skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought all 5 levels of Rosetta French version 3, and I lambast it at every opportunity.

There is one positive item, one huge negative and one poor implementation point.

The positive is that I think the mechanism, or put another way the Rosetta Stone platform, is mostly good. The combination of visual and aural, with a relatively simple screen-is-one-concept approach, is good.

The negative for me was the actual content itself. I learned about ladders, and horses and crazy things that not once have I encountered here in Paris. It would have been helpful to learn food items, grocery store items, things folks (even tourists) would likely find useful.

I hesitate to mention this because it might not have been a Rosetta Stone objective, nor might it fit into their framework/platform. But, there were no verb tense lessons. Even just rote learning of "je voudrais ..." [I would like ...] would get you out of 80% of the conversational jams when trying to get a sandwich, or similar.

The poor implementation point is that I did not experience any good luck using their voice recognition engine. Perhaps it is because I really have horrible French pronunciation. However, isn't that the very situation Rosetta is trying to correct? I found no way to discover why it was upset with my pronunciation. It was just a very frustration experience.
That's some pretty clean emulator code! Sticks fairly closely to the hardware design, and it's clear what's going on for the most part. In addition to practical use as an emulator, it might make a good learning tool for someone who wants to understand how the Atari VCS's weird hardware works. Perhaps read along with the canonical Stella Programmer's Guide (http://www.alienbill.com/2600/101/docs/stella.html) and the less technical but still informative book Racing the Beam (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026201257X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...).

A minor quibble is that the audio emulation, while accurate from the perspective of what the audio hardware does, produces a bunch of harsh-sounding aliasing when used to generate digital audio. That's a common problem with 8-bit emulators, though. The short explanation of why: in the hardware implementation, the Atari feeds square waves directly into speakers. Square waves are in a sense the "natural" electrical signal for digital circuits, and from simple bit-patterns you can get complex harmonics. But when, instead of feeding them as voltages directly to a speaker, you generate digital audio samples that look like square waves, the harmonics above the Nyquist frequency (1/2 the sample rate) fold over into the audible range as aliasing artifacts.

The fix is to generate band-limited square waves, which are approximations to square waves w/ no frequency content above the Nyquist frequency. There's an active research literature on how to best do that efficiently (it's important if you're trying to digitally replicate the sound of classic analog synths like the Moog), but it mostly boils down to replacing the discontinuity in the square wave (which is where the harmonics come from) with something more like a ripple, designed to only produce sub-Nyquist harmonics. One fairly simple approach, integrated into several emulators, is explained here (w/code): http://www.slack.net/~ant/bl-synth/
Real World SQL Join Examples
Evernote has a popular app, I grant them that. But how does that translate to a $1 billion company? It's not like you can take the same users and sell them insurance or weight loss pills.
Just in case the parent doesn't respond

"Is this a matter of the problems pointed out are "correct" technically, but they may or may not be the "right" thing to spend time on?"

I'm pretty sure you've already got it, this sounds like it. I would only add that a conscientious person checks whether their comment is adding to the conversation (not anxiously; just subconsciously, as a habit). The parent to your comment is saying that if you're 'correct' you're in the clear that way.

I think the thing about being "right" is that if you're right (i.e. your addressee is wrong) you have enough social capital to take that tone with somebody. If you're wrong and you take up an 'I'm right' tone, you come off like you don't care about thinking things through before you make an investment of your time.
It's a female in a bathing suit! There's nothing sleazy about touching up a female or male in photo editing software. In fact, these are probably two of the most common things touched up for photo work.
Why would it be better to have an ultimate goal? The intentions are clearly just to give people who are hungry to learn about some subject matter a great place to go learn it. That's a fantastic service.
Don't Go All In, Unless You're All In
Oh don't worry, nobody will forget the legacy of the guy who sued his own fan just so that his company would make an extra buck.
Also, enter Stallman:
"Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died".

Couldn't have put it better.
Maybe I'm being naive here: Where is the alternative to RSS? I live in
a small happy world (I use feeds heavily with gwene.org and Emacs Gnus
as my reader and I like the experience). How am I (or anyone else)
supposed to consume content from blogs? I cannot a believe a
technology would simply die without there being something better. Am I
living under a rock and just haven't seen the RSS-killer?
Evernote Has Completed A $100 Million Round At A $1 Billion Valuation
Know Your Gmail Stats Using Gmail Meter
Where did you get the zone file from? Link?
That information can and should be recorded somewhere. The most natural place (I think) for it to be recorded is along side the code where the insights are applicable. The tool was built to allow developers to create these 'stories'.
No questions here, just a small niggle: "Fewer users", not "less".
Why Startups Need an API
The way to remove a feature gracefully is to first stop promoting it in any way, sometimes up to and including making the docs more obscure, because it's rude to urge people to use a feature on Day N and then rip it away from them on Day N+1. Particularly if some of those people are your business partners.

