skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What good is a directional microphone and why would a headphone distinguish between voices and background noise?"

Lacking any context there is no way to answer your question. Tools do not have any intrinsic value, a tool's value is derived from its application to a problem.

It seems as if you are approaching headsets purely as a means of music reproduction. There are many applications of headsets where audio fidelity is not the only/primary concern. The reference to augmented reality in the first paragraph seems to imply that the author is concerned with more than just how crisp Jerry's guitar sounds at the beginning of Fire on the Mountain. Don't get me wrong I love crispy guitar solos but they are not the end all be all of headsets.

For a really neat and demanding headset application take a look at the C4OPS headset system by Silynx[1]. The C4OPS and others like it are headset systems for combat communications. There are a lot of sounds in combat; some of the loud ones (gunshots/explosions) you would like to hear at a lower volume / with less fidelity and some quiet noises (teammate whisper/footsteps behind you) you would like to be more aware of.

[1] http://sofrep.com/4246/act-of-valor-radio-comms-2/
Yeah, that's the only one I can get too, with either of my regular browsers and no matter who the referrer is. No clue.
Ask HN: What did you build in March?
I've enjoyed reading these in the past, and I think some folks who have recently built or launched something have enjoyed the brief publicity and chance to get some early feedback.

So, If you built or launched something in March, let us know, and maybe even show it off with a link.
Few things about that plane that are not amazing. There is an engine on display at the aforementioned exhibit in Seattle. Every tube on the outside runs in a 'Z' configuration instead of just a straight line, because the engine grows 6 inches longer at full operational temperature.
The real story is about how this district handled the situation. These situations can be handled quite effectively without demanding anyone's password. The person who receives the picture needs to show it, not the person accused of posting it.
Elmore Leonard story: 'Squad 7 - Impressions of Murder'
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If you're not intimidated by a little C, I highly recommend "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective"[1] by Bryant and O'Hallaron from Carnegie Mellon. It was personally recommended to me by a PhD student from CM when I inquired about CS resources that would be directly pertinent to programmers, and it completely exceeded my expectations.

[1] http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/
Yeah, I feel like I've tainted my work computer's browser history. :)
Sound leakage is an inevitable consequence of good sound quality. Put simply, those excess soundwaves ultimately have to go somewhere, and it's a choice between jettisoning them into the environment and annoying people, trying to absorb them in the body of the headphone and losing quality, or trying to produce less of them in the first place, also losing quality.

Very cheap headphones leak sound because they are very cheap and their designers and users don't care either way. Expensive, $500+ headphones leak sound because they are meant to be used in a music production context as a substitute for a $1000+ set of speakers, where one doesn't care about leakage.

If you are walking around campus, sitting on a train or generally doing anything except sitting in a chair with your eyes closed then it is pointless buying a very very expensive set of headphones because your physical movement and the input from your other senses will influence your perception of the music to an extent greater than the noise floor of the less expensive headphones you could've bought.

To be honest, headphones schmedphones. High quality monitor speakers are more exciting. There's a limit to what you can achieve with those tiny drivers. Far better to covet things such as this:

http://www.genelec.com/products/main-monitors/1036a/

Flat response from 19-22000hz at 136db. Oh dear.

If £20,000 is a bit much for you, consider something like this:

http://www.adam-audio.com/en/pro-audio/products/a8x/descript...
This was my immediate reaction as well. But with a bit of consideration, I don't really think this is the case. Interesting connotation though.
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Looking for an opportunity to join an analytics or software startup, learn the product inside out, provide first class customer support. Ideally with the opportunity to move into development.

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Eek. Not only are they hardcoding the logic but they mix their CSS-specific code into the function. I understand that they are handling a limited number of cases now but if I came across that kind of code in my work I'd be very sceptical.
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How This Web Site Uses MongoDB
Santa Clara PD regularly tracks stolen iPhones. They're also pretty successful in actually catching the people who did it! I've heard a number of calls where one unit is using the iCloud site while others fan out to cover an area.

It can be a pretty entertaining listen.
There are some seriously large markets for headphone tech and they have nothing to do with being able to drown out the noise of a 747 engine or the background noise at a starbucks.

Take a look at the C4OPS headset system by Silynx[1]. The C4OPS and others like it are headset systems for combat communications. There are a lot of sounds in combat; some of the loud ones (gunshots/explosions) you would like to hear at a lower volume / with less fidelity and some quiet noises (teammate whisper/footsteps behind you) you would like to be more aware of.

