skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't "want to be in the valley" (although I'm not opposed); I want to build a company by whatever means.
Howdy, professional musician here. I both agree and disagree with you, but I definitely disagree with the OP. "Playing by ear" is a way of learning new music, and it is a skill. Beginners do use the trial and error method you describe, and as you get better at it, you can rely more on your knowledge of what an interval sounds like, getting closer to what you hear on the first try.

Reading music is also a way of learning a piece, and for complex music (i.e., most classical music) it is the most effective way of learning music quickly, even if you're the most advanced player in the world.

I would contend, however, that "they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see" is not just fluff. Intermediate to advanced players are frequently very tied to the page. They tend to think in notes and barlines, which is a reflection of intermediate level training that usually focuses on rendering literally what is on the page. One of the big advancements that musicians tend to make at conservatory is to learn how to think in audible units -- phrases and gestures -- rather than the visual units they see on the page. So yes, expert musicians do rely on their ear in a way that they usually do not at intermediate level. However, it also has nothing to do with the way untrained beginners use their ear, as a way of learning music.

EDIT: A more useful analogy for musicians would be to look at how they approach the physical aspects of playing. In the beginning, a string player is taught to move the bow by moving their arm back and forth. Once they get the hang of this, they spend a decade or so dissecting the fine details of that movement: fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder. Making the bow change directions becomes a complex dance of many choreographed movements. Eventually, though, it all becomes second nature. When an expert thinks of moving their arm back and forth, it is a shorthand for all the things they've internalized about how to use the bow.

This is similar to the martial arts idea of learning technique and then forgetting it. It is most emphatically not, however, coming around to realize that your original conception of how to play was more right than what you were doing as a journeyman.
Well, that makes sense then! :)
I deal with app developers every day. I read a feed of iTunes store rankings regularly in the course of what I do. 80K is not an extremely rare level of success. In fact, even one of my old college buddies with a total MS-stack background has eclipsed it.

I'm not really in a position to share details, but for A-level geeks, there is much, much more than 100-200k to be made. It's true that most people won't achieve that. Much like 90% of sales-people's income are at sub-median levels, it's closer to a power distribution than a gaussian one.
Hear, hear. The number one reason to move from Illinois to the Valley: ability to drive your car and not be snowed in on Lake Shore Drive.
Omega became what called now "type families".

Types at the kind level and kind polymorphism is much more close to dependent type system.

Honestly, I cannot wait. ;)
She also wrote Founders at Work, probably the best collection of interviews with tech founders around. We're going to need a little better critique than she "was not so good at it" to discredit her as an interviewer.
China Censorship API for content publishers
I think the difference is that, from the researcher's standpoint, there is no downside other than cost for having your article pdf's open access. (In fact, there is a slight boost; if your work is more easily accessible, you're more likely to get cited.) On the other hand, releasing your data and code requires quite a bit of effort in curating it to keep from exposing yourself to additional criticism (warranted or not). On the net for society, it's probably extremely beneficial to have researchers do this, but right now they won't because they don't have any incentive.
My favorite from this article: Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets.

Seriously, get out there and grow your network. Do it by getting over being shy and smile more. Ask how you can help others. And ask for nothing in return. You will be shocked (over time) by how much you actually get back.
Oh I'm completely comfortable making such a generic statement.

Every time you use JavaScript God kills a bunny.
My first impressions are positive. I especially like the ability to filter by number of comments. It gives an indicator for popular but possibly contentious topics that stand a good chance of giving me some interesting discussions to read.
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OP is apparently currently in the US. "Start where you are now" is a good rubric for most things.
Also, typically "girl," like "boy," refers to a child. Ms. Livingston is obviously an adult, so to many people the term "girl" comes across as belittling.
That's Theravada Buddhism. The Mahayana branch which includes Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism embraces attachment. How are you supposed to cultivate empathy and compassion without attachment?

Cultivating "witnessing detachment" is still fundamental to these traditions. It's just considered incomplete without a cultivation of heart.
This was written as a series of blog posts before being compiled into a book. The original is here:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/
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What prevents other fields from doing the same thing that the physics community has done?: Nearly all published physics articles since 1992 have been released freely to the public on the ArXiv.

