skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, we're operating with opposite assumptions then. The only reason that I remember that Qantas has had zero crashes is that it was on Rainman when his brother couldn't believe how stubborn he was being. Other than that, I'd honestly be more likely to make a choice based on a $50 difference and if I remember how good the food on a given carrier is and how long the checkin lines are.

This might be less true of those who don't fly often for whom it's a big deal, but I'd guesstimate business travelers care less.
Well, I'm no longer a student, but I graduated from York in 2006.
I don't get it?

Someone composed a nice song. Then made a CGI video to go with it?

What am I missing?
I first saw this stuff years ago and had completely forgotten about it - thanks for the reminder! Here's their site:

http://www.animusic.com/

Some are cooler than others but they're all worth watching. Here's an interview with the creators:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYrYqA8lO0U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TzvuPB8ttU
An editor killed it, then an editor unkilled it.
The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced.

This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are:

- You can't comment on the submission itself, only reply to existing comments. I understand the motivation for this, but it feels too close to censorship.

- After a submission is killed, there is no way to visit it. It is good that dead stories are no longer clickable, but I wish there were some way to reconstruct its URL for the highly motivated.

- No reason is given for killing a story. Sometimes a reason is posted in comments, but it's not mandatory. Requiring a one-line justification from the executioner would be both educational and personal.

Also, given that this unabashedly-political article is apparently supported by Management, it seems really hypocritical to disable dantheman's long-standing account without warning, apparently for submitting one off-topic political story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 ... It would be "important" if courts were using evidence despite police errors, right? Then why is Gaza "important enough" to be featured on Hacker News, but the US isn't? I wish I could be certain that there's actually a double-standard in play here, but it's not mandatory to provide a reason for disabling an account (or for killing a story), so there's no way to find out unless I ask. More mysteriously, dantheman's off-topic submission was never killed; his account was simply disabled. So what's going on here? Has he emailed yet?

On a personal note, I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just concerned about my fellow users and about the direction of the community. It would be great if dantheman's account wasn't actually disabled for submitting a political story, and all of this was just a misunderstanding.
I don't think it would bother me one bit. Especially since they are open sourcing it, so I could be as involved as I wanted to.
As someone who develops some on AppEngine, this is a great announcement. There is a real limited amount of documentation from Google on AppEngine and this will be a peak into what they consider best practices, etc.
University of Latvia
Also graduated in 2006 from York.

Now moved to Edinburgh for MSc/PhD.
There's no music hack here, just a cool piece of CG that came out many years ago...

Here's a snopes article about it:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/musicmachine.asp
You've obviously got a shortage of lolcatz and youtube novelties in your life.
This isn't a hack. It's a blog post about someone coming up with an interesting but ill-thought out concept.
It would be a fantastic hack if they were using some cool algorithms/machine learning to separate the sounds, analyzing their timing, then dynamically generating the animation from that. I would be genuinely interested in discussing that.

But not this, unfortunately. Seems to be a simple (albeit well-done) cg video set to some music.
Typing Errors: The standard typewriter keyboard is Exhibit A... Dvorak not so great either
Why Java exceptions are slow (and Common Lisp conditions aren't)
21,000 Jobs Worldwide Erased in a Day as Recession Chokes Demand
Buy Webkinz From The Worlds Largest Webkinz Shop
Webkinz as you may know are sweeping the world by storm. These on-line critters, originally released in 2005 by Ganz are the hottest thing for youngsters today. Adopt a plush webkinz pet and register the virtual version online where you can play games, interact with other members, earn kinzcash and learn education games all while having fun. Adopt a webkinz today!
Same here. UIUC
err--yes, I see you're correct. Dang. (I still like the thing, though...)
Arabs lost 2.5 trillion dollars from credit crunch: Kuwait
If you have a Radeon 9700, you can watch this rendered in real-time:

http://ati.amd.com/developer/demos/r9700.html
it's too deterministic.
I think it's cool and all. But I didn't see the hack part.

If you really want a music hack, check out this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmuggHx_H5Y&feature=relat...

Wii controller + Electric guitar + Max/MSP = An electric guitar that handles like a Guitar Hero controller
Here is a real life implementation of something similar:

Video of a piece: http://vodpod.com/watch/857866-absolut-music-machine

More about it: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/absolut_machines_am...

