skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>And aren't we getting way too caught up in debating style over substance here? I think my point was pretty clear, personally,and that that you're just being intentionally argumentative for the sake of being argumentative

I disagree. You called them "gestapo drones" (an emotionally loaded and pretty much useless term) without elaborating further. That said, nope. I try not to argue on the internet just for the lulz. Huge waste of time. I'd rather you just tell me what you're getting at in plain English, thanks.
I had my laptop charger replaced four years after purchase. The Sale of Goods act trumps Apple's policies. The power cable is a vital component of the overall product.
I'm sorry to hear about that. I can completely empathize with how it must have felt to dread going to work everyday. Unfortunately, as this thread has shown, some people don't understand and rather rationalize.
>And without the targeting, advertisers will be paying a whole lot less for access to the networks and for far fewer revenue-generating click-throughs.

Not true. Advertisers just pay as much as everybody else does. Do you have an idea of the price of a single 2 page spread ad in a popular magazine? A lot.

Advertisers are spoiled. And if everybody else can only muddle along, well, that's what they'll do too.
At the price everybody else is paying.
As a data point, the last 3 laptops I've bought (Toshiba, Toshiba, ASUS) did not require breaking any 'factory seal' to swap out the hard drive.
It isn't about the armed forces themselves, as they rarely make their own arms. Most weapons companies are publicly traded corporations.
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I don't think any of the games above had good AI - but rather, they had believable AI.

I once read this piece by one of the AI programmers on the Halo series (can't for the life of me find it now) where he goes into the difference.

A good AI will be able to beat you time and time again using ingenuity and creativity. But such AIs are rarely fun. Instead, we prefer AIs that merely give the illusion of competence (e.g., they take cover... but always behind predictable objects. They flank, but always in obvious ways. They retreat, but always under specific, easy to understand conditions.). What the AI does is utterly predictable, but still challenging.

An unpredictable AI will quickly become frustrating instead of fun, even though it would be more realistic.
Agreeing with you: Absolutists (like RMS) expand the Overton Window. I'm more BSD than GPL, but without RMS, BSD would be seen as radical.

ESR wrote:

Unfortunately, RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes.

Having done a bit of policy work, value statements are what works. "Intellectuals" (progressives, geeks, libertarians) think The Right Answer wins. Nope. Cite George Lakoff, David Domke, Thomas Frank, Noam Chomsky...

Further, open source is a moral issue. Example:

Diebold hid their software. We lost transparency of our elections. Bad things happened. John Bonifaz and voteraction.org proved in court that John Kerry won New Mexico in 2004. The same things happened nationwide. Extrapolate.

Ditto medical devices, our personal data, etc.

So I'm with RMS. I'm sorry that RMS makes ESR feel weird. Tough.
You could plateau post-peak.
Did it take into account lawyer fees paid for sponsoring that visa?
Open source isn't a compromise between free software and proprietary software. It's a different philosophical basis for advocating the same practices.
A bit more than than that, unfortunately I haven't got exactly £250 from every client so far. And finding work, is work ;). I have had to negotiate as it's early days, and work for a reduced rate is better than no work. I haven't yet taken the first offer any company has offered me though, hence my advice in the post to negotiate.

I entered a competition ran by a company supporting http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/, purely because the competition appealed to me, I had some free time, and I thought it would be a good way of promoting myself before the event. Unfortunately the competition wasn't as successful as I hoped it would be (very few entries). I came second overall, it's another example of work on my github profile, and I got to play with Python for the fist time, so it was a positive experience.
Show HN: Inspired by Obama O's we present Music Bacon
DevelopHer Hackday: a Hackday Competition for Women
Well their 180 day lockup is about to expire as well. I would fully expect some folks to liquidate next week, perhaps this is in anticipation of that.

One of the weird things about World of Warcraft was that there are (or were) folks who would sort of hang out in that world just to socialize and sometimes, perhaps, go out and kill some stuff. The 'hanging out' part was key, and I am convinced that if Blizzard could figure out a way for folks to sit down and play cards or checkers or something it would be popular.

