skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Classic rock and shitty pop. All kinds of classic rock, but only certain, catchy pop songs can do the trick. I can completely ignore lyrics, they've never been a problem.

And I agree, a given album will put me in the same mentality every time.
To those who think 60% is low: how many apps of the 100,000+ in the App Store were made by a small team of maybe 3 or fewer people? How much could their development costs be? A few thousand? Certainly modest apps can be developed for less than $100,000 (substantially less in most cases). I'd believe that most (say, oh 60%) of these apps can attract a few thousand customers to pay the $0.99 for their app.
Investors are pouring funds into big data
Stuff like this makes me want to drop the WebForms work I'm doing for rent and work on my FRP library... le sigh.
Show HN: Hack the game of finding friends to eat with
"My body area is private" - Software with personality
Why shoot for tablets and smartphones when there's better tech.

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/03/spell-checking-powere...
Kind of an obvious press release, no?
Speaking as former Nokia employee (they bought my employer in April 2010, I bailed at the end of this January), I think all the discussion about Nokia’s strategy is missing a very big factor in Nokia’s decline. Their corporate culture is deeply, deeply dysfunctional: my pet name for them is “The Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic”. I think (judging from some of the internal propaganda we received while I was there) that some people in upper management understand that there is this problem, but you can’t take a company of 100,000 people who were hired and trained and promoted to thrive in one kind of environment and then, two years later, have them adapted to another.
Yeah, we played around with a bunch of different styles, including defining the block before its use. It looked cleaner but the code locality of defining them inline won.
Why do there need to be a unified theory?

That seems only the be necessary if you are looking for some sort of Truth which in itself is saying there must be a creator (i.e. someone must have defined the true way too look at this)

Science the way I understand it in its most postmodern interpretation isn't really about finding a unified theory but rather about finding the one thing that changes the paradigm and using that.

For instance beliving the world is flat might not be true, but it's true enough to get from one village to the next. The problem is when you want to travel further.
Stopped reading at "theft". Sorry, I don't take anyone serious who equates or even compares
copying to thievery. It's factually wrong, and serves as nothing but an attempt to discredit
anyone critical of or even opposed to copyright (whether just in its current form or in its
entirety).
If al-Qaeda can build their own bombs and guns, I'm pretty damn sure they can set up their own secure Email & VOIP servers.
Implementation of the very fast FFT (MIT SFFT) is now available
F-Script (see chrisdevereux's comment) has been around since the very early days and allow itself to be included in the program to begin with or injected later. You can do a lot of experimentation with it.
This just proves the world is overpopulated when we have such useless idiots as the FBI, inventing new ways to make themselves seem useful.

If you are an FBI agent, quit your job, buy a dairy cow, and finally give the world something it needs.
I found that clearly defining and specifying a question is half way to the answer. More often than not, the questions are asked poorly and the desired goal is obscured confusingly.

For example the first question, "How do you map the list on the left to the list on the right?" Huh? What do you mean by "map"? Do you want a data structure to link the two? Are the list infinite? Or just upto 100? Do you want to derive the algorithm to produce the next number? Or do you want a function that given the left list produce the right list? Or do you want a function that given a number from the left list, produce the corresponding item on the right. On and on.
I don't think Google delivers over TLS (it doesn't to my server anyway), so in general your mail is subject to wiretapping anyway. And even if it did there's no way protocol I know (maybe DKIM has a section for destination verification?) for them to know that they're really delivering it to the right host.

Basically unencrypted email is a lost cause already. If you care about this stuff you need to dump webmail right now and go with a client encryption solution (and convince all your friends to use it).
Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time
They are talking about the fact that you have a few teachers telling you to question authority

People don't need to be taught to question authority, they figure it out on their own at a pretty young age. Usually the moment an authority tells them to do something that they don't want to do.

At the age of two, "questioning authority" manifests itself by throwing a tantrum in the supermarket when the authority tells you to stop trying to grab things off the shelves. At the age of fifteen, "questioning authority" has moved on to the more direct form in which you assert that your parents and teachers are idiots who don't know anything and that you should be allowed to smoke, skip school and pierce your septum if you feel like it.

The process of growing up is largely a matter of getting out of this phase and accepting that actually those authority figures were right about some things all along.

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years" -- Mark Twain (maybe, though snopes says falsely attributed)

Everybody on Earth fancies themselves anti-authoritarian; it's easy to be anti-authoritarian when an authority is telling you to do something you don't want to do, though much harder when the authority is telling other people to do things that you really think they ought to.
How many apps are developed by existing businesses that wish to extend their service to the iOS platform? I'd bet this is a significant number. Dropbox, Facebook, all of Google's apps, many newspapers and old media channels, online travel services, and many others have an iOS app to supplement their existing business. How many apps in the App Store are barely more than a nicer mobile interface for an existing website?

