skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
to clarify:

the THX sound was created by a synthesis program that was probably quite substantial itself (I have long been under the impression that it was a MUSIC-N derivative, and Moorer's description seems to confirm it) and, I'm guessing, probably not written in C. The input to this program was itself generated by a 20KLoc C program.

EDIT: i figured "i don't have to explain music-n, people can just look it up" but i just read the wikipedia article and i think that explanation only makes sense if you already know what it is. so...

MUSIC is a software synthesizer by Max Mathews, considered the father of computer music synthesis. It consists of a library of 'unit generators' and an orchestra/score processing system for using them. The "orchestra" file is used to define "instruments", basically parameterized combinations of unit generators, which themselves are basic synthesis building blocks (say, a square wave generator, or in the case of the THX sound, a wavetable oscillator).

The orchestra is controlled by a score, also known as a note list. This is just a series of statements saying, basically, "start playing instrument N at time T with parameters X,Y,Z".

MUSIC was followed by MUSIC-II, MUSIC-III, etc, hence the name "MUSIC-N". Basically every extant software synthesis package is derived from MUSIC-N on some level, but Csound is the most direct descendant.
>1. Kindles won't read non kindle ebooks.

Every Kindle ever sold will read PDFs, and with software like Calibre, you can convert every modern ebook format to it.
50 Reasons not to use Photoshop for Webdesign
酒渣鼻
So, to paraphrase you and Magritte: This is not a footprint.
From a quick glance Gmvault looks preferable from a security standpoint as your credentials get saved in ~/.gmvault rather than being passed as a command-line argument, which could be viewed by any user on the system.
https://www.backupify.com/ is a pretty good alternative as well
> If the folks managing the hospital were rational, shouldn't there be a regulation to use GMT and 24-hour clock?

People are not rational, that's the problem! Just look at any web app that can't get timezones right.

In addition, most Americans swear by EST, CST, PST, etc. and have no idea how many hours behind GMT they are. Record everything in GMT and soon there will be a similar article documenting how medical professionals routinely misinterpret GMT timestamps. Especially in March and November.
Can you buy technology with a clean conscience?
20kloc of C sounds like a lot and 4 days like too little. As a comparsion at work we developed a drive-by-wire system for handicaped car driver. This Software has around 22kloc of mostly C and some configuration/make files.
My main problem with this is that it would require me to store my password, in clear text, in a shell script.

I'm no security expert but that raises a red flag for me. I'd rather have some way of entering my password each time I want to back up, but this would also make the cron process impossible.
ditto. What problem does it solve? None, we don't need another framework! What we need is something that would save us PHP programmers more time than the MVC/Frameworks that are out there already do. How about a sleek CMS on top of Sf2 built on the bundles concept (it would have to be:), or a Magento replacement that integrates with the CMS and Sf2. That would get my attention.
Ah, but what creates a sound? The instrument, or the musician that knows how to play it? An instrument without a musician is merely silence.

I would argue that if the C program didn't "create" the sound that it was certainly the musician responsible.
That's the beauty of a distributed VCS. If my team member deletes every commit inside his master and tries to force push that to GitHub, either by accident or by malice, I have the true history for my master sitting on my local machine. I can then revoke his push access to our upstream, re-push the true master history I have a copy of, and then write him up for being stupid and/or uninformed. It doesn't matter if he was able to do that in HG or Git.

If no one notices that such a thing happened for a couple of months, then we need to use better code review practices. Git won't prevent humans from making mistakes. Git will, however, complain if I try to push my master to the upstream's master and the histories don't match (if someone else deleted a previously merged commit), which can at least tip me off to something fishy. Then, I can either force push, and then tell all my other co-workers that the history has changed, or I can revert the destructive commit and carry on.
3.4 sigmas aren't enough. Call when you get to 5.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/13/the-large...

and...

http://trap.it/47HCqt
Newtonian physics has worked out for too many situations for it to be just "wrong".

That doesn't sound quite right, does it?

I'm all for keeping sensationalism off of science, but I don't think "it's been working great so far" is a good reason to discount improvements to a model that we know is incomplete. Of course, a lot depends on what you mean by "wrong".
Seems like everyone wants to write an intro to Bayesian state (or, usually, subjective interpretation of probabilities and Bayes' Theorem). It's like the new Monad tutorial.
The *active* seed investors in UK and Ireland
Christian louboutin spiked
>Apple has been fighting to push back at the tide of design violations put forward by companies like Samsung and others. If you can name even one instance of where Apple has directly sued a small company over a technology patent I would be surprised.

Is this some sort of revisionist history? What about these ~20 patents? I'd like to know which ones you consider as design patents.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-bre...

I am not even going to waste my time listing patents used to sue Motorola and Samsung because I believe you're the one trying to handwave things here.