I saw a more detailed description of how they built it, but can't find it now.
Arizona State University
Last I heard, Lessig was at the top of the list. What happened there?
University of Southern Mississippi.
i graduated in 2008 :)
Signs that you (as a programmer) are about to be laid off
Samsung C160 Insert Sim Ways
c160, c160 insert sim card, c160 sim jumpers, c160 sim not accepted, c160 sim ways, samsung
I graduated from USC in '07. Fight on!
GMail down?
I'm getting a 400 error:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Bad Request</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000">

<H1>Bad Request</H1>

<H2>Error 400</H2>

</BODY>

</HTML>
> This combined with How Doctors Think made me realize
> that our doctors in the US are really no better than
> witch doctors.

You don't want to go around saying things like that - you're pushing economics out of their similie that is wholely theirs.
University of Copenhagen, Department of Computer Science (called "DIKU", an abbreviation of "Datalogisk Institut, Københavns Universitet").
Tufts University
Totally agree on the ease of use thing. I used to do some MIDI composition with an old version of Cakewalk Home Studio years ago. It was light on notational features (that's not really what it was intended for) but I've never come upon another app that I found to be as straightforward to sit down with and just bang out some musical ideas. This web app could easily become a perfect solution for that sort of informal usage. But the UI needs to be stupid easy, and currently it's not. It seems like you should be able to import a MIDI to get started, too.

I think score sharing done right (i.e. better than this) would be pretty awesome, too. Open it up to non-members and add search, tagging, ratings, commenting, etc., and you'd have the YouTube of musical compositions and arrangements. There's a BIG community of musicians out there for whom that could prove very valuable.
Can you accept Canadian customers yet?
Are you sure it was dead? I just looked in the kill log, and there is no record of an editor killing it. The kill log is only kept per server invocation, but the server process has been running since yesterday evening, PST.
Morten Lund at LeWeb'08
This seems to go in phases... First TechCrunch spam, then anything Zed Posts, now anything 37s posts.
Watching this, I kept thinking he's the Kurt Cobain of entrepreneurship.
So why aren't Java exceptions resumable?
Hey,

What's so bad about Northeastern?
I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about it here too.

As for the claim that this should be killed because it's a crap link, it definitely seems over the threshold for that. It's not just a bunch of random, biased bystanders who are making this accusation, but the UN (http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html). So it is at least something that has to be taken seriously.
Go Jumbos!
It's working for me.

Here's the gmail server I'm resolving to, FWIW:

brks-macbook-pro:~ brk$ ping mail.google.com
PING googlemail.l.google.com (64.233.187.83): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.233.187.83: icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=40.155 ms
Why the sad face? If I knew that a significant portion of the PLT Scheme developers were at NEU back when I was applying to colleges, I would have seriously considered going there.
I've been using tarsnap for about three weeks. Very happy.
Thanks for a great product!!
Yet, only a small fraction of streets have dedicated bike lanes, and with an installation cost of $5,000 to $50,000 per mile, we shouldn’t expect to find them everywhere anytime soon.

Why are they so expensive? Adding a bike lane consists of painting a stripe down the side of the road and adding a little icon of a cyclist. The latter could just be painted with a stencil. Keeping the line parallel to the others means a road maintenance truck would probably do it, but is there really that much bureaucratic overhead? That's $1-10 per foot of bike lane.

I saw a system that attached a paint roller to the back wheel for a "DIY bike lane", for something that uses paint rather than lasers. (I can't find the link.) I still don't think it's a good idea, but paint of any kind is probably an improvement over lasers.

Is adding bike lanes even approaching the problem from the right angle, though? They arguably help prevent a driver from hitting you from behind, but they don't improve misunderstandings about intent/right-of-way at intersections, which is where more collisions actually occur.
i go to penn state as well
Or even just a spoke POV system[1], so there is quite a bit more light visible from the sides?

[1]: http://www.ladyada.net/make/spokepov/
Further Adventures of a RAID Noob
Speaking of Israel, here is a video you folks may find interesting:

"Who controls the USA? Bush or Israel"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGroeDe4VYM

(posted earlier)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436905
Why Steve Jobs's Health Matters to Us
Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his profile. I reinstated his account as soon as he emailed me.
Boston University '07
well yeah I know they are less profitable...but the newspapers make it sound like noone is buying them anymore.

Making up 10% in profit through other sources is hardly impossible, and they should have been able to recover by now if they spent a little more time thinking instead of whining
Re: "any news which is serious and impacts lot of people or a region should be discussed here for finding peaceful solutions."

