skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The classical Steve Jobs quote seems to be fitting here:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

The video aside, the music that is presumably made by this product sounds exactly like something made on a Yamaha DX7, which went out of production in 1986! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_DX7)

It's awful, and it made me want a glow-in-the-dark towel more than it made me want songsmith.
I think I'm turning Japanese!
What about supporting the Unity Web Player? http://unity3d.com/
Would it qualify as competition if Google is no longer in the business of providing the service?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Enforceabili...
The elephant down the hall is that if Noah put the job board on his own personal web-site - it was a $100 business, not a $1,000,000 one.

The spolsky/fc brand is what made it valuable - and Noah had nothing to do with that.

Isn't one of the HN mantra's that it's execution not idea that's valuable?
I've been thinking about warbots lately. I don't think they will be very effective, because as soon as a given model is hacked, sending a pack of robots on a given offensive will be equivalent to giving them away to the enemy, assuming the enemy is savvy enough.

If the robots are remotely sent instructions, then remote hacking will be possible. If they have the instructions downloaded to a media, then it would be possible to "reboot" the robots with the enemy's software.

It wouldn't be trivial, but it would be possible. I think a robust black market will spring up soon after the first robots go on the offensive.
I think one major cause of the problem is that every financial show/book/article for the last 20 years has been telling people that funds are a safe, smart thing to invest in. And they have been, but they have been boring and have modest returns. It's not surprising that people are trying to get a better return. The solution is what it has always been "Let the buyer beware". If Madoff's customers hadn't skipped their due diligence, they would have been fine.
If you program it to recognize faces, it will not, on it's own, learn to recognize cows. That's my point - it all has to be programed in advance.

And if you program something that can recognize anything - just tell it if it was right or not, that program will not then learn to draw.

It's the capacity to self program if you like - a human can learn anything, just tell him about the subject. A program can not.
Wow. That is just painful. I didn't even make it to 30 seconds.
Is a human brain not a machine?

No, I don't think it is. But it'll be a very long time before anyone can prove it either way.

....if only we knew how to program them....

Which is part of the point - we don't, and I don't think we ever will.
http://www.bubbletimer.com

disclaimer: my partner wrote the app.
Hi, happy to consider it.

Doesn't that require a separate install? Can you link me to a web playable game?
and one in french!

http://www.accessoweb.com/HeyZap-Le-Youtube-des-jeux-en-flas...
Aren't aircraft designed to ditch in water and not sink immediately? I guess it did stay afloat long enough to evacuate.
He makes an excellent point!

But he neglects the reason for it: it's because no one was able to take that step of "Once we understand these mechanisms better, we can build human-level chess programs that do far less computation than do present programs.".

No one could do it, so they did other things.
Love unity3d. We should definitely get in touch with them. Super fast 3d in browser gaming.
When you define "almost everyone in the world" as the <5% that own stock, then I'm not s.......
Actually, I kind of like that HN is self-meta (i.e. the ability to ask questions as well as post links). There were a few good discussions about how to make a good post a while back:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419539
Ugh, I can see my writing has been very unclear in this thread.

Anyway thanks for the recommendation.
Yup - you can't find a race condition by stepping through your code.
Stanford Prof. Wants to Link Smart Meter Data to Online Game
Web Design Job for the Eager
I have a bit of a story to tell here, but their might be a job in it for you, so bear with me. I just spent the last 45 minutes talking to the owner of Tahoe Reno Firewood. I don't know why I did it, but I just started talking and asking questions, and I couldn't stop.

The reason I was on the phone was because my girlfriend Anna had gone on his website: http://www.renotahoefirewood.com/index.html to order a cord of wood. As it stands, to do this, she had to download a PDF form and then email it back to him. Even after jumping through these hoops, he emailed us and asked us to call because the form was screwed up.

So, Anna had me call the guy, and while I had him on the phone, I decided to ask some questions about his business, and give him some advice on his website. He seems like a really nice guy, and I really like his business - we've discovered that not everyone in the wood business is reliable or honest. But his website is a real travesty.

After talking to him for a while, I learned some things:

* he sells several thousand cords of wood (over a million in revenues)

* his website gets around 50 visits per day

* he traded a cord of wood for his website, including hosting

* he has two types of clientele - people who live in the Bay and own multiple houses, and less affluent people around Truckee

* he manually imports the PDFs people send him into Quickbooks

* he's very friendly and likes to talk on the phone

What i took away from all this is that there is a lot of money sitting on the table. If you follow hacker news, you know that simple usability issues (remember the $300,000,000 button from yesterday) can make or break a web business. And he has a segment of clientele who really appreciate a good website.

