skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This past week, I decided to start working on a project to build a new type of speech synthesizer. Did I know anything about acoustics or linguistics? No, but I've been reading what I can find about them since then.

I used to have a philosophy of intentionally choosing easy, "overlooked" problems. I figured I wasn't that smart, so I should just stick to the simple stuff. The software I built was good and useful, but a lot of it is already becoming obsolete. I want to make software that will last 50 years, not just 5.

This talk came at a great time for me, and it's strengthened my resolve. I'm going to keep learning about speech synthesis and acoustics (which means a lot of math and physics that I slept through in school), and hopefully I can push the field forward a little bit.
Yeah, I found this article whiney. The last time I had to use a DVD was upgrading to Snow Leopard. When I went to do the upgrade I had to take my 1 year old laptop in to get fixed because the DVD drive wasn't working on it -- it in fact probably never worked.

I remember when BluRay 'beat' HD-DVD. By the time HD-DVD was dropped by Toshiba I was already thinking "who cares? no one is going to buy bluray anyway."

I suspect within 2 years, ODD will be completely dead from a manufacturers perspective:

* Games will be acquired through app stores (all the major consoles already have these)

* Movies will come from NetFlix type streaming options (Walmart just entered the game, no?)

* Software will be from app stores as well, or USB sticks

That's not to say you won't be able to buy DVD's, it's just that devices won't have the drives.

Biggest losers? Best Buy's and similar stores. What are they going to do with all that shelf space? (I guess I've already proved myself wrong, since they still have racks of audio CD's sell to the odd 'old' person).
Optical drives are rarely needed, EVERYTHING is going online and downloadable: movies, books, shopping, games, etc. Cable companies such as Comcast (xfinity) and AT&T see this. That's why they are putting in transfer caps now (250 GB/month). Their caps will not limit their own movie services. Services like justin.tv, Netflix and so on will be hurt.
First European Startup Festival
This is symptomatic of societal denial that there are serious gender imbalances in the objectification of women. Not long before Tom posted this image there was this public post:

https://plus.google.com/117378076401635777570/posts/AQ6Fp44B...

How can I, as a woman, read this story and then look back at Google+ and see this image?
Eh. They did a vanity site to promote a product.

When Goog starts adding /marquee/ tags and VBScript to their browser, I'll start getting worried about "openness."
Based on my personal experience as a user of the site, feels like could be staples.com (I used to hate that form, and now it is gone, so I buy more often)....also the revenues match up to Staples of 25B.
wow, that makes me feel old.
> It's simple: the men are engineers and the woman is a pair of tits. That's all. Nothing more.

This is your bias. It's a picture from Halloween or a costume party. The woman is dressed as a nurse. The guys are dressed as geeks. Yes, she's supposed to be sexy (she chose to dress as a "sexy" nurse). I'm not sure how that's objectifying. She's an object because guys find her image attractive? What does that make the guys in the image? Not even objects?
I will take those downvotes with pride. I bet none of you ever managed any people.
I have little doubt that Apple is working to compete at additional price points moving forward, so I'd definitely hold off on crowning anyone king until they actually earn it.
Google recognizes this problem and is attempting to get vendors onboard with an 18 month commitment for updates(http://thisismynext.com/2011/05/10/google-promises-android-d...) .

On the other hand, the hardware vendors prefer you buy a new handset every year. How many vendors will agree to long term updates is anybody's guess. I'm no fan of Apple but this is where their controlled line of hardware definitely helps updates/support.
My gut feeling is that there is a large need for good query/visualization tools of the datasets the sequencers produce. At least, I think if researchers could "play" interactively with data they would be pretty excited. But I am most definitely non-expert in this area, so take that with a grain of salt. I sometimes think about whether or not tools developed with column stores (e.g., the programming language J or something like KDB+) would actually be cool for data exploration.

For visualization, check out:

http://genome.ucsc.edu/

Also, a huge list of projects is at:

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

In the genomics analysis space, it seems that I hear these three tools mentioned for sequence alignment are tophat, BWA, and MapSplice.

http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/

http://www.netlab.uky.edu/p/bioinfo/MapSplice

http://tophat.cbcb.umd.edu/

These are actively maintained projects that I think are mostly developed inside of various academic research groups.

There is also The Cancer Genome Atlas project at:

http://cancergenome.nih.gov/

You can probably find research groups via TCGA that might appreciate some one-off development or support, but it might not be exciting from a tech viewpoint.

There is a ton of EMR (electronic medical record) data out there in free text. If you have skills or interest in things like Lucene/Solr, I would bet that almost any research hospital might appreciate your time and skills. And, if you talk to the right group, want to hire you . . .
Amazon Test Drive for iOS
Good question and difficult to answer...truthfully I hadn't ever given it much thought until this article.