The next step, in many cases, is to send out sorrow-filled notices to the feature's users saying, in essence, that you're end-of-lifing the feature as of date X. Though often the bad news is artfully disguised. (e.g. "Look at all the glorious new stuff that we're rolling out to replace that tired old feature that will now be deprecated and slated for removal.")

Only in step three do you just shut it off. You might even shut it off gradually, as when Google shut off their old design for Gmail, a process which is still going on and appears to be taking literally years.

How much time elapses between the three steps depends on the details.
On my laptop it perfectly covers the scrollbar so you can't use it at all. Funny how it doesn't seem to do that in anything that isn't Chrome.
I'm not sure if this is possible. According to Wolfram Alpha the distance between NYC and Tokyo is ~10879 Kilometers (as the crow flies, not as the cable lies). The speed of light in Kilometers per second is 299,792.458

If we evaluate (10879 / 299792.458) * 1000 = 36.28. This is for a single leg. So we get 72.57 milliseconds just for as the crow flies transport. This does not include other factors that contribute to latency (network, processing, etc.)

For "round trip" as you say then this number should be multiplied by 2 as it has to go NYC -> Tokyo, Tokyo -> NYC.

Have you developed some sort of faster than the speed of light communication mechanism we haven't heard of? Inquiring minds demand to know.

Edit:
One possible explanation is that you are using multiple time sources that are not synchronized. E.g. if you send a FIX message to an ECN and use the clock available on your machine and then use the ECN's timestamps somewhere in your calculation this renders the measurement invalid because you can't ensure that your clocks are synchronized.
I agree with the parents that doubt the veracity of these claims. There is so much more to a language than just vocabulary and grammar that I can't imagine anybody picking up on their own in 4-5 months. For example, in Japanese, there are many levels of formality that affect the vocabulary you select as well as the way you say something. And it's not just a matter of using one level with a particular person, how formal you are is very dynamic, and can change back and forth in the same conversation. Also, it's pretty much impossible to reach a native level productiveness of giseigo and giongo (different types of mimetic words) without being born and raised there.

However, if you're a language maven, then I can see how you can obtain high fluency in a short amount of time (although even the mavens I came across had issue with giseigo/giongo production, figure that out). But don't assume the same technique a maven uses will apply to your everyday person. I've studied Japanese for going on 14 years now (8 of those years being intense study: masters program, study abroad) and the more that I learn the more that I realize that I don't know.
10 Google Bombs That Will Live in Infamy
With some effort I think I understood why Zuck paid 1 billion on Instagram (IMO Instagram had a huge potential to be the next big social network, so I think Mark noticed it too and bought before it became too big), but I fail to understand how it is possible to Evernote to value the same. This seems to be a bad smell to me.
True, but irrelevant. We're talking about commerce, not armed robbery.

Trying to return something to a store is not fraud. This guy in particular always intended to pay for a case like his wife's. If he didn't get what he expected, then returning the product for a refund is reasonable and legal. If he sends them a note saying, "I am returning the product and canceling my payment; where should I send it?" then no fraud has been committed.
I'm convinced that valuations calculated by multiplying shares x 'the last price someone payed for one share' is completely useless.

A better valuation would be the sum of the equity that has been sold (for actual money) - liabilities + cash on hand + discounted future earnings at some reasonable growth rate (this can be industry specific).

IOW, what would a single entity be willing to spend in cash to acquire the company today.

I don't see how saying Evernote is a "one billion dollar" company has any merit at all.
It is very impressive that it works flawlessly in IE7.
which version of Lion do you have? i have no problems on the latest one
All keystrokes are recorded but that is not the main form of documentation created. A developer creates a playback of only the 'interesting parts' of the code and provides a narrative about why they think it is interesting.

Then, when someone looks at some unfamiliar code they can search to see if there is a 'story' about that bit of code. The code and the narrative playback side by side. The noise can efficiently be bypassed.
Norway killer sharpened aim on computer games
I just flipped through the docs, and this looks amazing.

It would be nice to see some benchmarks.

If Numba lives up to expectations, Travis Oliphant should be knighted.
He's "correct" in that all his recommendations seem valid. Ceteris paribus, Patrick should adopt them.

He's not "right", though, because adopting any of these recommendations would cost anywhere from tens- to thousands- of dollars, and would be unlikely in the aggregate, even if all of them were adopted, to make Patrick one additional dollar.
Then, instead of a crazy person, you look like an asshole.
It sounds like the obj-c garbage collector is deprecated in 10.8. Is there any plan for MacRuby to work without it?
> Jekyll is an awesome framework, But, we think it's not right for blogs for a number of reasons. Also, we think that the git push → deploy dance, is a bit too much when you want to make minor edits.