People like to sit around and socialize, and if they can do it with an 'excuse' like a game of cards or a table top game, well that is just icing on the cake. I don't think Zynga has quite got the formula down yet but when they do, or someone does, you will see the rise of the 'Grandma chat rooms'.
The upcoming Maps update for Android will have offline support so you can pre-cache a selected area.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/6/3068113/google-maps-offline...
But that's coming soon for android: http://trutower.com/2012/06/06/google-maps-for-android-gets-...
I love the Navigation app on my Android, but I can use up my monthly data allotment in one day. Until I get unlimited data or Navigation stops overriding my low bandwidth settings, I'll continue to use my TomTom (terrible UI by comparison, but good enough directions).
Hhmm. I was assuming the purpose of such a visualization was to understand the offense, which can't be done without including free throws. Perhaps it serves some other purpose, like employing "front-end developers".
Don't quote me on this but I believe Google Maps on Android has an offline mode where you can select a desired area to be cached for offline use.

EDIT: it is currently a "Labs" feature but it is being officially released soon along with the 3D mapping.
That's the problem that David Cope had trying to do a Markov-chain-based recreation of Bach, in one of his many experiments in that endeavor; just wanders and doesn't really sound like much, even if all of the n-grams are legit, because it doesn't produce any kind of phrase structure. He ended up with sampling based on hierarchical context instead, iirc: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm
I'm more amazed that even a semi-humorous topic gathered any significant quantity of upvotes, let alone enough to get frontpaged.

That said, this is the silliest I've been grinning today, so thanks all :)
I've only ever used a gps device in a rental car, and that hasn't changed since owning an android phone, so I imagine that as long as these gps manufacturers continue close ties with rental agencies they will continue to live on.
Good customer service is doing everything that you can for your customer that doesn't make them want to dump you and jump to your nearest competitor.

An often quoted statistic in marketing and sales is that it is 10 times more costly to acquire a new customer than to do the things necessary to retain an existing one.
I don't understand why the article says Bitcoin is still alive "against all odds". Why would the June 2011 speculation bubble kill Bitcoin? It is like saying the dot-com bubble should have "killed Internet entrepreneurship".

There is a core group of users who understand Bitcoin's technical merits and cryptographically sound design. This group is growing every day, and certainly not loosing interest in Bitcoin. So short of a major design flaw, Bitcoin should continue to survive and grow.

All the price bubble did was to kill greedy speculators, not Bitcoin.
I wrote this to test several social hypothesizes I had as well as test some new tech and raise some money at the same time. I'll write up a full analysis after the contest is over.
THE THINNEST 14" ULTRABOOK™.
THINKPAD X1 CARBON
Less than 3 pounds
Carbon fiber construction
Embedded 3G connectivity
Lenovo RapidCharge
X1 CARBON AVAILABLE AUGUST 2012

August? Why announce it now? As if the literally 40 or 50 different models of laptop on the Lenovo website aren't already confusing enough...
Science is about performing experiments and replicating them, not about debugging hardware. A friend of mine famously complained that his computer was broken because his C programs weren't compiling. He had misspelled "include." The "community" didn't need to step up and help him. He needed to learn how to use his tools.
If you would like to petition Dell to start to include Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL on all of their machines and stop the whole "Dell Recommends Windows 7" monopoly cartel join this idea on ideastorm and let's try to get our voices heard...

Dell Ideastorm Multiboot Linux: http://www.ideastorm.com/idea2ReadIdea?id=0877000000006ixAAA...

Dell Linux & Windows on all Laptops/Desktops:
http://www.ideastorm.com/idea2ReadIdea?Id=087700000008iglAAA...

Dell Sputnik Ubuntu Laptop:
http://www.ideastorm.com/Idea2SessionIdea?v=1339521444920...
I wrote to the curatorsof sweden and suggest they follow up with Aron Flam. I think it would be appropriate (and actually funny)
What does Twitter have to do with double-checking your work?
Professional trolls are not part of any society
end of the article
"After months of investigation, physicists have ruled that the speedy neutrinos observed were likely due to a faulty connection in an optical fiber of the Master Clock."
i really do wonder why negative attitude to my "were likely goes both ways" - they have ruled (not proved) that something is likely. please. either the article is stupid or those who have ruled.
Boats. Airplanes. Backpackers. Campers. Adventurers. People who need routes anywhere the network isn't real or good enough.

But mom? Yeah, she's not going to struggle with a Garmin or try to get the piece of shit in her car dash to work.

Thank you Google!
I'm referring to your hanging judgement whether or not any supplied information is derived from "some crackpot theory."
> From melting icecaps to near constant nuclear war its a sign of an AI that that too easily bounces from one extreme to another.