But first, I can tell good candidates from bad by what they've accomplished, who they've accomplished it for, what they say, and what people say about them.

I'm a good recruiter not because I never talk to the wrong candidate, I'm a good recruiter because I know the difference between the right and wrong candidate.

So yes you are still going to have to talk to bad recruiters. However, the best way to attract great recruiters is to be great at what you do!
If pg wouldn't mind me scraping the site, in a manner that would not impact the sites performance, I will write an app to collect this data and publish it to the public domain.
Bioinformatician here: First of all, I think it's got to be clear that a lone bioinformatician, or even a group of them isn't going to go about changing the world. Essentially, when you sign up for this, you're still a cog in a machine, albeit a slightly more altruistic machine.

Here's my pet peeve in bioinformatics - If there's one thing that's poorly suited to science, it's the building of computational infrastructure. We're talking basic stuff like databases, tools etc. Sure, anyone can knock out a bit of code for a basic database, but the big problem is that there's no incentive to have decent code, or maintain it so that it lasts any longer than the person is in the lab, or has funding. So, what will be great is if existing resources are cleaned up - data is normalised and pulled out so that it is actually accessible for doing some kind of analysis on it.

If you want to do bigger work, do something actually novel, or that has any biological relevance there's no getting around collecting your own data (e.g. sequencing the crap out of a bunch of things). I'm in the process of trying to get funding now for a project of mine to make that very leap now.

I'm sure someone working on next gen sequencing (the new hotness) can pipe up with the big problems to be solved there.
I was personally burned by the Moment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SPH-M900#Controversy

It got a single major update (from Android 1.5 to 2.1). Which was delayed from three months after the phone came out to seven. And software support stopped immediately after said update.

Compare that to the HTC Evo, which just recently got an update to 2.3, over a year after the phone was released.

EDIT: I should also mention that the phone and its drivers were incredibly buggy, even after the 2.1 update. The GPS was the worst- the only way anyone even got it working long-term was to port over a driver from the Intercept.
When I got a netbook in 2008 and realized that the optical, while possibly useful during install (USB key boot is just as good), was never missed once Ubuntu was installed and running.

Ever since then, I've felt like the drives on my other laptops are dead weight.

Apple is definitely doing the right thing... just wonder why it took them so long.
is there such thing as a non-3d Rubik's cube?
Why was the title of this post changed? It used to have the name "airbnb" in it earlier this morning, around 400 votes.
This is precisely the same kind of trickery Apple
pulled with its HTML5 Showcase for Safari, which
locked out other more compliant browsers in order
to make Safari shine line a beacon of hope for open
web standards. But Google isn’t building these
experiences to make the web look good: it’s building
them to make Chrome look good.

I don't get this bit. Isn't Google doing the same as Apple, then?
YTMND - Rosetta Stone Ebonics Edition
Using something with unlicensed patented technology exposes you to liability as well. Otherwise you could just make shell companies to add the final software piece to a product and cleanse the liability from all the other players.
His dog also seems to be all-in on the concept as well. Godspeed, Yegge family!
I fit the mold you are talking about. I started working for a neuroimaging lab about 1 year and a half ago. Basically I'm not a scientist at all, did Math as an undergrad but almost no stats or any of that type of vodoo stuff (topology, abstract algebra etc real math stuff is what I did ;p).

So basically I had no clue what Neuroimaging meant or did other than people get shoved in scanner, huge magnets turn and they see inside you ;p

But what I found is there are plenty of computer science problems in a field of Neuroimaging (and neuroscience) that a programmer can help with. (processing, image analysis, data mining, storage, Visualization whatever) Most labs don't really have people who's primary job is programming. Thus there a lots of tools that are just hack jobs long forgotten that no one is maintaining but everyone depends on. Those things can be helped out by good programming practice and with real programmers behind them. What sucks is getting funding for these people but Open Source can help here by pooling multiple people from many labs into common projects.

Also, if you do work with scientist, most of them will talk to you for hours about the science of what they do. You can usually ask the most stupid question and they will be happy to answer it. I've found that most people I work with are open and even more if the work you do helps them achieve their scientific goals. So in the end if you need to learn some science stuff, they will usually be helpful.

(BTW my project is in my profile, will be open source soon, waiting for some political approval process).
Being addicted to travel is probably just a side-effect of staying in a place like Oklahoma for so long.
I'm trying to put myself in his boss's shoes. I think I would only be upset if I took it personally.
Astronomers find Earth's first trojan asteroid
What are optical drives used for? Reading and writing data? There are much neater solutions. The typical CD holds 700MB, DVDs, 4.7GB. My reusable, USB thumb drive? 16GB, and I have at least 6 ports on my computer for them.

What about Blu-Ray and movies? For a home theater, Netflix streaming isn't going to cut it. Everywhere else I am happy to stream, or have my movies downloaded through iTunes or another provider. (Movie watching rights and transferability are another can-o-worms though.) For the most part, this solves 95%+ of my on-the-road movie watching.