How does this "study" account for these cases? If you release a free app, how many additional conversions are required via the app to justify the development costs?
This makes me happy happy.

It will detangle some big apps I'm on.
Same. I gleaned quite a few little tid-bits from this article. I started reading and was able to branch off with the provided links to get more in-depth information.
Big Networks as an Unfair Advantage
tl;dr: Piracy makes good promotion for tech reference books. Bing returns a lot more links than Google when you hunt for anything involving "torrent".
DoT, India Orders Blackout of Vimeo, TPB, kat.ph and more
I get a chuckle out of Google's final status regarding the naming conflict with Francis McCabe's Go!: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9
Thank you and have an upvote. I do not know who is "right" but you certainly supported your position. I am in no position to argue it, but then that wasn't my intent anyway as I hate arguing. But I appreciate learning something new.

Have a great day.
I love the concept of this. I travel a lot and sometimes find it difficult to arrange a dinner with old friends on short notice. I'd especially like it when I get hungry late at night but don't want to bother anybody specific.
What purpose does this server other than to demonstrate these individuals lacked the savvy to secure their compensation?
I thought one of the things we'd learned over the last decades was that when the hippies took over the education department and took all the regimentation and repetition out of the classroom, the result was a bunch of students who didn't understand the material.

Meanwhile, Asian schools were cranking out kids who had actually understood the material. How 'bout that?
DEA Abandons Student In Cell
I think these long allegories are rarely justified vis-a-vis a direct explanation that can 'break character' to reference other works and use more varied supporting examples. This also avoids wrapping up individuals and their reputations into the much more important question of what the truth is.
Grothendieck is one of the towering figures of 20th century math. He said:

"Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle–while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured) things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects."

There are many other such mathematicians who aren't flashy. (I recall that Hilbert is a famous example.) So I wouldn't be discouraged by this. Environmental factors are probably far more important.
Quantum biology is making inroads in a few areas, such as in the mechanism of chlorophyll. I would not be surprised if it starts popping up in bits of neurology, even in the parts that we currently understand classically.
Using the term lottery and pointing out that 60%+ don't break even makes a very inaccurate assumption: that all of those apps are equal in quality of production and marketing. They aren't.

High quality apps which are combined with a high quality marketing and PR push have a far greater chance of success than the 912th Angry Birds ripoff that was built in two hours.

See Instagram for an app this author probably thinks hit the app store lottery. In some respects they did get lucky, however all of the work that went into releasing and publicizing the app gave them the potential to have the kind of luck most apps could never have, because millions of people would not download those apps, use them daily, give them 5-stars and rave to their friends about them even if their app were the top result for every search, chart and list in the app store.

tl;dr: the better your app is and the harder you work to market it, the 'luckier' you will get.
I agree that extremetech is pretty link baitey but if they are accurate in their assessment that Samsung has decided to invest in a usability features, then it would be a big step toward a more useful device.

Of all the Android Phone manufacturers, Samsung and Motorola Mobility have been the most active in 'enhancing' the Android experience. Sometimes that enhancement is in the form of ways to lock you into their gear (custom app stores, capabilities, Etc) but the capability is there to generally improve the user experience.

One might ask why Google isn't at the forefront of this sort of change but I think they have their hands full at the moment. All in all it looks like an improvement in the marketplace.
I wrote this in the comments on the article, but also wanted to share my thoughts with everyone here, please reply if you have something to say about what I'm about to say, this is one of the topics in life that I haven't finished making conclusions on, it is terribly complicated and I'd love feedback on my mental process. Thanks.

When someone goes to prison it's generally for a good reason, after the jury and trial and all that, it's safe to say then that these people forfeit their rights. That's what happens when you go against the rules of a society you belong to. I think everyone can agree with that. The trick is balance, sure it's not fair to blanket treat inmates all the same, however they cost us money to not just capitol-punishment the lot of them (a bad idea for moral reasons.) So they need to pay off their debt. But to go as far as to say they should be treated as if being away from everyone is their only punishment and that's already bad enough is a bit naive. Many people in prison did really bad things, like rape and murder, try telling the victims family in those cases that the inmate that killed their kid gets to get an education, a job, some savings for his release, cable TV, food, etc, etc. Tell them that and see what reaction you get.