It seems to me that if this guy had a better way to order would online, if his website better conveyed his brand (reliable and high quality), and he didn't have to manually input forms, he could make a lot more money. Now, I do sort of get the feeling that the guy is leery of paying a lot of cash for a nice website, but I think if someone came to him with a good deal, that involved some cash and perhaps a gain-share on sales, he might be interested.

So that's the story. I just met this random guy while ordering a cord of wood., and I asked myself - where might I find some enterprising young web developers who see the same opportunity I did? I'd aggressively pursue this myself, but I recently got some funding for my company trailbehind.com.

By the end of the conversation, the guy seemed sold on improving his website this summer (during the off-season) - but I told him I wasn't available. If you are, I'll put you in touch, or you can even bypass me and call him yourself. My only hope is by this time next year, I can buy a new cord of wood online.
A typical well written Haskell program has more type annotation than the same program written in Java. Not only that but because of type classes those annotations are even more verbose than an equivalent declaration in Java.

It's true that you can omit most of the type signatures and let the compiler figure it out but nobody really writes Haskell code that way if they want it to be comprehensible by human readers.
Even a blind squirrel... :)
Perhaps, to put a HN spin on it, we could discuss the fact that Twitter is apparently aware of the difference between unicode chars and bytes, but what about SMS? After all, that 140 character limit comes from SMS's limit. Does SMS treat ♺ as 1 against the 140 limit or 3?
Metafilter seems pretty cool, but it could desperately use some formatting to help its readability. Basically copy the HN/reddit styling to differentiate posts and comments from each other.
Caltech Changes Scholarship Policy
I'm not an expert, just interested in the subject.

I thought of an idea, and this is completely fresh so take it with a grain of salt, but you could use social data from all users subscribed to the same feed to modify the prior probability that any given post was interesting, and then use each individual's data to modify the conditional posterior probability terms.

I'm not sure how effective it would be, but it would create a hybrid sort of classifier that might be interesting.

I'm studying natural language processing this quarter, so I'll let you know in three months if I come up with something more clever.
According to the article, the average survivor is seated 5 rows from an exit. The author states that is a "cut off point", beyond that your chances drop dramatically. I think this might instead mean that there tends to be an exit every 10 rows, slightly more to account for small planes with fewer rows. For instance, the 737 I just pulled at random off google has exits at 0, 12, and 25+, The average distance to an exit is about 3.5 rows.

Oh, and if your skin is roughly the color of a paper grocery bag, do not ask aloud while on the airplane or you will not be able to run the experiment.
Are you depressed? Depression can make it hard to make decisions, which I take the liberty of interpreting (being /able/ to make decisions, rather) as, 'having enough life-force to not sweat the small stuff', which might apply to getting stuck on micro-optimizations too.

In which case, exercise, get enough sleep, and tell yourself you can catch what matters in a profiler at the end :)
Ask HN: How Google Maps works?
I have an idea for a website that requires to implement a zoomable/pannable interactive map, similar to Google Maps but without all the bells and whistles. The map itself is for a fictitious place, so I really need to create it from scratch.

I don't have much experience in Javascript or in maps creation, so I would be grateful if you could point me to the right direction.

In particular:

1. How the maps are normally represented? I bet they are vector-based rather than raster images for different zoom levels. Is there a common format or any standards for storing the maps? I don't need anything complex, just a schematic representation of terrain.

2. Are there examples of how to implement panning/zooming with Javascript?

I will appreciate any tips, from links to Wikipedia and blog posts covering this, to search terms that will lead me to them.

Thank you!
here is a good walk-through: http://blog.grimpoteuthis.org/2005/02/mapping-google.html

Good luck with it :-)
I noticed that too but the article addressed it by saying:

"Mr. Chang, a technophile who checks on his apartment with a Web cam while traveling, refuses to switch to MP3 files because he loves CD cases and liners."
OneWire Introduces Better Way for Hiring Firms and Job-Seeking Professionals to connect
It's not the mention of PHP, it's the tone of the comment.
Quick question, is it just me or is gig ethernet 1000 Mbps, not 1024?

Man "mebibits" sounds terrible.
Same as you would anyone else. You tell the VC that you can't discuss the details. If they want details they have to sign the NDA for the 3rd party company. You can always talk about the commitment in general terms (revenue vs. time spent) and if it's strategic to the growth of the company. The rest of the details don't matter much unless the 3rd party is in their portfolio or a competing portfolio.
>they can't fire you for telling people what you make.

Yes they can. Unless you are talking about Western Europe or something.
Why can't they just be running Windows on Bootcamp. It's no different from running in a DELL, HP or Acer box is it?

