skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be really interesting to see a list of posts where he's been right as well as a list where he's been wrong. In fact, it would be great if there was a site that hand a right and wrong list for all the major economic and foreign policy pundits in order to see some accountability.
Grew up playing classical and pop music, basically 3-4 chords (maj, min, 7th, etc). Went to the best jazz school in the world (U of North Texas) and woke up to jazz...an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. Will spend the rest of my life learning to play jazz.

Why is this on HN? Because there is a giant overlap between hackers and musicians.

For those of you interested, but confused, go to a music store and ask for a "fake book," a big collection of tunes in "head chart" format (just melody and the kind of chord symbols being discussed here. Study it like a new programming language. Bang out the chords on a piano, if you can. (Most fake books have a "glossary" of the chords in the front or back.)

Donald Knuth said that when a new CS grad student arrived at Stanford, they didn't ask, "are you a musician?," they just asked, "what instrument do you play?"
Top 3 Google Tools for Keyword Research
What clients need to learn about software development
Slow Intelligence: Ways to slow down and think better
Vancouver, BC, Canada

SurfAds is hiring! We're an online advertisement start-up located in Vancouver, Canada that is looking for developers to help us build up our infrastructure to support our advertising platform.

Responsibilities will include improving the performance of our adserver by removing some key bottlenecks, as well as developing monitoring, testing and administration tools to improve the performance and reliability of our systems. Our current architecture already handles thousands of transactions per second, produces 50GB of MySQL data per day, and is based around a stack of open source technologies beyond the basic LAMP environment.

For more information and to apply, see this post: http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/van/eng/2778431934.html (and please mention HN).
Saudi Universities Offer Cash in Exchange for Academic Prestige
I imagine thats how tons of kids justified breaking into stores during the Vancouver hockey riots.
Great stuff. For me, I always feel much cheerier after getting some exercise and it doesn't even need to be long or high intensity. Just 15 mins of walking, or a few sets of 30 pushups does the trick.

I also think people naturally feel sad after the holidays because there's nothing to look forward to. So maybe it's best to start a startup during the winter months.
It's a few hours old, and arguably the most productive recurring thread on the site. Subjectively (but you can take my word for this), the hiring thread used to be pinned to the top for a day --- I presume this was not because of something 'pg punched into a REPL.
Indeed. Some people believe that there's no real productivity gain from all team members being located in the same place. However, one of the (potential) benefits of being located in the same place (as management) is job security. People grow attachments to others.

Plausible if you accept that problems can be broken into separate pieces. Furthermore, measuring/comparing the productivity is non-trivial/impossible.
httrack?
No, there really isn't a better way. All the rules behind music theory are based on what sounds good, not the other way around.

What you can do, however, is push yourself to try out new harmonic structures. You can make your chords more complex, you can delay resolution much longer, you can shift keys.

There are also other musical idioms like polytonality, alternate scales, etc. that you can use to expand you horizons.

But ultimately, you still should pick something that sounds right to you.
I can see that some would see this as inspirational, but I cannot help but see it as shallow and pointless.

Sales as the end-all to your aspirations seems to be a good recipe to end up rich, influential, lonely and bored.
Avoid hiring contractors. They are modern day mercenaries and are solely motivated by money instead of a shared company vision. When times are good they will bleed you dry, but when times are bad they will show no loyalty.

I don't agree with this, contractors make up a large spectrum of individuals, all are not the same, just as some employees may not be loyal, so too are some contractors. I personally contract until I find something worthwhile to get involved in, but I do expect to be compensated for what I am doing, we can call it bleeding dry or we can call it fair market value, but the reality is whether contractor or employee, developers are high value assets. It just so happens that a lot of them that freelance know what their value is and charge accordingly. But to malign them as mercenaries and uninterested in the success of their clients I think is a little unfair. There are sociopaths in contracting just like there are sociopaths employees.
Your father's mentorship style reminds me of Gotama Buddha's style of teaching: not imploring, cajoling, threatening, or demanding, but simply laying out the consequences of any given action and leaving the decision up to the individual. He also suggested that students test his offered truths and develop a first-hand understanding rather than taking his words on faith.

People can get very receptive when you offer help without implying they should take it.
Does iffft do what you want? I'm not super familiar with it, but it might.
Happy New Year Product Management in 2012
Monetate - Conshohocken, PA - (Philadelphia)

Full time, No remote.

We're a SAAS provider of testing, targeting and personalization tools (e.g. content targeting, segmentation, A/B testing). We are located in Conshohocken, a Philly suburb and our clients list consists of many big e-retailers. I got hired via HN a year ago and we do have a good number of engineers in the team who found Monetate through one of these threads.

We are actively looking for Front End and Backend engineers.