The only thing I can think of is that physicist are more likely than most other academics to be proficient with LaTeX, and therefore to have a presentable (though often not perfect) version of their paper before an editor ever touches it.
No, but doing so in order to ensure state control of information for propaganda purposes is certainly a feature of tyrannical governments, China being a particularly strong example.
Even then, if there were an internal-resistance movement that was well organized enough, they could get around this stuff. Seems more like it's there to keep some bureaucrats employed and possibly to prevent lone-wolf resistance 'fighters' who might not be well organized/smart enough to get around these measures.
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Hacker News seems to be evolving and becoming many things to many users. Why not leverage that instead of trying to restrict it? Regardless of whether things are "on topic" or not, the site has two things going for it that other communities often strive in vain to build: traffic and a definable culture.

My suggestion: a column down the left with a topic marker: startup advice, network technology, programming tips, hacker culture, VC firm news, economics, politics, military tech.... whatever the topics are that people are actually posting and upvoting.

Classifying a topic could be done by a voting algorithm, weighted by karma... the poster thinks the topic is economics, then it gets marked as economics. If enough commenters feel that it falls under politics instead, then their clicks on that topic classification (submitted as part of the comment form) will reclassify it as such. Those users who want to see only certain topics can filter as desired.

The spirit of respectful and collegial debate that pervades the site is a huge draw and could just as easily be applied to the "off-topic" as the "on-topic"... and there is a synergy in having both available. It keeps things fresh and interesting and there is intellectual stimulation available here that you can't get anywhere else, regardless of topic.

I guess I am saying that the pool can be bigger and still be clean, and it can have a shallow and a deep end, fast and slow lanes, and serve a wide range of swimmers... but still be known for its overall high quality.
Hi, I'm currently doing Twisted documentation, as part of a project to recover divmod.org's contents. How could I improve Twisted's documentation for you?

I'm sorry you don't like zope.interface. Do you prefer ABCs? What would make interfaces better for you? Did you prefer Twisted's builtin interfaces to zope.interface?

How was the community unfriendly? What can we do to improve the community experience?

(Anecdote: The only way I've been productive with Django is through reading their source; their IRC channel and documentation are useless.)
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"So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius."

To me, this is just an abusive twisting of the word "genius". I know it has different meanings to different people, but I think being smart, or having some kind of intellectual capacity, is probably the best common ground between definitions.

It seems like Isaacson thinks being a genius just means being really good at something. Dan Marino and JFK are geniuses based on their prowess in their respective fields.
Just like most sound bites this one needs context to be accurate. But I'm sure it will continue to make headlines elsewhere.

He said that the valley was very helpful for him early on as a fresh entrepreneur. He also said he could probably have done it in New York as well.

Also the headline mixes present and past tense, "If I were starting a company now" and "I would have". This doesn't mean in retrospect he would have kept Facebook in boston back in 2005 or whenever he moved to the valley. It means right now.
I'm not sure if anyone else caught Jessica trying to follow up about the serendipitous meetings of people like Sean Parker in the Valley. I think he's completely discounting some of the experiences and chance happenings that acted as a catalyst to Facebook's success.

It goes back to what PG said at YCNYC that apparently he caught a lot of flack for - these types of occurrences, while they happen, are just far too infrequent in other places with less vibrant tech communities.
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Paul Graham, Computer Programmer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_%28computer_program...
> including a comment by pg, the site founder, that the quality of comments on Hacker News has declined. What can I do about that?

That's just part of having a bigger community. It always becomes more general over time as it grows.

You can't usually get around this as it's a natural part of the lifecycle of a forum/group/site.

Site fail when they refuse to recognize this and start mucking around trying to revive the past glory.
I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in any way.

Quite a few users agree with this general opinion, with differing values assigned to "didn't further the conversation in any way." One problem is that many users who are not furthering the conversation don't seem to notice that about themselves, and then demand an individual explanation for each and every downvote, which seems too much to ask for in response to comments that are, in pg's words, "(a) mean and/or (b) dumb."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

While many users share the opinion that downvotes should mean something mostly about contribution to the community rather than disagreement with the point of view expressed, the opinion that downvoting is okay when used for expressing disagreement with the content of a comment has also been expressed by many users over the years, including by pg, the site founder.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If someone who disagrees with me on factual or policy matters has made a thoughtful comment that introduces me or other HN participants to new information, I am happy to upvote it. But if a comment indeed doesn't contribute to the discussion, because it merely expresses one user's opinion with no verifiable information, it's within the current site guidelines simply to downvote the comment, so that the person who posted it is made aware that he or she should try harder to make a substantive, evidenced comment next time.
I would use indentation to discriminate between the cases:

list
.concat(other)
.map((x) -> x * x)
.filter((x) -> x % 2 is 0)
.reverse()