Macbooks are the most aesthetically pleasing laptops out there so I can imagine directors wanting it in an advert rather then a plastic piece of crap.
My guess is that it wouldn't matter as long as the contract was still in effect. What if Google just hadn't announced that they were planning to relaunch Dodgeball or changed their minds...
http://www.joesgoals.com/
>I only share my compensation information with anyone and everyone who wants to know.

So, how much do you make? ;~)
I wouldn't pick on MS for having a Mac in the ad. They just probably hired a firm to make their ad (have you noticed how most ads use Macs with stickers over the apple logo whenever they need to show a notebook?).

I would however criticize them for the absolute lameness of the ad.
It may be one less "character" than RT, but it is one more byte in UTF-8. 0xE2 0x99 0xBA. What does twitter mean with the "140 character" limit, what's a character here? I mean, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html was written in 2003.
I don't quite get the piling-on of this video.

Singing by average folks is always a bit corny and campy. Homespun/improvised lyrics and 'casiotone'-like accompaniment makes it even more so.

But it's also social, goofy fun -- as the enduring popularity of karaoke and American Idol demonstrate -- and an important musical & cultural activity (especially for children).

The video fits the earnest aesthetic of amateur/folk/ad-hoc singing, and to mock it for that is to miss the point.

I suspect the Songsmith team is happy even for the ridicule -- as a viral vehicle for promoting awareness of what their work does, the video is among the 'best' rather than 'worst' of that genre. (It's much better than the nonsensical Gates-Seinfeld videos.)

Finally, no discussion of Songsmith would be complete without:

http://music.metafilter.com/2943/Runnin-With-The-Songsmith
Safe Water Landing a Remarkable Feat
Do Not Hire This Man as Your CFO
Disagree. Are there instances in which journalists and tech are too intrusive into private matters? Absolutely. Is one of them taking a cell phone picture from the deck of a ferry while media helicopters swarm around the scene? No way. Please explain how this picture is insensitive to the family members.

Are you seriously arguing that in the face of a tragedy, no information is preferable to those worried about their family members? The Mumbai attacks are an even better example: if I had a family member in Mumbai during the attacks, I'd want every single piece of info and data I could get my hands on, rather than having to wait forever for the "official" reports.
Why so many minds think alike
This thing is so silly that they must be gaming for the viral crowd.
Putting aside the article for a minute - where did that leading period come from in the domain name?
Trick 5 (opening a remote port on a "public" machine to connect back to your local machine) is great. Combine it:

office$ ssh -R 9999:localhost:22 user@home ## do this in a screen for good measure

and another lesser known ssh feature:

home$ ssh -D 8888 -p 9999 user@localhost

and now you have a SOCKS proxy on home:8888 that will access everything visible to the computer named "office".

For extra credit add PingTunnel and a hotspot that happens to allow ICMP and enjoy free internet wherever you go.
Thanks! In the comments I found this site which looks very close to what I was looking for: http://www.maplib.net/
You mean you didn't want a glow-in-the-dark towel anyway?
Q. If you append to a linked list, you can't avoid creating an entirely new copy of the list, can you? (prepending is OK, because you reuse the old list).

Or can Haskell's laziness help with this? Can it somehow avoid actually creating the new copy, but instead just return the correct value when you reach the end of the list? So that the new copy is never actually made, but it just behaves as if it was?
Is it just me, or does it seem that @myspace.com will become equivalent to what @aol was. A few years ago if someone told me their e-mail address was @aol I would never look at them the same way again, it just couldn't be helped. I wonder, in what way the @myspace will be different, will it be more negative?
You're right. I just get a bad feeling when the random Twitter user starts giving interviews and becomes the hero, and when every tragedy inevitably turns into a discussion about Twitter and the real-time web.
The article describes some interesting trends: more data becoming available from the various levels of government (although with some resistance), monitoring and blogging by individuals and bloggers, web sites appearing that allow citizens to track and respond to the actions of their governments, and anecdotes that illustrate this in action. And he didn't even discuss the impact of grassroots fund raising to counteract the influence of big contributors.

My take is that these are indications that there will be a fundamental transformation of how our democracy works. Transparency will be forced on the politicians.

It looks like there will be lots of opportunity for HN types to help the process along, both as entrepreneurs and volunteers. How about Open (Source) Democracy.
Fight long boot times with HyperSpace instant-on desktop
You can check out G Website Optimizer
Win7 tested on a netbook
Very nice collection. A tech at the datacenter that hosts one my servers showed me trick #3 and I remember being thrilled sitting there watching him do stuff on my server and sharing the keyboard to type messages back and forth in vi.

My company uses trick #5 as a primary feature for accessing the remote Linux machines that our product is built upon. We have it set up so that every single machine automatically creates a reverse SSH tunnel to the server on boot, so that the tunnel is always accessible in case we need it. Very cool stuff.
I think Haskell is intellectually challenging in a way that isn't needed to get the job done. The one exception is for proving things (which so far is not practical - but it's cool, and might become practically useful, one day).