You realize this "dance" is solved by a simple post-receive hook right? For example:

git clone ${GIT_REPO} ${TMP}
${HOME}/gems/bin/jekyll --safe --no-auto ${TMP} ${PUBLIC_WWW}
rm -rf ${TMP}

Any time you push to that repo, it builds and deploys the new site automatically.
downvote me please, but why is this on HN?
I am currently learning Swedish just because we moved here for work, but English is the language we ALL speak at work, no matter where we come from. most HNers would need to learn a language if they get a job overseas for daily survival outside of work, @ work I bet 100% will be speaking English.
Nice job!

Maybe someone could create a PlayN version so it will run on the browser and on Android.
Linux Torvalds Shortlisted for 2012 Millennium Technology Prize
Patrick, you're the expert here on Google traffic direction: are any of these changes likely to impact your ranking?
Maybe Patrick could do a A/B test on the new version of the site vs. the highly optimized version of the new site (do even more than you suggested, there is a lot more possible if you start searching) and see if it makes any difference. That could be really interesting.

I doubt he has the time and 'itch' right now, though.
This has likely been happening quite some time, especially on file locker sites.
I feel your pain. I started http://discoproject.org back in 2007, trying to make MapReduce more easily approachable.

If vanilla MapReduce is too low-level for you, you might want to take a look at http://bitdeli.com which provides a cloud-based scripting platform for real-time data (disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Bitdeli).

Neither Disco nor Bitdeli provides OLAP out of the box but if you are ok with writing a screenful of Python to process your data, you might find them useful.
Why is it so hard to create an index of online prices, which is what BPP is.

Here is their own explanation:
"Data collection: our data are collected every day from online retailers using a software that scans the underlying code in public webpages and stores the relevant price information in a database. The resulting dataset contains daily prices on the full array of products sold by these retailers. Our data include information on product descriptions, package sizes, brands, special characteristics (e.g. “organic”), and whether the item is on sale or price control."

That isn't hard to do in my mind. Why do you believe it is so hard?

Let's be clear. You are claiming that inflation is significantly higher than the CPI or BPP. You can talk until your blue in the face about the "problems" with those two, but you have to also provide some alternative data/math which is transparent. shadowstats is not transparent. It seems rather easy to me to make a price index, make the data public, and make the code public. I'm happy to help out on the coding side if you're up for it.
a notepad app company that's worth 1bn...hmmm.
The WSJ had an article on showrooming just the other day: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230458770457733...
Fair enough, about the same costs as in the US.

...but I am used to Swedish pricing levels. $45 for 100/10 Mbit/s with no quota.
You can apply through Verisign to obtain access:

http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...
Operator threatens to report hack to the FBI, hacker returns stolen bitcoins
For whatever it's worth: Patrick's original strategy for ranking (and perhaps still the strategy that accounts for most of his revenue) isn't the Google search [bingo cards]. It's 1000 closely related but technologically distinct searches.
Hmmm, I'd want a client capable of seeking out images stored as a background image or underneath a invisible div that some site owners use to protect their image. But that's probably impossible.
I presume your limitations are due to the drag drop file handling on the upload from computer?

I did something recently like this and ended up with an ugly "Select file" button when people are in IE.

I really hope IE are pulling their fingers out with IE10, it appears they are. We are getting a load of adverts in the UK now on Microsoft products, like Bing etc. It seems to me they are taking it seriously again.
Brett,

This is great and I would pay to use it in a second if it could handle uploads on the iphone/ipad (something like http://www.aurigma.com/iphone/). I just signed up for the developer key. Will you be emailing that list with feature updates/news? Thanks
> "the app had 20 million users"

How many paying users do they have?
> Security before there's anything to secure is a little silly.

Cute, but falls flat in the face of reality. If you just bought an expensive diamond ring, you already have the safe at your apartment waiting for it.

The same with software. You can't add security later.

You will need to rewrite everything, because with software, every action needs to be secure. So every action would have to be re-written. Every database write and read, every file write and read, etc. etc.

You want to know the real reason Firebase and Meteor didn't have security baked in from the start? Because security is 90% of the work in any real software suite. They started off with the 10% that's a low hanging fruit.

That's totally fine! But that also means neither one has a viable product and they won't have a viable product until they do the other 90% of the work.
The glass half empty is that there was no benefit to the redesign.

The glass half full is that you have a more visually pleasing, refreshed web site that is at least as effective as the old design. Patrick also notes that the users tend to associate visual changes with programatic improvements, even when there are no programatic improvements (placebo effect).
Undeniably. Now the question to me though is how a pre-IPO valuation bubble pops. Obviously lots of venture investors lose a lot of cash if these companies can't exit; but that cash wasn't in the public markets anyway and shouldn't cause a ripple, right? Who is bearing the risk here? What money will flee where when it becomes clear that Groupon and Evernote are losses and that Facebook is going to break even at best with their IPO?
What are the risks of cloud services?
Websockets or Comet or Both? What’s supported in the Java EE land
I've been having an awesome time learning Spanish using http://duolingo.com for the past few weeks.
Good to know re. mobile.