Front end engineers primarily write JS that runs on our customers' sites or for building features for our client facing product. Backend engineers work on large data and web performance. We work in Python, but experience with the language is not a prerequisite. We have many interesting front end, scaling and big-data problems to solve. Monetate is a fun work place with an awesome culture and a big list of benefits. If you want to work with interesting people who are passionate about what they are doing, do check out our jobs page

http://jobs.monetate.com

Feel free to email me if you have any questions. ram <at> monetate <dot> com
Are you selling on any other ebook platforms yet; like OverDrive for libraries, or in B&N's store? Do you sell physical copies through Lulu or their competitors? What do you use to track analytics if you use multiple platforms? Did you ever think about formatting with Markdown ever during the process? Can you expand upon why you chose $3 as the selling price for your ebook?

I realize these are quite a few questions, but I value your input given your experience. It's a very interesting world in self-publishing today.

Thanks.
Ask HN: When does "no" really mean no?
Example. You go up to someone and ask them about if they would every buy [INSERT NAME HERE] product. They say "Definitely No, Not Now, Not Never" You believe them and then go amongst your merry way thinking they would never buy a product like this.

One year later, guess what product they are happily using? At this point they are trying to deny they never even wanted this product.

So, when does "no" really mean no and when does it mean "well not right now, maybe later"?
One of the Most Creative Addresses on Earth
At my previous employer, a high* level manager (3 levels above me - a leaf node developer), considered it his job to just shield his subordinates from demands/bullshit of those above him.

That's definitely a desirable quality, and leads me to believe he'd have other desirable qualities.

* In reality, middle management, but at the level where strategic decisions are made/strongly influenced.
It's also built-in in 12.0a1 (a mode of source view).
Sturgeon's law probably applies to any book published, whether by traditional or self-published means.
"I strongly encourage you to do your own searching and reading, which is why I don´t add a long list of references here as I don´t want to bias you. "

What?!
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Could some one apply speaking only english and spanish?
I think what this article is referring to is the importance of retaining perspective of the goals of the project. An experienced programmer might have the ability to program to a very high standard but he should reserve that for times when it is justified—not forgetting that practice or curiosity alone is occasionally adequate justification.

You can go further with this thinking and suggest maybe it isn’t even useful to ask “is this good enough?” and instead ask “is this sensible given xyz?” or ”will this be worth doing?” and forget about what is means to be good enough or assess the quality of your work in absolute terms.
Some of them were, but others were just updating a boolean or an integer value. For the most part we tried to pad our records, but I'm sure there was some moving along the way.
I actually have the exact opposite point of view:

1) To the best of my knowledge, I've never gotten a gig out of the freelancer thread in the past six months, although I am a full-time freelancer. The thread is essentially a list of facts and does not expose me to any new ideas, which would be forgivable if I consistently got gigs out of it, but I do not. As for its cousin the Hiring Thread, I am not nor do I know anyone actively searching for full-time employment (quite the opposite, I know dozens of desperate employers who are desperate for a reason). Job inquiries seem to follow me everywhere I go: to developer events, to my various inboxes, to my phone, etc, and many developers in the tech hub in which I live share the same sentiment. This may be a local phenomena, but it is my experience.

2) I am not an occupier (and FWIW not really a fan). The article was not overly political. It discussed protesting from a tactical point of view and exposed me to a new idea (which may very well be an old idea to others). It is of personal interest because I have been working on pathfinding lately, and this is, essentially, a distributed pathfinding implementation. I wonder if there is a reasonable attack on this kind of strategy or if the strategy is applicable to other protests (Arab Spring, etc.) I think that the discussion quality and level of improvement to my life is going to be a lot higher on this article than on the hiring thread.
Meet Ed Jacobs, Designer Of America's Meanest Motorcycle
As a Brit now living in US, I came here to mention Kettling too. (Kettling is when the police entirely surround a protest group and will not let anyone enter or leave for many many hours).

Unlike the other comment on this sub-thread, I don't see any reason why Kettling wouldn't work here in the US (sadly) if the police used it. The density of the streets in UK doesn't come into it when you consider the Kettling that took place in Oxford Circus, London during May Day riots a few years ago.

I think the issue for Kettling in the US is that police here rely more on aggression and fear of attack (the heavy infantry, as the OP puts it) then strategy and tactical superiority. As the OP observes, this then goes horribly wrong for the Police when they are forced to assert that aggression physically on protestors.