For pipelining, and:

brush
.startPath()
.moveTo(10, 10)
.stroke("red")
.fill("blue")
.ellipse(50, 50)
.endPath()

For what we are calling “chaining.” I use this now as a personal coding style when writing jQuery stuff with JQuery Combinators:

added
.addClass('atari last_liberty_is_' + ids_of_added_liberties[0])
.find('#'+ids_of_added_liberties[0])
.when(doesnt_have_liberties)
.removeClass('playable_'+added_colour)
.addClass('no_liberties’);

The first “addClass” and “find” are both sent to “added,” “when” is sent to the result of “find”, “removeClass” and the second “addClass” are both sent to the result of “when.” It feels to me very much like how we indent scope and syntactic blocks like “if” or “unless."
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a nod to future g+ integration in chrome perhaps?
This extension (together with the type-level built-in literals, described in section 8.3 of the paper) looks like it will address the major remaining wart I've observed in Haskell: the widespread use of complex type-level programming to make up for deficiencies in the type system. Many packages on Hackage have deep type-level hackery under the surface, and that hackery often creates subtle differences and incompatibilities.
There are a bunch of parallel conversations spawned from this 2 year old blog post. For reference, here's the area the author talked about in current google maps:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Huashan+Road,+Shanghai,+China&...

The locations are all still off and they're consistently off by an offset throughout Shanghai. There might be some deliberate dishonesty by map makers in China, but I don't think this is evidence of it - I think this is just an inaccurate projection. If you want to make bad maps to confuse people - first, that's probably pretty impossible with current information systems, even in China, and second, this would be a really bad attempt at it.
I grew up in Wisconsin. We not only had snow days, but we had cold days, where the school wasn't allowed to hold class because they couldn't keep the building at least 50F / 10c. And then when you go to university, you have to walk around in that weather all the time. It was miserable.

When I moved to sf I used to snicker at the people you see wearing leather coats and scarves because it's 45F out. Now I do the same :( No winter for no summer is a great trade.
I used to work for a surgeon and was tangentially involved with some conferences. I'll confirm they're like he described. The only person I've ever heard of being asked to leave was a malpractice lawyer digging for dirt.

Surgeons, like developers, tend to be very particular about their tools. The one I worked for designed a few of his own and worked with medical device companies to produce and sell them.

The sales reps are an interesting mix of "sales-ey" and technical. One medical device sales rep I knew became one after having sold his business stocking sandwich vending machines. Other sales reps were practicing PAs (Physician Assistants) who were known to scrub in and sometimes perform parts of the surgery.
Is disruptor a common term/phrase?
The Scientific American link in the blog post seems broken.

Also, off topic, I never got the email I signed up for about the release of your new book. Did you ever send those?
Payment gateways can be a problem when your company is not US-based.
Looks very interesting, I'll def be there. Anybody else?
I'm from Canada so I know exactly what you mean. The one benefit of freezing winters is that you can get six solid months of productivity while locked inside.

Contrary, I find my productivity increases with warm weather given the freedom to move around with ease (walking to a coffeeshop or waiting for a train/bus). Not to mention health benefits of things like vitamin D.
One idea -- don't display the user's own karma score in the top right. It reminds me a little bit of an arcade game, and I confess it makes me want to earn more points.

I still think you should be able to see your own karma of course (click on your username), but that it should require two seconds of effort.
He specifically says this:

I don’t think outside of Japan there’s anything like this “retirement age” of 35 that is imposed on programmers here. There’s absolutely nothing special about being over 35 years of age over there.

He's clearly complaining about being forced out of programming because of age, not because they're taking some sort of enlightened approach to management.

In the company he was working in he was being deliberately forced away from programming. He's not making polite noises it's the entire reason he moved to Amazon and he explicitly says it.
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Understanding computational Bayesian statistics
I don't think his point was hypocritical, just a bit illogical. He realized he'd contradicted himself right at the same time he and Jessica both realized he'd said something mildly insulting about the valley, which was a bit awkward. Jessica tried to make a joke (by saying that the press would have a field day with the comment) and Zuck bore down and restated his comment, in the process inadvertently de-emphasizing the original comment's counter-factual nature.