[1] http://sofrep.com/4246/act-of-valor-radio-comms-2/
If SceneTap is “an absolute sewer of an application”, then anyone with eyes, a brain, and the ability to count is an absolute sewer of a person.

Then again, the URL is “i-hate-all-apps-bah-humbug”, so this might be somebody’s strange idea of an April Fool’s prank. I thought it was satire at first.
How to Prevent a Financial Overdose
A "public FB posting"?

If it was so public, why did the school administrator find it necessary to demand her password and invade her personal privacy?
Convert any RC airplane into a fully-autonomous UAV
Hey HN,
Here's the first version of my web app search engine and directory for which I would love to hear HN's opinion. Starting from Crunchbase's datafeed I've been working nights and weekends for the past couple months to clean and curate the data, design the site and build the web crawler. The next release will include several social features including app following and discussions (sign up for the private beta if you want first access when it's launched). If you're an app creator feel free to add yours using the "Add Your App" button on the bottom.

Thanks for checking out my project.
Unfortunately I missed the fact it was an April fools gag, as I tend to stop reading anything when I see the phrase "next Facebook or Google"...
Safari seems to get the same thing, so probably not. When I saw it the phrase that came to mind was "cosmic sphincter".
A professor of mine once said that becoming a professor requires equal parts intelligence, hard work and luck. Usually I cite him to stress the importance of luck: being talented and working hard often isn't enough. However when someone says that someone else just got lucky, I cite it to make another point: without talent and hard work, luck is often useless. You need vast amounts of luck to get somewhere if you're talentless and lazy. If you are talented and work hard, the tiniest amount of luck is enough to lift you from your peers.
The Turkic bug was fixed a week ago and we'll also be in Firefox 14. As far as I know Webkit still has this bug. I don't know about IE or Opera, if somebody knows...
What is it that you wish to learn? If you're a self-taught programmer who wants to learn (to use an extreme example) bricklaying, then you won't have much use for the standard undergrad CS reading list. Similarly, if you want to be a better programmer, the list will be different to that of the standard undergrad CS reading list. Can you tell us what your goal here is? Do you actually want to do CS, or do you want to fill in some of the theoretical gaps that might be useful to you as a coder, or do you actually not care so much about the theory and just want to be a better programmer?
"President Laporte"? Please tell me that is not the dude from screensavers. Is this really something people say now?
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We're a team of six engineers and are hiring more. Familiarity with iOS and/or Android NDK are a plus. We are a YC company with solid funding, great benefits, already profitable. We'd love to chat if you're interested - jobs@apportable.com
The 'Dodgers tax'
Entelo is hiring: http://www.entelo.com/jobs

Our belief is that a primary barrier to growth for most companies is the difficulty associated with discovering and assessing talent. Entelo helps make proactive recruiting more efficient and effective and is currently used by more than 200 companies, from startups all the way up to the Fortune 50.

• Our current stack includes Ruby, Rails, Scala, MySQL, MongoDB, Resque, and elasticsearch and other big data technologies.

• We're also contributing to open source as much as we can (e.g., https://github.com/rglabs/teleport, https://github.com/gip/resque-telework) and eventually plan to have open source contributions that don't start with "tele". :)

• In addition to Github we're using Asana internally to manage projects and we operate in very flexible way.

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If you're interested in hearing more, please send me an email directly (I'm a founder of the company) at jon@entelo.com
I'm quite happy with GNOME 3 on an 11" MBA. Most things, like browsers running fullscreen, gvim and terminal side-by-side, each taking half of the screen, no need to fuss with resizing and moving windows.

This might not be optimal for large displays and desktop computers, but if with Windows 8 the future of computers looks like [1], then GNOME might have made a very smart move with the shell.

1: http://liliputing.com/2011/12/samsung-series-7-slate-pc-revi...
Such a beautiful plane. I got the chance to see the second to the last flight of the NASA SR-71 at Edwards AFB in I think 2001 or 2000. The airplane is other worldly, loud as hell and simply beautiful.

They did a full Mach 3 overhead pass (at 50k feet I think) and also a bunch of slow and high speed passes before it landed and it did a close up crowd taxi-by. The engines at idle have a unique noise, different than any other jet they had.