For music, Apple would probably prefer you just download everything through iTunes and bypass the CD, but CDs are still a major piece of the CDN for the labels. I do need the ability to rip my old CDs to my computer, but I do prefer keeping everything digitized and backed up. Then again, I haven't had to rip a CD in years.
we are not related
As absurd as cryonics sounds, without fanatics (as some might call them) pushing for it, it will never exist.

"If you don't ask, then the answer is always no."

Hopefully we'll see you again some day, Ettinger.
Useless article. This has nothing to do with "openness", just marketing: what is Google's incentive to building the site in the first place if they can't make people download Chrome to view it? That said, they could at least add a "Try it anyway" button for other browsers.
Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality SDK Now Available For iOS
Where's the "don't know, haven't measured it" option?

Without measurements this data does not mean anything.
Sometimes things go very very wrong. That's why they invented insurance.

Most people act 'good' most of the time. That's why this whole society thing stays cohesive. But, everyone has a probability to act badly. Just consider someone who may have had a stroke that considerably changes their personality.

A small portion of people act 'evil' under more common situations.

It's odd that airbnb doesn't seem to risk mitigate these sorts of black swan events. They wouldn't lose much having a 100% loss redemption clause. It would seem that the property owner would be much less likely to game the system than the visitor.
paraschopra mentioned PhantomJS for doing the same thing at couple of days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758438
How can you seriously compare a woman choosing to dress in a sexy outfit with women who are forced into prostitution?

When Anthony Weiner sends pictures of himself in his underwear, does it cause gender imbalances? Does it cause male objectification?
It is clear to me that this is a Google Chrome Experiment, from their labs, and that they did not had any intention of it working on any other browser but i got curious...

i was doing some research on it and they appear to be using sync xhr calls which causes FF to hiccup even after all this time.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383304
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313646

they are marked as resolved but i just confirmed the xhr sync calls dont work in some cases.

google is using the sync calls here
http://www.allisnotlo.st/static/js/API.js

Here you can try this to try and play the video on FF
https://gist.github.com/1109890

you will notice your console throws some errors around line 42 of that file, if anyone knows what else is wrong here please let me know.
I worked at a bioinformatics co-op job for 8 months about 4 years ago. I had fun, but my main impression was that the field is a major clusterf*ck of databases and data management. I think you could take this list as evidence for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics_workflow_managem...
Anonymous Spokesman 'Topiary' Arrested in Scotland
Same here... on my Santa Rosa 10.6 MBP w/4GB at work, it can get quite annoying.

At home on my later model MBP w/8GB and Lion it's not even noticeable.
Hmmm, somebody changed the title of this HN post from "AirBnB: Crimes committed against a host"...
I'm not really sure what the word "sexy" has to do with a giant multinational corporation.

Is this creep speak for "Google is receiving more positive esteem from random members of society due to its recent emphasis on slight aesthetic improvements across its product line?"
I'm on the edge of my seat following all this AntiSec/AntiAntiSec drama: The original AntiAntiSec crusader: http://th3j35t3r.wordpress.com has picked up some helpers: http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/
Apparently he also froze his two wives... that might be awkward if they all get reanimated.
Kinect can do that now.
I think you address an interesting market that will still need disks. The home-theater geek. It's not yet practical to stream the amounts of data necessary to play a full 1080p movie for 2+ hours without any noticeable degradation or stuttering. For now, if you want the best, you need a Blu-Ray drive.
Dear Recruiters,

One of the biggest problems I've had with recruiters is the sheer amount of them I was called by, half of them very hard to understand, another third being very pushy about the amount being offered being "set in stone", and a slim sliver of the rest being genuinely decent recruiters trying to do an honest job. This is one of the biggest turn offs I have regarding recruiters. Be honest, try to do your due diligence in regards to the person you are calling (don't call a DBA about a web dev position), and you will already be largely ahead of the game. I have had multiple recruiters call me up about positions that I didn't want even after I SPECIFICALLY told them I was not interested in positions of type X (don't repeatedly call me about QA positions when I said I was not interested in them).

One of the best ways I found to get my attention was to SLOW DOWN. First, mention the name of the company. Second, mention what position this is for and what product I'd be working on. After that, mention the technology stack if applicable. After that, ask if I'm interested and/or if it is okay to send me the job description (if you send a job description or email, thank me because this makes me feel less like a slice of meat that you are trying to use). After that, ask when is a good a time when you could call me back (the next day is my preferable choice). THEN HANG UP. This should take about 5-15 minutes.

In the first phone call, I should not hear "this is for X amount an hour/year/whatever". I also should not have to wait until the end of the conversation to hear what company this is or what position this is for.