His point was that the valley was critical to FB's success, but that if he were starting a new company today he'd do it in Boston b/c he no longer needs what the valley has to offer and his perception is that in Boston long term value is preferred over short term exits.

I think Zuck's answer started out as a clever non-answer intended to communicate his appreciation of building long term value... probably 100% on message for Facebook's current growth strategy... but went slightly awry.
Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing?

Yes, I'd agree with that, and that's why the article rubbed me the wrong way. I don't think the facts here are in contention at all, it's the tone and slant of the piece.

And yes, the status quo is not always best. In fact, on HN we talk about this issue of framing all the time, just in different, productive contexts: sales pipelines, product positioning, social validation, etc. The list of productive ways to discuss this issue are legion, and it's an awesome and useful thing to talk about. In fact there's only one way to discuss this is a non-productive manner: the way it was discussed in this article, as some sort of failing of the human mind. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!)

I'm also a bit of an existentialist, and this plague of over-rationalization and assuming that everything can somehow be tied to a scientific metric is getting a bit old by now. Huge parts of life are experiential, and that's the way they should be. The geek guy inside us all who thinks that it's all logic and science can become his own caricature if given too much room to run. We are not all little Mr. Spocks, able to get a "true" vision of reality by ditching our emotional, subjective experience of life for some sort of scientifically-valid viewpoint. That was the real emotional roots of my disagreement, not social posturing or any desire to be a contrarian.

I'm going to say this a little differently in hopes the point will sink in: yes, many experiences you have -- probably most experiences you have -- are affected by the vagaries of the human mind. As startup founders, lots of us would like to help you have an even better time of things without spending as much of your resources. The entire purpose of an early-stage startup is to create and shape a narrative that begins with you hearing about something and ends with you being a little happier. Sometimes a lot happier. If you're thinking of the human brain and human experience as something that's broken about us and something that you can hack by making people do things they wouldn't? This is the kind of thinking that gets you Farmville. I don't like where that kind of clinical thinking ends up. It's wrong. It pisses me off.

In fact, your entire line of questioning around why wine has to cost so much or lotteries charge for the dream of winning is exactly the reason I think the startup and entrepreneurial communities rock. We're always asking that question too. Many times we find answers that most people don't want to accept, but that's okay. Most importantly we're doing something positive about it. You're on the right track with your critique of my post. You just need to keep going down this path to its logical conclusion.
It didn't seem to me that he was complaining about founders selling companies quickly so much as employees flitting from one to the other so fast.

In my experience, founders in the Valley are more likely to have the confidence to turn down acquisition offers than founders outside it. All the examples you list are Valley startups.
"Why don't you just tell me why you think the Mac is safer"

I'll let Pwn2Own winner Charlie Miller answer that for me:

"I'd say that Macs are less secure [...] but are more safe because there simply isn't much malware out there. For now, I'd still recommend Macs for typical users as the odds of something targeting them are so low that they might go years without seeing any malware, even though if an attacker cared to target them it would be easier for them."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pwn2own-mac-hack,2254-6....
Or maybe a hidden suggestion that this market may soon become very hot?
I saw a copy of this at my local Borders for about $25 during their final sale. Sadly I made the mistake of not purchasing it because I was already in the process of learning a few other languages. I figured the price on Amazon would probably be about the same. I was mistaken.
The correct term would be "the lady" or even better, "the interviewer".
Any conferences, industry events, meetups or similar in CA in November?
Hello everyone,<p>I might be spending the last 3 weeks of November in California on holiday. I'll likely be around the San Francisco bay area but might also go down to LA and Orange County, or anywhere else in CA for that matter.<p>Are there any conferences, industry events, meetups, or similar happening in November?<p>I might also look around for consultancy contracts - Therefore any career or recruiting events could also have interest.<p>I'll be researching a bit tonight, but in addition to google search, I'm hoping somebody here knows something of interest?<p>Thanks in advance!
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First the attack against sites with childporn:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143789

And now this is happening. Is this good or bad?
After dark in SF it gets pretty cold... a t-shirt may work if you're going for a very hard run, but I'd recommend a hoodie just in case.
Or, arxiv could just add life sciences section. AFAIK everyone prepares appropriate preprints, so that shouldn't be an issue, it's just that the attitude is missing, and, while many scientists now make their preprints available, there's no coordinated movement or repository.