>The pricing scheme where DOS was $60 and the very same DOS + Windows was $30

God forbid a company set the price of its own products according to competitive pressures. What next? Kindle Fire should be banned?

>The way they would switch up Windows to "break" other competing applications like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3?

Care to elaborate or provide references? Is there really a case of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 running well on one version of Windows and breaking on the next?
Besides that, I use to say that I would not put a backdoor in the system used by my spies to communicate. It would be really dangerous for me if it fallen in the wrong hands.
one of the nice things about computer music is the way in which it can be a collaboration between musician and engineer, so much so that the lines are frequently blurred. i certainly got the impression from the article that in this case, Moorer was himself involved in the development of the synthesis package and even the signal processor itself.

Fundamentally though, you are of course correct. This was a mainframe in the 80s, so presumably there was an operating system and system libraries and they all played a part, so should we credit those developers as well? it's tortoises all the way down.
Using HTTP to access postgres
They're going for TSTO full reuse, vertical landing?
Burberry site
My Mac app, CloudPull, does something similar. CloudPull backs up Google Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Drive (formery Docs) and Reader to your Mac. http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/

CloudPull stores your password securely in the Mac OS X keychain.
I'm pretty sure cell towers all use gps for time synchronization, which is necessary for the network to work.

I always trust my cell phone time.
I hope not - but probably so. Ugh.

P.T.S.D.
Black Hat SEO Techniques That Work
Interesting Properties of 153
If you add in the non-visible salary taxes ("sociala avgifter") and other hidden costs, the salaries are quite high... you just don't get any of that money.
Finnish officer once said to me that when Finnish defense forces ceased to use horses at large,our mobility went greatly down. This happened somewhere around sixties. Only when Sisu Nasu came to use the situation was fixed.

I can understand, as horse needs no gasoline, can move in snow, is small enough to go between trees and is more silent than most engines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisu_Nasu
I wonder if that's part of the point. On other social networks you're connecting with friends and family. On G+ you're circling strangers whose thoughts you're interested in. I think I'd prefer to mine the latter if my goal was to make better search results for you.
Indeed, and we work on at rolling that back.

A whole lot of other governments have the same stuff, I would hazard to guess that they all do (Eschelon for example) and Sweden has actually been open about the fact that it has it, and has shown how the oversight is being done, whereas with other governments this is all a secret. Not justifying it, but just saying that because Sweden has said it does this, doesn't mean it is the worst or the only government spying on Internet traffic.

Indeed: I am a Swede.
See gmvault as mentioned in the comments here, it just saves an oauth token. Still can be used to access your mail but at least it can be easily revoked and isn't your clear text password.
You're right, a 17-month-old disclaimer is useless unless there's a link to it within a hundred pixels or so of the actual code sample.

If I ever start a technical blog, I'm going to style the <code> element so that every code sample automatically gets a link to a disclaimer about security, copyright, etc. Also throw in class="insecure" (background-color: reddish) to any sample which I know should never be used in production.
Because language wars.
A large factor is probably the oligopolies in the building industry, which earns lots of money with the present situation, despite little building going on.

Regulatory capture in Sweden is still not counted as corruption, for some strange reason...
> Design is everything

I don't think this is true. Features are far more important than shiny buttons.

Custom design is a problem too as it fragments the user experience. People want software that looks and feels native .
You kind of have to hope if more people (politicians, general public, enlistees) saw the realities of war they may be less likely to start them. There are a number of disturbing things about the USA Combat Robot / Drone programs but one of them is removing the psychological impact of blowing up another human being (bad guy, civilian). It seems like a path to increasing conflict, not reducing it.
Thats a really interesting find, although I'm not sure I like what I've heard of the netflix culture.
That doesn't make any sense. All of his posts that people see are posted to public.

Posting to your circles is the lists that you have created, he's not curating lists of >1million people. There isn't any way to limit the visibility of a post just to people who are following you on google+
I didn't bother to read the terms of API use. I'm not using the API ^^;;

I'm simply using their embeddable video player and changing the height and width to a form more appropriate for desired usage.
So, what I think you're suggesting is that a developer wouldn't understand accidental/essential complexity differences until a more skilled developer figured out the essence of certain classes of problems and others learned to apply their experience.

But, isn't that the case with any domain built on knowledge? My point was that a skilled developer had learned much the state of the art knowledge up to this point, and understands the pitfalls over over-complicating a solution that one can get into with certain solutions of the problem.

Brooks' paper wasn't even getting deeply into what we are talking about, he was just suggesting that software development is inherently complicated, that it's always going to be hard, because unlike Newtonian physics, you can't wave away the complexities and distill the essence of a problem into simple equations. The complexities ARE the software. Abstractions, though helpful, are flawed and leaky, unless they're designed by a master.