You should read "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman".
It's been anything 37s posts for months and months. HN is practically an RSS feed for the 37s blog...
The University of Texas
Okay. Thank you for taking the time to convey your reasoning. It's valid, and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza. I'm just concerned that newer users may use this to justify their own bad behavior, but I suppose that can be dealt with.
Microsoft gets hit by another anti-trust complaint
I'm not a MS fan boy...but this shit is getting ridiculous. All they are doing is offering another feature in their product to get ahead. Its not like Windows doesn't allow you to install anything else. Whats next Calculator software companies bitching that Windows comes with a calculator?
3 million hit by a Windows worm
What's the startup environment like in Phoenix? I have lived here for the past few months but it does not seem to have the vibe.
The University of Chicago.
The usual explanation for this pilot/surgeon difference is: Surgeons don't go down with their patient.
Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior.

But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.
Georgetown University, '07
There's a difference between things that are interesting to the intellectually curious, and things that are interesting to hackers. This topic provides a good example.

The economony is a big, somewhat hackable system. We elect representatives to steer it and shape it. When a big, important system's performance starts to degrade, that attracts the attention of hackers.

The Israel/Gaza war is much less hackable seeming. Important, appalling events are occurring, but to my mind they are not hacker news.

It's a subjective call. This is your site, and of course you are entitled to decide what is Hacker News.

[edit] Politics and wars are also hackable, in some sense, so maybe this distinction is less crisp than one would like. But there does seem to be a difference between using this site to talk about economics, and using it to talk about conflicts between nations or political parties. In the case of entrenched conflicts, discussion is very unlikely to change anyone's model of how the world works. The thing I like about discussion here is reading it and participating in it supports the evolution and refinement of my model of how the world works.
Apology to the HN Community
I would like to apologize to the HN community for my post this morning that involved the cg generated music machine. I received the video in my inbox this morning from a friend, complete with an incredible story of its construction. As I gawked at the machine, I thought about the fantastic precision required, the type of isolation required, and the number of students required to pull this thing off. My usually trusty bullshit detector, for whatever reason, failed me. I immediately thought, "I know some people who would love to see this."

Alas, I embarrassed myself by posting what turned out to be an old video, and I posted it with what turned out to be (because it was fake) a sensationalist title. Fortunately for the community, it wasn't long before the thread was killed.

For some reason that I still don't understand, I failed to do any due diligence on the veracity of what I posted. In some communities, that is ok. But not here. And I know it. And I'm sorry.

--Dan
Exactly what has PHP won? Most IT jobs aren't looking for PHP programmers. They don't make the most money. The most impressive websites are not built in PHP. PHP programmers don't have the most 'skills' so to speak. They aren't the smartest, contrary to their own opinion.

This article is just for a bunch of fan boys to pat themselves on the back for picking PHP.

PHP hasn't won anything.
I just spent five days researching how to generate PDFs dynamically or alternatively how to fill PDF forms dynamically from a server-side script. Just so anyone who purchased a ticket to our concert can print it out themselves (the ticket will include a barcode which can be scanned using a mobile phone with Java and a camera).

Then it dawned on me that I could simply point them to a (HTML) page which they can print out. Believe me, I felt stupid.

(But at least I learned about PDF forms, (X)FDF, and JavaScript in PDFs. Oh well...)
Kent Pitman, a member of the X3J13 Common Lisp standards committee, wrote a terrific paper (http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...) on the subject of various condition handling systems, which includes examples of various error-handling systems.
That's very low for the most popular blog in Germany.
Reminder: NYC meetup tonight
7pm at Republic, which is on the northwest corner of Union Square.

www.thinknoodles.com

If you can't find the group when you get there then call me, my cell is 607.351.2671
Airline Accidents More Survivable
Maybe something like this could be altered to make predictions, but that wasn't really my goal.

In my league this year, there was a team that started 11-0. He thought that proved he was the best fantasy football player and had the best team. Everyone else pointed out that he simply had the fewest points against. This was a way to calculate what his record should have been if the other players had set their roster optimally. (It turns out he should have finished 11-2 instead of 12-1, and was like 4th in total optimum points for.)

Optimum points is better for recognizing which players you should have started, not for who you should pick up or draft. If anyone has any input on what it should do to be better at prediction, I'm all ears -- I just don't know if that could really work reliably.
Ask HN:  What's the state of the web in your (non-English) language?
I'm fluent in Spanish, because I was raised in Central America, but I don't surf the web in spanish, or use any spanish web apps. And, from talking to family in Mexico, they don't use the web in spanish much either aside from spanish versions of YouTube, local newspapers, etc...

I know that e-commerce really hasn't taken off in countries in Central and South America, because the use of credit cards is not as wide-spread as it is in the US. The shipping infrastructure in many countries of Central and South America is also very limited.