To be completely fair they did bad things, we need to keep that in mind, also the cheap labor could be used to help society. Cheap furniture/clothing/household items, etc for low income families comes to mind.

I think the real solution is to be transparent about how much things cost, and we need to keep in mind that we can't allow for slave labor of prisoners just for those profits to go into CEO's pockets. If we are to do that then it needs to go to the potential rehabilitation of the inmate, and in dropping the costs so lower income people can save money on essentials that are made by inmates hands.

PS: This is definitely one of the most thought provoking articles relating to inmates I've read in a long time.
It is nice that to discuss refinements and alternatives to the tried and true experimentation approaches -- but a deeper problem in the real world is that none of the methods under discussion yield consistent results with scientific merit if the time series data are non-stationary, which is the normal case in data sets that have economic value.

The most basic property of a statistic is that, as the size of the data increases, it converges to 'the answer' (accurate) with more and more precision. Converging to the wrong answer (bias) or an answer that wanders off over time, doesn't count. ;)
If you have the actual numbers, it would probably obey the Pareto distribution. Essentially few rockstar developers make big money and most of them don't succeed.

\Didn't read the article.
But you can in fact build such a computer - you'll just have to solve the little problem of accounting for absolutely all the factors that directly and indirectly affect the result. Then predicting the future is easy peasy :-)...
Firefox on Windows already has this feature. (i don't think its a feature of windows because it doesn't work in other programs)

Try scrolling sidways with your touchpad when you have focus on the url-bar...

Hold control to scroll word by word.
hardware prefetching mechanism is in core i7 that i know for sure, it automatically identify memory referencing pattern and attempts to fetch those blocks into cache before they are accessed, the detailed algorithm of prefetching are not documented...
A large slab of Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind is, if I recall correctly, devoted to describing how certain structures of the brain just might have some quantum mechanics involved. I don't recall the details and I don't know whether it's all been disproven as we understand the brain better.
Except that being an ex-con means that at some point his standard NDA must have been insufficient/unenforceable... Or he made a bad hire, or trusted the wrong people. Just sayin'.
There's really no conflict between the statement, "every request gets it's own thread" and the use of thread pools.

The point is that a given request in a servlet container is handled in it's own thread. That thread will probably come from a pool and be reused to handle another request of course, but that's sort of immaterial.
Somehow hadn't heard of this book, and as I'm intending to do some web development soon this book sounds worthwhile. Thanks for the tip!
How to Support a Family of 5 By Running an Open Source Project
As sad as it is that a music pioneer has passed away, I don't think this belongs here.
Which part is wrong, the punish part or the cost part? Is it controversial to punish criminals?
yep. The only thing that's presented as a difference is a regular periodic update cycle, which is not really necessary as Mac security vulnerabilities are few and far between at this point. The other difference is code auditing, but given that OSX was re-written using UNIX ( designed as a multi-user OS from the ground up ) as a base, I don't think the criticism applies.
Please be charitable.
Fun with Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Thank you so much for your feedback! I'd love to hear more honest feedbacks from you. Bon Appetit:)
Nice! Will this be integrated with the zero-click info API at http://api.duckduckgo.com/ ?
Few mainstream services are going to accept data they can't recover for a user when they forget their password and their computer failed. Which pretty much precludes client-side encryption.
http://vertx.io/core_manual_js.html#serving-files-directly-d...
Both of these apps are incredibly useful for using the ipad as a controller:

1. http://liine.net/en/products/lemur/

2. http://hexler.net/software/touchosc
I do not understand why you would assert that. Anyone can make a mistake, ex con or not. So I don't follow your logic in tying the two things together. Do you think people simply cannot change?

Signed: Puzzled and curious.

Thanks.
Whenever a headline asks a question, the answer is always no.
While I don't really like this kind of editorializing, I haven't seen a better explanation for why things work the way they do -- with RIAA/MPAA people often accompanying FBI raids, writing police training material on counterfeit CDs and DVDs, and NBC hosting federal governments' anti-piracy videos on seized domains.
That's genius. Jet Blue's uses stay-at-home moms as their entire workforce of reservation agents. Productivity increased by 25% and employee turnover was reduced when they moved from call centers to homes.
Bad Science author Ben Goldacre: It's time for a VPN
Before '95 I'm sure anyone you asked, who was online, could tell you about basic HTML, circumventing blocks, security and even some basic CS knowledge. These days, everybody is online, mainly for easy to use services like Facebook, they don't give a crap how it works.

