when I pitch it my way, but very little regulation is actually written that way; usually the real purpose of a given regulation, as demonstrated by actions, is something else.)
A few points to consider:

1. Last time I checked North Korea wasn't founded on a series of charter documents proclaiming freedom from opression being a foundational concept.

2. What other governments are doing has absolutely no bearing on the US government systematically dismantling it's citizens personal freedoms.

3. If you really think the US government at it's worst can't compare with various tin pot dictatorships around the world (including North Korea) you need to take a survey course on US history. Forced sterilization in the name of eugenics, concentration camps, genocide, political prisoners, murder, corruption... you name it, the US has done it at one time or another.
Very interesting. That's exactly what I was arguing.

I don't quite understand where the line is though. For instance, why isn't Google Map information public domain? The locations of roads aren't copyrighted and Google's efforts to enter this information don't seem that different than compiling a phonebook.