Don't get me wrong: I like the intellectual challenge, and I especially like the Haskell community - they are nice people, excited about what they're doing, very helpful, and just not interested in putting down other languages - and I think there is real beauty in Haskell. It's like a branch of mathematics.

Disclosure: I'm terrible at Haskell's intellectual challenge. It makes me feel stupid. I hate that.
Google's ever-growing market share
Ask HN: To Patent, or Not To Patent
We filed for a provisional patent a year ago, and the year is just about up, so we need to decide whether to go for the full patent. Our lawyer is saying $5k for an opinion of counsel and then up to $10k more for the full patent. This is basically all of our remaining capital and then some. The patent, if we get it (82% were rejected last year), would theoretically protect us from competition if we could afford to litigate. More likely it would serve as a reason for us to get bought. If we don't go for the patent we won't have protection (not that it would come in for 3+ yrs or whatever), but we could still try and rule the market we are in. A patent might also help us get funding, if we try and seek it (more funding, right now we've got friends and family money). Needless to say, spending the rest of our money would put us in a tight spot.

Just wondering what HN's denizens thought of our situation or patents in general. thx.
> it should also be a crime for a doctor to ignore a computer recommendation without getting permission to do so through official channels.

What is this "official channels" of which you write? Are said "channels" liable?
Physics Jokes
Wow. This is a really awesome development! This would change our conception of the universe drastically.

However, I don't really see it impacting our day to day conception of life, because even if we live in a 4 dimensional boundary of a 5 dimensional space, we are still living in the same familiar 3 space plus whatever the 4th is.

Does anyone know if this research group has published yet? I'd like to see the primary source material, and I didn't see a mention of it in the article. I did find this nice link that describes the status of the GEO600 as of 2005 (you may need a subscription):

http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/22/10/009/pdf?ejredirect...

Here is a description of noise in the laser system as of 2007:

http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/25/3/035003/pdf?ejredire...
Great story, and thanks for sharing the opportunity on here. I'm sure someone closer by than me will jump at the chance.
Doug Comer: How to Insult a Computer Scientist
I think so too, to put it into perspective - even my mum knows who Steve Jobs is and she is even sad that he's ill.

I asked her yesterday if she knew who Larry Page or Sergey Brin was, she had no idea.
I've always thought that that was pretty cool--helps keep organization standards high overall and prevents poor managers from building their own little kingdoms.

Even if a group ends up with a new hire who lacks some domain knowledge, I'd bet that as long as they're generally smart, which the hiring process should guarantee to some extent, they'll adapt quickly.
Writing a Shakespeare interpreter with Parrot
Software patents are evil.
Although the snippets are shorter, Google already does run ads next to third-party content, as their search result titles and descriptions are pulled directly from the websites.
Yes, but this is the sort of thing a market would be good at, finding some optimal tradeoffs between cost and flexibility... if a market could be created. I don't know inner cities well enough to know whether that is true.

If we're going to cite problems, mine would be that the concept probably only works with one person. With any more, everybody has to coordinate what "rooms" are available and the dependency graphs could be quite odd. Can I cook breakfast if you're sleeping in? Can I get to the shower if you're watching a movie? I would expect that even two people would be significantly inconvenienced and three might just lock up due to contention. Smaller, dedicated rooms may suck, but at least they are reasonably independent.

But hey, for one guy, awesome. It's certainly in the running for "ultimate bachelor pad".
This story illustrates why you're a founder -- recognize pain, know the solution to alleviate the pain, and have the skills to talk to the people who can effect change. Congrats on the funding.
what is "a computer recommendation" and what are "official channels?"

The reality is that insurance re-imbursement guidelines, utilization reviews, DRG's, and other aspects of third party payer systems are already enforcing "computer recommendations" and "official channels." They are just designed to save money, not increase diagnostic accuracy or treatment effectiveness.
That link made me laugh like a maniac, I'm sure my neighbors think I'm insane now. Thank you so much for the link.

I don't think I agree with you about the ad, but I'm far too happy to argue about it now. It just seems pointless... maybe DLR Songsmith is the cure for "Someone is wrong on the internet" disease?
at least skip to the marketing meeting where he pitches his jingle. comedy gold
[bad humor contained within, you have been warned]

Hmm, so if the universe is one giant sticker on someone's credit card, then I wonder what the credit limit is on that baby - and if they can lend the auto industry a couple billion bucks to waste too
No bait and switch. He is responding to the question, even though he is not answering it.

It is similar to the response "mu", which is "I cannot answer your question because it is based on a false premise." Here, the false premise is that the nature of "should" is simple and universal when in fact it is individual and situational.