Strategy games put the player in the role of the fascist dictator. Your goal is to further your own nation at the expense of everything else. In reality, groups of people have different incentives and act quite a bit differently.
Well, that went down fast.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
AT&T says it's interested in Verizon's unused 700MHz spectrum
I've also found that I am usually lost where there is poor cellular reception!
For those interested in a far deeper analysis of music structure, as well as exploring the possibility of computer composition and creativity, see the work of David Cope: http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Models-Musical-Creativity-Dav...
I did this a while ago to create an infinite music machine. The chains are just based off of one particular song (Bicycle built for two, which also happens to be the song the IBM 704 sang back in the day) but could be made to work with these chords (The site appears down, so I can't access the content).

You can find the source code here : https://github.com/Feni/Infinite-Music-Machine
Since both the Steam version and the DRM free version are $9.99, I'm a little confused on why one would buy the Steam version. I understand the rationale for things like games, where you have friends on Steam or you want your games to automatically update when a patch is released, but I don't understand what would make Steam a viable movie platform in this particular instance.

Anyone care to provide some insight on this? What is an argument in this case for why the Steam version would be advantageous over the non-DRM version? I'm not seeing it.
good job...which publisher..Orielly? I would like to see more cool examples and tutorials?
if anyone cares:

- apparently 6/13 is not the actual lock-up expiry:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/zynga-lockup-secondary-offe...

- this seems to be behind today's sell-off:
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2012/06/californi...
Will it support offline navigation? Map caching has been available as an experimental feature for quite a long time.
Well it isn't hard to figure out chord progressions, modes and key of any song. If you wish to serve 90% of the crowd, who listen to pop music, simply "catch" C Am F G type of chord progressions. For balance, you can expose and iterate with more patterns and lead yourself up to Joe Satriani/Steve Vai's of the world.
I think it is more of a case of our civil laws starting to catch back up to how far technology has been pushed.

Unfortunately, it seems there will always be some humans out of the whole who will abuse/take advantage of/mess it up for the rest for whatever reason. In many of our civilizations, we attempt to codify what is acceptable behavior and what is damaging behavior, and what recourses we have for harm inflicted.
> I suspect because there just isn't a big enough market for games
> of that nature. Maybe there is a handful of us out there. Maybe a
> relatively small handful, but one that's willing to pay a fair
> amount for a really great, truly strategic global power game. I
> dunno. Maybe it's worth organizing, or Kickstarting, or what have
> you. If any game devs out there are reading this and are
> interested, know that there's a niche crossing its fingers for
> you.

I'm actually working on an in-browser MMO strategy game set in space that will try to balance around long run[a] strategy and diplomacy instead of just constantly-at-war deathmatches. Of course, relying on humans rather than AI does help.

I suspect that the market is bigger than the big publishers are willing to take a risk on, especially if it was written to be run within browsers (including mobile browsers) and was fun to play.

I have considered Kickstarter, but it seems like most Kickstarter game projects fail unless they go viral first so there's definitely a major risk[b] in going public too early.

-----

[a] One way to make the games last a long time (perhaps indefinitely) is to make it a slow-playing game, such as using Civilization-style simultaneous turns that refresh by default once a day. This would also put more focus on forming alliances, socializing, and making strategies. Of course, the issue with this is that there would be a massive surge of traffic on the servers during turn refresh times.

[b] The main risk of Kickstarter is the uncertainty in receiving funds. I could underestimate costs on purpose and have a decent chance of being funded, but with an insufficient amount, or I could provide the "real" amount and have a very high chance of getting no money at all, even though a little bit would go a long way. Neither outcome seems ideal, especially when people would assume that "funded" means that the game is ready to be released given a certain amount of time.
<shameless plug>

I wrote a utility a while ago to manipulate human/AI control of civs in Civ III (conquests expansion pack), as a bit of a reverse engineering exercise: https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me

</shameless plug>

It's possible to set every player to AI and then just let the game run to observe the results. (You'll still have to dismiss pop-ups about civs getting eliminated or wonders being built, though.) I've done it on several occasions, mostly to test out mods to check if they are properly balanced. In general, I've noticed that AI's that nuke aggressively do tend to win in the long run, but if nukes are disabled or otherwise restricted, huge stalemates can result.
Yeah, I play guitar as just a personal hobby, and there are a lot of times when I'll play an "in between" chord on my way to the next chord I would consider to be in the progression. Many times it's not a traditional "chord" you would find in this list, but just something to bridge a key change or just create a feeling of movement.