The other issue for Kettling here in US is constitutional rights. In the UK the police will Kettle a crowd for hours - which in real terms mean they will not let you out even if you decide to give up protesting. This is frankly as a punitive action more than anything else. My guess is constitutionally the police might not be able to do this to undetained, unarrested citizens.
Ask HN - How long of consistent blogging did it take to see traffic results
The title really says it all. I set a goal of 1 post per day in 2012. Curious to see others who have done it and what their results were over the course of a year.
I'm a long time reader but don't post much. I was hired in NYC through a post on the Oct 2011 thread. Obviously I'd rate myself as amazing. The job isn't bad either hehe.
I've found the most fun I've had was when I was working on side projects while taking relevant courses. I ended up staying at MIT for all four years + an extra year for their 1 year EECS Masters program. All during that time, I was working on a variety of different projects. I purposely picked relevant subjects like Machine Learning / User Interface Studies / Behavioral Psychology.

Not only did it help me understand the subjects better, it let me master a number of direct cross-applications into web products. It does wonders for your creativity when you are actively thinking about new products while being exposed to so many new techniques.

.

On the topic of dropping out, an aspect that gets underemphasized in this community is how strong of an ideation muscle you have. Know that the more you do it, the better ideas you come up with. School for me was an excuse to hang around while taking a few classes while building new things. As each year passed, I realized I got better and better ideas.

It would have been rough for me to drop out of school with the first few "promising" ideas that I came up with. At that point in time, they seemed like game-changers that would transform the world. Now I realize if you are the person to come up with good ideas, you'll come up with great ideas later on.

Use those years in college to train up your ideation muscle along with your implementation skills (web dev languages / backend management / mobile dev, etc.) During your final year, apply to incubators using your uber skillset and amaze everyone. Not only will you no longer have the temptation to return to school, you will be putting yourself up for review when you are strongest.

It makes a much stronger statement to apply once and be awesome than to apply twice and try to wow people based on how much you "improved".
Designs We Love
It looks good to me - simple, direct and easy to navigate.

Our customers are looking for quality formatting at good prices, not lots of rounded corners and other gewgaws. By and large, they have zero overlap with the HN crowd and could care less about the latest trendy design fads.

Also, remember that Kindle formatting is very very plain.
I would rather do "forgettable" development. It means that I don't have to worry about it afterward and can forget about it. I don't have to go back to fix tons of bugs. The software should run by itself as much as possible. It takes much less time to develop over the entire life cycle of the software, not just the initial sprint.

One corollary is to use simple and proven technology and libraries.

Another corollary is to have crash-friendly design, i.e. software that can crash in any time and recover at the next restart.

Third is to make software self configured and no configuration. It makes operation and scaling very simple.
Yeah, but I also mean that they also seem to pick the theory/names just fine -- i.e not just playing complicated stuff by ears, but also understanding how everything is called and how it works.
> When something new becomes possible everyone wants to find an excuse to try it.

For some reason that sentence reminded me of the 80s.
"WARNING

impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)"

Although said in jest, this struck me as poignant. I feel that many of us spend a disturbingly large amount of time researching, downloading and "hello world"ing all of these pretty well-marketed tools, but most of us still haven't figured out what we're going to build with them.

Opiate for the hackers. I plead guilty.
Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies
Yup. But in this case I know all too well just what the heck I'm talking about, unfortunately. Hint: I live in Dutchess County, NY and for years worked in Westchester Country, NY.

Besides, the NYT wrote just a puff piece. Now just why would the highly self-esteemed, formerly highly revered, long pseudo-objective NYT do that?

Besides, what details did the NYT piece provide?

Wise up and appreciate a gift when you get it!
Working 40 hours a Week is Nothing if You Enjoy what You’re Doing
The English parlance of American business is utter gobbledygook. The vocabulary within non-profits is even worse.

The more I read from Dan Palotta the more endeared I become to him. His book, "Uncharitable" is about the ridiculous mores, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that impair the effectiveness of charities. I was blessed to find him a kindred spirit when I began my own non-profit in 2010. By that time I had developed a tolerance for non-sensical jargon and group-think in business. The non-profit sector, however, is immersed in such a say-nothing, mean-nothing, decide-nothing, do-nothing culture that it's amazing that anything gets accomplished.

In fact, were there not a steady influx of starry eyed bleeding hearted young people, it would be a great environment for leaders to commit heinous crimes and find no internal condemnation. Kind of like Jerry Sandusky and The Second Mile.
From your comment, I'm still not clear what your exact objection is to the article. You appear to be complaining that an 'Occupy' thread is rated higher than a 'hiring' thread, yet don't explain why you feel that the Occupy thread doesn't 'gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' the way a 'hiring' thread does.

I recognise that the 'hiring' thread is valuable to some people on HN and am glad that the post appears, however for me, the 'hiring' thread does very little to 'gratify my intellectual curiosity' - I'm fortunate enough to have a job and so the thread has almost zero value for me personally.