If software development is a fundamentally hard activity, like playing a musical instrument well, you're not likely going to make it a "breakthrough" with a piece of technology, you're going to improve it with better programmers. A highly talented programmer will be less productive using COBOL and older tools and technologies, but will not be an order of magnitude less productive. Back in the 80's, this was bitter medicine that management types had to hear, thinking that programming was rote activity with barely any need for higher pay or recognition of the 10:1 or more disparity in productivity among individuals.
Transit of Venus June 5th, 2012
Related article:
Hubble to use moon as mirror to see Venus transit
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936071
Communicating between views in Backbone.js
Where are these functional compilers developers? I am passionate about functional languages and compilers research, but feel siloed off after I left academia.
> should you start to give a service for free at the beginning and then monetize it when you have a lot of users

Are you VC backed and can live without positive cash flow? Ore are you trying to build a real business?
Facebook's Brillian Disaster
Michael Bloomberg to hackers - NYC better than Parents Couch
Just chmod the shell script to 700, so that only your account can read it, together with an encrypted HDD that should be quite save.
Despite that "everything is expensive", "taxes are high" and "whether is cold" it is actually a very good place to live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_Index

Cultural life in Stockholm is rather quite good for a town of its size, and you have plenty of nature around you to compensate for not having quite as many bars as London.

Racism is sadly on the rise, but not as bad as in many other societies. Anecdotally I have immigrant friends and visitor friends, from backgrounds that would invite racism, who say that they feel less discriminated in Sweden than in other Euopean countries. No place is perfect though, you just have to select the drawbacks you want to put up with.

More importantly for Hacker News readers I consider that the startup and investment community to be fairly insular and limited in scope in Stockholm compared to other places I have worked, particular London, West/East coast US. But no surprises there, it is a lot smaller after all.

Indeed: I am a Swede.
Related HN article is "Hubble to use moon as mirror to see Venus transit." URL is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936071
I found the quickest way to learn how to use it was just install it. The code is commented very well and is quite expressive in it's syntax so looking up the docs has been, for the most part, an exercise in "what params does Str::limit take?".
The USB SIM Card Manager | ALL REVIEWS HERE
The problem is that G+ seems to only get the people who are technology driven. Even then it's a fraction of that community.

The 'average Joe' doesn't have any use for this. They can follow their friends on Facebook or follow their favorite celebrities on Twitter.
ShowHN:SongPiper.com, Vidless Music Distribution 4 Youtubers
Switcher 2.0: solid design that works perfectly 5 years later.
I think you're putting too much value on that one data point in order to prove the "ghost town" theory. Scoble actually gets crazy amounts of interaction with his posts. Just look at how many comments each of his posts get, not to mention that every dicussion is on point and "right there". And it's not just quantifiable interaction like comments. For example, I generally don't comment on posts from people I don't know but on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written...because he's Scoble you know? His is a kind of self-fueling notoriety. I think it's definitely arguable whether G+ is a ghost town or not, but Scoble is probably the last example you should use to argue the pro-ghost-town side.
Long commute linked to poor health
Agreed 1000x. There are some completely questionable pieces of advice in the book and Tim Ferris is kinda sketchy, but the major message is not "here's a diet you should do" it's "you should experiment, here are a few of the vectors and here's what I did - try it, and then try some other things." The strategies are suspect, but he does a great job laying out the moving parts.
Whereas a frequentist model looks at an absolute basis for
chances, something like the population of females is 52%, so that
means that if I select someone at random from my office, I have a
52% chance of picking a female. The chances are purely based on
the total probability. The Bayesian approach is to rely on past
knowledge and then adjust accordingly. If I know that 75% of my
office is male, and I grab a person, then I know that I have a
25% chance of picking a female.

This is a terrible example, it makes it look like frequentist statistics don't know about conditional probabilities.

My understanding is that frequentist statistics are all about point estimates (such as maximum likelihood) or sometimes confidence intervals. Say you want to run an elections poll, sample a bunch of people and ask who they have voted for.

Frequentists will average the data and say "Party A is at 51%" (point estimate) or "Party A is between 49% and 52%" (confidence interval). Asymptotically and under certain assumptions this value will converge to the "real" value and often you can also estimate the speed of convergence (with variance bounds).

Bayesians will instead start with a "prior" which is a probability distribution p(x) on "Party A is at x%". You can start from an uniform, non-informative prior, or if you have some information you can factor it into the prior. Then you take your polls data D and compute the conditional probability p(x | D), called "posterior", which is the probability that "Party A is at x% given the data". So you don't get a number or an uniform interval, you get a probability for each possible electoral outcome. Again, if you have infinite data this will converge to a distribution where all the mass is on a single point, which usually is the same given by frequentist statistics.