From the front its a higher pitch noise due to the fact that you're hearing the eddies off the compressor (the engine had no slow RPM fan like most military jets), and from the back like the worlds largest hair dryer.

At take off, it sent up a rooster tail of dust from the runway that went for a half mile.

Sad that they retired the bird. Kelly Johnson was a super hero engineer.
Eh, if you're new to a place and come in guns a-blazing or commenting on worthless flamebait (which is generally what leads to your karma dropping below zero), that is at least a very bad signal. I have seldom seen such a person go on to be less hostile than they started out.
I seriously doubt this guy was being brutally honest. If this guy was so awful, why did they keep him? It sounds much more likely that he's lying about how bad this fellow was out of spite.

If he really was awful and got called on it, that would be one thing. But to be libeled for no reason other than writing up your decision not to take a new job is terrible. Nobody should do that, CEO of something or not.
In my opinion, if you are publicly posting inappropriate content and showing it at work to your co-workers and or students, then yes, there should be some consequence. However, if someone is snooping and around for personal info about a teacher or an employee, i believe there is a better approach to handling the situation. Perhaps maybe making the teacher or employee revoke public access to his or her webpage/personal info.

I can only imagine how many teachers and employees would be out of a job if all their personal and private life details dug up and investigated.

Everything is subjective in context.
The article (which I quoted and which serves as the context for my post) refers the the state of headphone tech, not headset tech. He only ever talks about headphones, and the brief introductory reference to another blog entry about AR seemed fairly beside the point and the theme isn't picked up again.

I guess he might have been talking about headsets, although once again I'm not sure the tech is in need of an innovation boost from the hearing aide industry, it seems to progress just fine, even outside the realm of speciality gear for more efficiently killing people.
Facebook considering hate button
What's more unbelievable? After 48 years we don't have anything that comes close to it and we don't even fly them anymore.
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I agree with this suggestion.

Also, I want to point out that "essential readings" is not the right attitude. In order to really make progress you're going to need to get your hands dirty and work though some examples. One very good exercise is to write an interpreter for a language you invent.
Ask HN: Privacy and the Absence of data
I've seen a lot of comments on HN about how bad it can be to be human with all the associative flaws being exposed via facebook and google. In essence, how Big Data becomes bad data in the wrong hands. Thus, creating a very new Privacy issue.

I'm curious as to the thoughts of the community, especially on the more scary topics of insurance or employment, how the lack of data can be interpreted. For instance, if 98% of the people give up personal data, then the 2% of people that live private lives are now marginalizable. And, in essence, any bad action that can happen as a consequence of the wrong information leaking can be now (or soon be) the default action taken when no information is available.

It would seem to me that living a private life could become more scary than living a life in the public because people can assume and act on the worst scenario ("oh, math lives a private life, thus he must be sacrificing kittens to his lord diablo").
"I no longer have a compelling reason to switch from Mac back to Linux."

Even if you assume that the only thing Linux has to offer is graphical windowing environments; there are a lot of other enviornments besides gnome/unity...

Xfce, awesome, kde, xmonad, lxde, fvwm95(joke), etc....
Last time I checked with a university, they dropped half of the hardcore stuff, and teach more Java/Python. YMMV.
Just-in-time Education
Santa Monica, Ca

We are a well funded, new startup that is changing the way people experience books on mobile devices. We are in need of a generalist engineer who wants to help us build products which combine traditional books and nontraditional interactive games. Proximity to Los Angeles is desired. We're looking for braininess and experience, but if push comes to shove, we'll take brains over experience!

Email careers@bentoboxinteractive.com
Why nations fail
Google Monster Maps - KML World Map with all monsters from Dragon's Quest
I wonder if they have any plans to support MPI? On most of the super computers I use that is the only option for parallelism across compute nodes.
That's called not over engineering something.

Making something more complicated doesn't make it better. Make it more complicated when you need to, not before.
Warning: this is going to get very long and ranty.

I worked on Wall Street 2006 to 2008, and I had friends on the Street before that. I went into "tech" in 2008, saw the mini-crash and read the Sequoia ScareDoc, and now I'm watching this bubble.