What I will do is review the position and when you call back (if you say you are going to call back, do it), I will give you the yes/no.

This is the best way to get your foot in the door in my opinion/experience.
+1.

It's because HN is fundamentally biased and always will be. The top 2 comments are not surprisingly pro airbnb:

a) People are still good fundamentally - because that's exactly what I'd want to hear if someone ransacked my place.

b) PR from a guy who works there.

I personally wouldn't want to stay in a stranger's house and I don't think I ever will - no matter how big airbnb becomes I believe there will always be a percentage of people who are uncomfortable with the airbnb business model.

Obviously a lot of people don't care and airbnb will go on to be successful I'm sure but it's a shame this community has such a hard time being honest with itself.
The original reasoning that went into the design of the first form is (I think) the classic perspective taken from someone that has never had to use their own product.

"Why wouldn't someone want to create an account? Ship it!"

Then as soon as you are in a rush, shopping for some tents online for a camping trip (something you rarely do) and REI is forcing you to create an account just to order the clearance tents you found, you want to yell at somebody.

I think this story is valuable if for no other reason to make sites realize how much of a road block registration is.
There's something special about receiving a hand written thank you card that gets lost when converted to a font (even a nice looking "hand written" font).

Here's an idea I had to keep the hand written allure and still eliminate the major hassles (stamps, stationary, envelopes, etc.).

What if a customer signed up and was given a template to print out on any old printer. This template has a To/From section at the top similar to a fax cover sheet and below that, a large rectangular outline.

The user would fill out the top contact info, hand write the thank you note inside the box, snap a picture with their smart phone and then email the picture to you. Your servers would identify the user based on the email address, place the hand written contents of the rectangle into a gorgeous thank you note template, OCR the contact field at the top of the page and then email a sample copy to the user for approval. If everything checks out, user clicks 'approved' and copy gets sent to intended recipient.

Obviously that is an over simplified explanation and a good amount of work would need to go into something like that, but I can absolutely imagine having a stack of these pre-printed forms sitting on my desk and scratching out a quick thank you note to people.

4 for $1, 50 for $10, unlimited for $100/year? Or do freemium where you charge for premium or custom templates, remove thankuz branding from the email, etc.

You'd probably also want to do some image processing so the hand written section looks like it belongs in the template and wasn't just pasted in.

Hopefully that brainstorm is useful to someone, good luck with your business!
I do this also, and I would be pretty miffed if it becomes impossible in the future to buy a new MBP without two drive bays.
Ask HN: What's an appropriate multiplier for stock-as-salary w/ sm biz/startup?
Before you give the smart response "Get it in writing beforehand," I've learned that lesson. Now I need to decide how to move forward.

I was asked to sign on "full-time" with a small business (startup?) that's been around for a few years. The deal was that I'd be paid a small fee on a per-job basis (basically a deployment to a remote job site) so that I could pay bills, while growing the company. I was also to be compensated in the form of stock. (Privately held company) I had recently lost my full-time job and had enough safety pad to take the risk, so I jumped in.

I now know I shouldn't have been so optimistic as to enter the situation believing that I'd be taken care of, and instead should have gotten things in writing before I started the work. Hindsight is 20/20. I spoke with the owner of the company about stock compensation and was asked to make a request to them in terms of how much stock I should receive at the end of the year.

I thought it would be appropriate (having committed a year or so of my life to growing, improving, and developing for this company) to receive stock at a multiplier level (that is to say, not 1:1, but more like 2:1). So I submitted a stock plan of 2x - 3x of the standard American salary ($40,000/yr) for my yearly compensation in stock, to be awarded at the end of the fiscal year.

The owners were mortified that I'd make such a request, and without responding with a "no," made sure I knew that I wouldn't be getting my request. On the advice of a trusted business friend, I'm seeking out what is an appropriate multiplier to use in stock compensation of work performed, based on my situation.

Last bit of information/details: I've literally lived the job for almost a year now. Traveling, residence, 60-80 hr work weeks, sometimes done in four days; doing marketing, developing, sales, ... as though I were the boot-strapping founder of the company. The company is privately held, and I would be diluting the stock of others by whatever I am awarded - but I would be getting less than 5% of total shares if I were to receive my original request. If income continues at its current rate (which it will at this company), I will have made less than $20k of taxable income.
Yep, I was referring to the fallacy. I know people don't always make rational decisions—and there are many other considerations here besides—but I thought it worth pointing out that it's not quite so obvious that the large companies would be against patent dissolution.
For the lazy: The answer is Best Buy, circa 04-05
Egad! That would explain my difficulty finding that article then. Thanks so much.
I read that to imply that war is application of governmental free markets. You would still need some governing government to ensure that all the free market governments don't eliminate eachother. And now you're back to the same thing.
Howto: Becoming a Brogrammer
Facebook adds feature to create Test users for apps