Re. email, we'll be trying to limit the number of emails we send out to the lowest possible, but if there's interest we can create a separate mailing list that's higher volume for feature announcements, etc. over the coming week.
> But the Dragon still cost less to develop than a single launch of the NASA space shuttle. That's remarkable.

It's called "standing on the shoulders of giants". I'm glad the industry is at a point where it can be run by companies instead of governments, as I'm sure it will be more efficient, and likely innovative as well.

But those of us without an ideological axe to grind are pointing out that it got to this point thanks in no small part to government involvement.
New HumbleBundle: "Botanicula"
Well, I'm stating a basic constraint of physics: you have to carry around this much energy and it will require this much mass. You're making a certain assumption about the kind of engine and its exhaust velocity, and finding that there's a problem with low exhaust velocities. That's mostly correct, but in principle there are probably fuel sources which could achieve an exhaust velocity near c -- I'm thinking in particular if you were carrying matter and antimatter, and annihilated them in an ultrahigh-Q cavity with a small aperture to let the light out in only one direction -- or some really crazy futuristic application of lasing. You will still not get better than carrying thousands of times the mass of your spaceship for the deceleration phase, due to a basic constraint of physics.
The world needs more of this kinda interaction! It can only lend itself to stronger design.
Great concept.

However, a small nitpick : When I click "Get a key" without entering any Email, I get an Internal Server Error at /thanks/. Probably you guys should handle edge cases?
Actually the drag-drop isn't as big of a deal as cross-domain message passing. We'll likely end up having to use a flash fallback or similar, but last night as we were hacking on this we decided to punt for a day or two
Memorizing vocab in that way is less efficient than SRSing whole sentences, where you get semantics, contexts, and grammar at the same time.
All this VC money comes from pension funds, university endowments, and other large institutional investors that are looking for a return on investment that is higher than regular public equities.

When the crash comes, pensions and endowments will stop seeing tech venture funds as a safe investment so they'll shift their money elsewhere, leaving VC firms without money to invest.
Splunk is a horrible name
Ask HN: How to build a potential clan, Need Advice, www.stygianhackerz.com
I have started a educational, informational kind off website targetting the hacker community. It like a social network for hackers and a forum for them. I call the group of mebers as a clan. I need advise for building a potential clan and making the site popular.
This comment is clownish, because both designs appear to make asymptotically close to the most money you can make on the Internet with a topic-specific bingo card generator (which is a surprisingly high amount of money).

I'm not sticking up for Patrick (he doesn't need my help, and I probably make him look worse), so much as I am repeatedly trying to talk unfunded startups out of wasting time and opportunity chasing cool-kid aesthetics which will have nothing to do with their eventual business success.
Banjo's growth shows that strong technology wins
I've not tried it yet, but what a cool idea! Will be sure to give it a go
One piece of data for Evernote skeptics - the founder has said that they have a very slow monetization, in that people convert more and pay more the longer they've been a user. So the longer people use it, the more ways they find to use it, the more data they put into it, the more valuable it becomes to their process and they outgrow the free plans. Older customers pay because Evernote has become more valuable to them. So rapid growth in free users over the last couple years has a demonstrated (not hypothetical) path to payoff over time.

EDIT: reference: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2799
Sell to facebook for a billion dollars?

Seriously, do you have any plans of how to make money? The server costs on this could get really high if it actually becomes popular. Then you have a hugely successful app that is actively losing you money.
I'm sure others have achieved significant gains... I just haven't experienced them, and it sounds like you haven't, either.

What I found does move the needle are:
1) Changing how much I charge, including adding upsells, and
2) Getting new sources of traffic.
I think the point is that is will support pulling files from any service you use to store them - dropbox, facebook, your computer, skydrive, etc. It's much more than a pretty file upload UI, and the fact that it looks that simple is actually its greatest achievement.
What benchmarks would be the most relevant? speed.pypy.org?
What are the licensing costs?
Nice! Going to integrate this into my blogofile setup so that I can output nicer HTML!
I totally agree. 5 years living in France would be already very difficult, 5 months is just impossible. Unless OP has a special gift for languages, in which case the whole post about the method becomes irrelevant.
Great hook but then...

"Apply Privately with Facebook"

Instafail. That's never gonna happen. Ever. Please take a read of http://dickbrouwer.com/post/16748664071/facebook-perils
Just because one can puzzle out meaning doesn't mean that a piece is well written. It only means the reader was sufficiently clever, or lucky enough to stumble on the meaning.