Wall Street has a bad reputation, but I've seen far worse ethics and much less professionalism in technology, which is supposed to be above that garbage. On Wall Street, people know what the rules are. They're pretty clear, because the scummiest shit has generally been tried. You front-run your customer, you go to jail. You get a reputation for being unethical, it ruins your career. You defraud people, you get fired for life from the securities industry. You have to take a Series 7, so you have no excuse. Sure, the industry has some slimeballs and some slip through, but not so brazenly, and they at least are supposed to feel bad about it. In technology these days, there are so many people who don't give the square root of a shit about making good software but just want to play the angles. The vast majority of them aren't engineers, those who are tend engineers turning into junior executives by putting their ethics through a fire sale, but none of those fuckers belong here.

Google: generally professional and probably ethical macroscopically, but careerist to a fault. Bureaucratically overgrown. Full of horrid legacy systems that are built to flip-- specifically, to be "interesting" enough to merit a promotion for the original architect, who then moves on before it goes into maintenance phase and falls to pieces. That's how you get promoted at the big G. Launch and flee, every 18 to 24 months.

Startupland: I can name two major ($100M+ valuation) VC-funded companies that have committed major ethical faults in the past 6 months (one wasn't published and won't be, one developed last week and might be in the next 3 weeks). Both of these startups have some of the best, nicest, and most interesting engineers I've ever met... but are run by scumbag executives that would have fit in better with 1980s private equity people than with the (more decent, much more boring) typical Wall Street quant. I've never met a VC and I'm sure they're not all bad, but my theory is that the scumbaggery in so many VC-funded startups has to come from the top. I assume they fund people who are like them, and that would make sense, given that VCs are mostly MBAs, and something like 60 percent of B-school students at top schools cheat in their coursework.

Why do I bring this up? Because it's fucking nuts that some unprofessional, vindictive jerk like this guy was just acquired for $200 million. The world is seriously on tilt here. What are we even doing?
I'd be interested in your recommendations for primarily becoming a better programmer.
You are probably thinking of Jim Clark's exec admin, and I can say as someone who supported Jim Clark, that no, she worked about 10x harder and smarter than any admin you will likely meet. I Have a hundred anecdotes, but the one that comes to mind is where she had to delay his private jet, with an "electrical failure", just so we could deliver a ThinkPad the IT organization was repairing without him even knowing it was missing. She was still lucky, but based on the number of other admins JC went through, she was also unique in her ability and work ethic.
"even outside the realm of speciality gear for more efficiently killing people."

FYI, this discussion is made possible because of DARPAnet and other innovation boosts drawn from the realm of "more efficently killing people". So handwaving/ignoring tech.mil seems a little short sighted at the very least. But let's return to:

"What good is a directional microphone and why (and lacking a microphone, how?) would a headphone distinguish between voices and background noise?"

How about headphones for factory workers? Construction workers? Soccer moms/dads who want to listen to a book on tape while little johnny and 25 other 5 year olds clamber up and down and all over metal playground equipment? Scientists on safari in africa or bird watching in the amazon? News camera man operating in a nousy environment that needs to hear what the reporter is saying while monitoring the police-band/other coverage/updates from main news desk?

That's five examples that I can think of off the top of my head. But its not clear what field you are restricting the discussion to. That is why I asked what you meant by "what good is"? Without a problem/application it is impossible to identify the value of a technology.
The OMGPOP CEO
Honestly, why? Considering the rather insane amount of time something like jekyll needs, a few seconds don't matter at all. So having a background service won't really get you anything for "production" usage – even if you'd be doing twitter-like 20+ items/day micro-blogging. The only gain I could imagine from a setup like this would be prototyping the look and feel of your site in its very early stage, where it would save you from half a dozen script invocations.

Those seconds would only matter if they would be a large percentage of the whole running time. And I've yet to see a SSG where two, three seconds for a year or more worth of blogging would actually matter.
Amicus is hiring developers looking to make a positive impact with their code. Can you write CSS in your sleep, but are kept awake at night thinking about how to direct your skills towards a more meaningful impact?

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As for replacing R, the whole problem is that no-one is really a fan of the syntax but there is an staggering number of packages ready to use. Bioconductor (tools for analysis of biological data: http://www.bioconductor.org/) alone is over 500 packages whose functionality is most likely not implemented for any other language/platform.
The "bubble" isn't such a bad thing with software, IMO. Running a malicious application has much worse consequences than accessing an unpopular webpage.
New Clojure plugin for Eclipse [0.7.0] Beta released