The problem with Bayesian statistics is that you have to handle probability distributions instead of single numbers (as with point estimates), so the inference gets extremely harder. It has been made somewhat possible only recently thanks to both algorithmic and hardware advances. On the other hand, the main advantage is that you get to know how uncertain your estimate is, which can make a huge difference when you have little data.

Last note: another thing you can do when you have a prior is factor it into your estimator and take the maximum likelihood of the posterior as a point estimate. This is called Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) and called by some people "Bayesian", but I don't think Bayesians agree with that.
Good point about the stats.

doctors are supposed to be able to reconcile conflicting information

They're supposed to wash their hands, too. (http://boingboing.net/2010/03/09/study-says-us-doctor.html)
As a guy who makes dozens of mistakes a day, the ones I know about because a computer catches them, I'm really not reassured by the idea that human judgement makes up for machine error.
Spock and Roo - Maven's conventions step in to mess with me
Love that each reason has a small yet very illustrative figure but should the conclusion really be use fireworks?

Based on my own experiences, once you have covered the very basics of a design by using pen and paper, you really need to stick to the end medium of your product, e.g. HTML/JS/CSS, and using as much real information as possible for the design. There's just too much room for self deception and errors when using less expressive mediums (screen shots, wireframes, etc). Even using something seemingly harmless as lorem ipsum can cause all kinds of problem with db data types, visual whitespace, etc.
This may be a naive question, but why is it not enough to set your mail client to save a copy of all messages?
I looked through your web site and one question remained unanswered:

Does it also do cloud push? In other words, can I use your app to restore the backups to a different Gmail account later?
Since only half the links work, here is Deep Note: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYMpMcmpfkI
and here is work on recreating it with SuperCollider: http://www.earslap.com/instruction/recreating-the-thx-deep-n...
3.4 sigmas is the within-model uncertainty - that is, given the assumptions about their instruments and methodologies, the result stands at 3.4 sigma, or about 1/1000.

I think that the uncertainty about the model and assumptions is already larger than 1/1000, especially given the recent failed "faster-than-light neutrinos" LHC experiment. So while 5 sigmas would be nice, I would assume that the physicists over there are busy double-checking everything, and trying to reproduce the result, rather than improve their "sigma-score".

Can any physicist confirm? I'm not all that familiar with how these things work. Furthermore, if they perform once more the experiment and get the same 3-sigma result, wouldn't that compound into a >3-sigma total?
I'm not leery of Google shuttering its Gmail service, but I can imagine a scenario where they cut off my access to Gmail and I have no way to plead my case to the search behemoth.

I am baffled at how people continue using such a service for something as important as e-mail in 2012, while still being fully aware that their access can be completely cut off at random with no reason or recourse. Does everyone just assume "it won't happen to me"?
Macintosh boot chime ROM routine:

http://www.folklore.org/projects/Macintosh/more/BootBeep.txt

And the story:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
Your numbers are incorrect. The cost for nuclear is cheaper than oil and gas, and only somewhat more expensive than coal, when factoring in the full lifecycle costs.

And Finland's reactor is remarkably cheap, if it only cost $4.1B. I believe typical plants cost closer to $10B. Nuclear plants are not cheap to build.
Yep, I agree (and wondering if you are a fellow fittitor). Unfortunately the fitness industry is filled with jackasses. It's an evolutionary problem: considering that most people don't actually need long term fitness advice, great trainers would quickly make themselves obsolete.
Sure, it's probably easy to tell for someone who's a regular reader of CNN. However, I believe that most people - even several (if not many) from HN - will see the CNN header, then read the article and assume it's CNN. They should be A LOT clearer about it being an opinion piece.
Simon Peyton Jones on the new Cloud Haskell extensions to GHC
Return on Investment, a realistic hacker story
I use the HNHalfLife[1] userscript, and I know find it extremely annoying to browse HN without it. Thanks polyfractal!

[1]: https://github.com/polyfractal/HNHalfLife
Really cool idea. It would be nice if you could see who has signed up so far.
Mobile Online Shopping Holds The Real Opportunity In Mobile Payments
Average is a fine measure. You've inferred that they used a mean average. The article doesn't say what kind of average they took.

Let's assume they did take a mean. If the mean error for 1700 devices was 24 minutes, the total error is 40,800 minutes. That's 28 days.

Therefore, they didn't include the outlier of 42 years in their average. It's most likely a median (or mode) average.
This same conversation could very easily be applied to OSS.
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LOC is really pretty meaningless, it all depends on how the program was written. If it was a "top to bottom" program with no loops or subroutines (this is the style often seen in COBOL code for example) it could have been a lot of very repetitive code.