I'd love to hear perspectives or anecdotes from non-English users of the web. Do you surf bilingually? Do you use non-English versions of common web apps, or do you use other sites/applications that aren't in English yet? What web apps exist in English that you'd love to have in your native language?

What's the state of the web in your native language?
Just my tuppence worth here: I started using tarsnap a couple of weeks ago and it's been superb. I needed a way to create encrypted, offsite, incremental backups and I'm not aware of a service similar to Colin's -- usually you get to choose two of those options, not all three. Also, customer service has been excellent after I expressed an interest in using tarsnap under Cygwin: Colin has responded in a timely and professional manner to my emails, so now I can also back up my Windows server as well.

It's sometimes unclear what a startup plans to offer to its customers, and how it plans to make money. In fact, sometimes it's utterly baffling. tarsnap is a necessary product with affordable pricing, and I wish Colin every success with it.
This is politics, and it is not even news. Israel has been accused of using such weapons a couple of years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus#2006_Israel-Le...

Clearly it is not more important now than it was then. I am all for a broad spectrum of topics covered here on HN, but this is just a controversial topic that is useless to discuss here.
Why Hudson River-Like Plane Crashes Will Happen Again
Gonna be there.
The difficulty really was that it was Roberts personal Blog and not a german Techcrunch. And I think the publicity of the sale actually hurt the price, since it was a personal blog and will be very difficult to maintain.
If the sale had happened non public a lot of SEO people would have tried to buy it but press attention is not really something they want.

I think he should have invited more authors to the blog in the months before the sale to make the blog less personal and more like Techcrunch. But that's not his style.
Suspense. Well done Icode.
most people I know don't use it. Top 3 reasons seem to be:

a) Fear of giving away the login info to third party sites
b) Privacy concerns, with every account on the internet being linked to them
c) Too used to quickly register with BS info(name: AA), so they don't feel like they should bother with FC

Actually if I think about it...I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise Facebook Connect.
University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada)
An exception, should be - by definition - exceptional.
Why would it matter that much if it's slow? I think that's premature optimization...

There are a lot more important things to make sure are fast.

If most of your CPU time is spent throwing Exceptions, something is probably seriously wrong.
yes, exactly :)

It should give an improvement in registration rate as probably half our prospective/users are on facebook also (the other half are in other countries where facebook isn't so popular) but what I'm trying to get a handle on is how much it will drive new visitors based on friends of users seeing mini-feed updates back at facebook.

Any real world figures to share?
Gracias. Y a ti tambien.
Ask HN : Where do you work (if freelance) ?
I live and work in an apartment.

Most of the week days it's quiet so i can get things done. But as soon as my upstairs neighbor arrives from his day job, i have a hard time to concentrate into my work. I'm very noise sensitive. Even if i listen to music during my work (loud enough) i hear the vibrations from upstairs. The neighbor's sons play rockband on the wii i think and i told them to lower the sound several times but there's nothing i can do about it. I even asked the landlord to warn them and two weeks later, the noises are back.

It's a pretty shitty apartment but it's surrounded by trees and near of everything (grocery store, train station, etc) and that's why we choosed to live here. We tought it would be quiet. We hate the city. But we need to be in the suburbs to meet with the clients in the city by public transportation (we hate cars).

Where do you work if you're freelance?
Because by the time a java exception is caught, the stack has already been unwound too far (because java must do so to find the nearest exception handler).

Lisp, basically, keeps track of exception handlers in a table seperate from the runtime stack. Hence, it doesn't need to unwind the stack to find an exception handler - it can just look it up without destroying the existing stack.
Coast Guard video of the moment the plane "landed" on the Hudson.
1. 13-20yo, 80% girls
2. USA, Hong Kong, Netherlands, UK, Belgium are top markets now
3. Roughly 50%
4. Roughly 60%
5. this is the tough part.

We have features planned that could improve stickiness and make it more likely visitors will enjoy and return and in time tell their friends. But doing those features won't help get more new registered users in the short term. So I'm still debating whether to add FB Connect first, get those users then add features, or make sure the user experience is great before adding FB Connect and driving traffic (if it really will help a lot)..

any practical suggestions would be great..
The security analyst said "Of course, the real problem is that people haven't patched their software. If people do patch their software, they should have little to worry about.".

While patching Windows will clearly help in this case, that is far from the "real problem". The "real problem" is that, for the umpteenth time in a row, Windows has been severely compromised, and people are simply handing money over to Microsoft without demanding far better security (or, they don't know any better).
University of Miami