The 99%, are the 99% who were not online twenty years ago, the 1% are the people who were (or would have been) online 20 years ago.
While I strongly agree with the statement that copyright infringement does not equal theft, you're overreacting. It's even more ridiculous when the article is actually on your side of the argument.
Okay, interesting. I perhaps don't understand enough about the syntax to appreciate why those lower-level constructs would be beneficial w.r.t the geo stuff.

On the styling sure, data should often dictate the style in visualisations - the most noddy example people tend to give in JS as the exception to the rule of never 'programatically' (JS) setting styles is the progress bar where the width has to be data-based (as CSS-classes only make sense for discrete increments or 'states'). Of course the same applies for colouring/shading and sizing based on say population data or whatever is being modeled in a visualisation, I get that.

But, in the example on the first page the bars of the histogram are all explicitly coloured gray w/ white text programatically and the bar heights are manually set to '20' (presumably px). What would make more sense is for them to have a default class of say 'hist-bar-default', which is set in CSS to { height: 20px; background: gray; color: white }. If anything it would just make the example simpler as it actually muddles up the code where the widths are being dynamically set. shrug

Edit: btw, you will see that d3.js does this, it applies classes where appropriate rather than setting styles explicitly:
http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/cartogram.html
On first glance this looks excellent, but I have to question producing a book on a language so steeped in unicode with a markup language that makes it so unwieldy.

eg. $\Phi{}$ = Φ
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;

Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What i tell you three times is true."
I hope someone stands up to these bullies. They can't make us do this. Really, a few powerful people just need to say no.

If you are in this position, please for the love of god don't agree to put a surveillance backdoor in your website.
tl;dr -> "Buy my product"
Reposting JIC you're using HNNotify: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3929733

While I'm at it, someone is free to recommend to me the appropriate etiquette for responding to the same question in multiple threads.

(I can't reply to the dead comment though.)
Also: Piracy doesn't hurt sales as much as you might (like to) think, and DRM is not a good deterrent against piracy anyway.
I liked An Introduction to Go (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/an-introduction-to-go-james-...) and The Second Book of Go (http://www.amazon.com/Second-Book-Beginner-Elementary-Books/...)
> Maybe someone should take Squeak/Pharo Smalltalk and create a utility that can be used as a REPL working with the iOS simulator.

I'm gonna keep pimping it here on HN: Use Nu[1] as a REPL for iOS[2] and OS X[3]. I do all the time.

[1] http://programming.nu

[2] http://groups.google.com/group/programming-nu/browse_thread/...

[3] https://github.com/timburks/nu/blob/master/nu/console.nu
Indeed. That comes from the same FBI who said a couple of months ago that having to get warrants makes their job harder.
I feel like you are twisting the meaning of the phrase "questioning authority" into basically pure "rebelling against authority" as I would say they are two separate ideas.

The notion of "questioning authority" I would argue is similar to your statement of accepting that authority figures are right about some things, as in, they are most likely not right about all things and that it is important to spend time figuring out which is which.

I'm not sure where that is similar at all to the idea of a child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket.
Not sure if you're being facetious, but no, not all functional languages are Lisps. Haskell, ML, Ocaml, and Scala all come to mind as functional languages that are far from Lisp.
From the press release:

> "At 3.1 GHz this 28HPM dual-core processor implementation is twice as fast as its counterpart at TSMC 40nm under the same operating conditions."

I assume power consumption is not being counted as an operating condition. Usually power consumption scales super-linearly with frequency, correct? (Can any overclockers out there confirm this?)
Thanks to Paul Davis for letting me interview him for this! Ardour is a pretty sweet project, which you can check out here: http://ardour.org

My F/OSS music setup also relies heavily on Hydrogen, a free drum machine/FruityLoops clone: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/
What is the canonical way to convert this to ASCII? Can it be done with nroff? Tried l2a and hevea. No luck.
The goodies/fathead plugins should auto-flow through. Spice/longtail are a bit more complicated but would love to get them in at some point.
Not trying to be a knob here - is this an improvement over creating a webkit browser window with the same dimensions as your mobile device and changing the browser's user agent?
Startups party at the patent office
I've never understood the draw to this. I can type really quickly and I don't understand how curvature impacts typing performance. I thought that touch typists rely on muscle memory for spacing rather than the feel of the keys. Normally I use a Model M, but when I switch to my MBA, I don't really have any issues.
I hate to point this out to someone with the username "planetguy", but Galileo certainly had telescopes, definitely lived in the Renaissance, and discovered four moons of Jupiter.
Google Said to Face Fine Over Apple Safari Breach