The 'occupy' post did satisfy me intellectually - I don't have a position on the politics either way, but the explanation of 'battle tactics', how they developed by non-military people and how they can be used 'on the street' was intellectually interesting.
Very well implemented. Prezi it's amazing except that it needs flash.
On this point: while they are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the Occupy movement has a lot of structural similarities to the Tea Part movement.

The sad thing about grassroots politics in the US is that the conservative grassroots movements, like Tea Party, form loose, non-hierarchical yet highly organized coalitions where as the liberals end up going lowest-common-denominator and form protest groups.

The problem is that the political system in America is geared up to accept pressure from political groups like Tea Party but isn't particularly affected by protect groups on the street. As a liberal I find it depressing that folks refuse to take on the political system at it's own game like the Tea Partiers have done.
This is a great implementation and I enjoyed the demo. As I have nothing to say, I won't be using it, but good work.
The Electric on Portobello Road[1] is nice too.

1. http://www.electriccinema.co.uk/experience.php
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS or Indiegames: Syntix [Volker Stepprath]
I was puzzling over the same question. Some of these words are semantically overloaded, and as far as I can tell there's no single interpretation that makes it all "work out" the way you would require if this were math. There are two meanings to "adding 7":

1. adding 7 arithmetically to obtain the same note an octave higher;

2. adding in a 7th note to whatever chord you are playing.

But the way the chords are named isn't what you'd guess from those two meanings. If it were, you'd add a 6th to C major to get C6 (that part is true) and then a 7th to C6 to get C13 (that part is not true). Instead, there's yet a third way the notes are "added", namely cumulatively in the following sequence (I've cribbed most of this from the OP):

C C+E+G
C7 C+E+G+B♭
C9 C+E+G+B♭+D
C11 C+E+G+B♭+D+F
C13 C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A

(The author's argument is that while the chords are theoretically defined to include all these notes equally, some notes - especially B♭ - are more important than others. So even if you drop E,G,D,F and only play C+B♭+A, that's still arguably C13. He's saying that's the essence of the chord.)

I suppose some arbitrariness is inevitable, because there are only so many letters and numbers to go around, and more chords with a plausible claim to the "best" names -- which, if you know regular expressions, would be something like [A-G][1-9]+ -- than there are names available. One beautiful thing about music is that it isn't math (we have math for that). It seems to overlap with math and then mixes everything up in mind-blowing ways, at which point all you can do is feel. Well, memorize and feel.

Does anyone know historically how C13 got to mean "C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A" rather than "C+E+G+B♭+A", which if you consider things only symbolically, seems more likely? Obviously, it must be because that's what people were playing - but who? Presumably jazz musicians? When was this name settled upon?
I fixed this. Interesting problem, because the game worked in FF 7, but not FF 9.
I don't participate in the freelancer thread (which is a new development) but I don't so much have to make the case for the Hiring thread, since (like I said) it leads this month with testimonials about how awesome the hiring thread is.

The quality of discussion on this article is already poor. That's also not surprising, because while the ostensible topic (tactics) is interesting, it's an advocacy article on an advocacy site and is mostly a coatrack for Occupy --- so, again unsurprisingly, it's not allowed for anyone to question the idea on this thread without starting a debate about the value of Occupy.

Think about it for a second and realize that any political story can be shoehorned into a "tactical" narrative; horse-race politics (which I follow like my siblings follow White Sox Baseball) are also full of tactics; there's a whole NYT subsite for political nerdery (fivethirtyeight) --- I highly recommend it, but would flag most 538 stories submitted to HN as well.

The argument that any given political story is "something that hackers would find interesting" and not "just politics" is as old as the site. There is also an infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures that satisfy the literal definition of "interesting to hackers". I concede immediately that the guidelines --- I think unfortunately so, and to the clear detriment of the site --- are squishy on this point; it would be better if they simply said "NO POLITICS EVER". They don't. But this is an advocacy piece for Occupy and it is pushing good stuff off the front page of the site.
It reminds me again that Dropbox is hard to beat.
Music THEORY isn't "all about the ears" at all, though.

It is the conceptual framework & vocabulary you use to talk about music, not perform it.

If kids love performing and listening to music, they'll want to talk about it. And initially they'll be limited to things like "I love that thing it does near the middle when the bass is going baBONG baBONG baBONG then everything suddenly get really quiet and strange".

That's obviously ridiculously imprecise, right? And aren't you curious to know what "strange" means in this context? Suppose you want to write a piece of music that sounds "strange" like the piece you liked, but more so? So even piss-poor black kids end up with a thirst for a subject that looks pretty dry to the unmotivated.
I've noticed that, but it never occurred to me that this might be the cause. Which browser do you use on those devices?
What do you mean by traffic results? The blogs that seem to do the best have single topics: tech. My blog has multiple topics. People seem to favor single topics. Especially if they think you're helping them to make money, the greedy curs.