I would say that this is most often limited to music that falls outside of pop culture, though. Katy Perry doesn't need to create movement or flow because emotional expression on the backing track is not what her music is about. The Raconteurs might, though. But once you get to that point you have to make the distinction between notes and chords.
Google’s PageRank could get a boost from quantum computing
Do yourself a favor before watching the NBA finals -- check out this 5 minutes preview of the finals: http://www.bballbreakdown.com/2012-nba-finals-preview-heat-v...

Best analysis I've seen yet.
The chord stuff is all perfectly reasonable (in pop music, that is; in a classical piece in the key of C you would have an Em going to an Am way more than to F, for example, and you'd see way more D chords).

I don't buy that Eb/Cm is the third most common key in pop music, though. There's not a whole lot of pop music in minor keys, and Eb is a weird key to play guitar in.
Sometimes we get too carried way by acquiring new customers that we don't sit back and think whether our customers are really satisfied.

And the problem is, we can never satisfy everyone as we're all different.
I'm surprised Google didn't announce offline support for Navigation as well. I wonder if it's a technical issue or they'd rather keep as much as possible online, so they can keep pushing ads.
Speaking as person that hires freelance developers it would probably be helpful if, on your blog, you mentioned what languages and frameworks you can develop in.
I like this analysis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1DIgPyxiWU&feature=relat...

While I do believe the popular songs follow some pattern, I think the chord progression is only a subset. Someone should look into why Call me Maybe is so catchy. Seriously though
Why Smart People Are Stupid
I've brought up daily billing to a few potential clients and am always met with resistance to the idea.

I've instead tried structuring my fees to promote long-term engagements.

So I have an hourly rate (highest), day rate (little lower), week rate (little lower), and month rate (lowest). This is working out okay so far, but it sure requires a lot of explaining up front and I'm probably losing out on potential income for longer engagements.

The key is to have your lowest rate still be something that you're willing to work at, or the whole system falls apart.

Has anybody else tried a similar rate strategy? How'd it go for you?
No, they have killed them years ago but maybe this wasn't obvious up until now. It takes time to work out deficiencies and for the market to react. Remember this when the next time someone is arguing that even though Product X is looking less and less relevant, "it's far from being dead, in fact, it's selling more than ever."
If by interesting you mean "commonplace," I'm right there with ya. It's frustrating, but in the age of hashbangs it's a common failure mode.
A Summer of Hacking
You don't modify the Phone app. You build a custom VoIP app like Skype did.

And yes, it can only work if both parties have the app installed. Otherwise, someone along the way (at the tower (your mobile provider) or in the OS (Apple)) will have to decrypt the data for you and that sorta defeats the purpose.
Looks like ZNGA's lockup period has already expired:

http://www.ifre.com/equities-zynga-insiders-race-to-cash-in-...

"IPO underwriters controversially agreed to early waiver of a lock-up agreement preventing insider selling within 165 days of going public"

So lock-up expired May 28.
Searching for flights sucks, hard. Fixing it with a better ui is a great thing. But ultimately we're experiencing that pain in large part trying to get the best prices. I search for flights about twice a year. Usually between two not-a-hub destinations (currently dublin-tel aviv) so its even harder. Every time I have to do it, I wish that things have improved. They haven't.

Basically, I:

- Go to 3-4 engines or portals. Try to figure out all the airline flying that routes. See who flies where.

- Go to the airlines' sites directly, see if they prices are better (usually they are). Try to remember which airlines (RyanAir) never have fares listed on aggregators. Fill out captchas and tick on boxes to be let in.

- See what the prices are for the most expensive leg & try to put together my own route using two separately bought tickets.

- Try to think of some more exotic routes: change airports in London, fly through a Greek resort island, whatever.

- Call a travel agent to see if they can do better.

I might not get all the way down this list.When I do, I rarely see the same fare twice. When I lived in Australia the stakes were higher and I always went down the whole horrible list. I hate doing this. I'd pay good money to avoid it. But, for my use case UI crappiness isn't the issue(even though doing your grocery shopping on Ebay in 1998 would be a better experience). The problem is centralizing all the available fares onto one site.
Another quote from Jeff Bezos :
"A publisher called me and said, ‘I don't think you understand your business. Your business is to sell books. Why are you allowing these negative reviews of my book on your site?’” Bezos’ answer was, “I'm not in the business of selling books. I'm in the business of helping customers make a good buying decision."
I'd love to build this data into a neural network and see if I can come up with robosongs. It should be quite good at coming up with "What chord should come next?"
The FAQ seems [1] to answer this, though I don't know if the UI is any good. Personally, I want to watch it on my large screen TV through WD TV Live, not on my tiny laptop screen, which seems to imply that the direct non-DRM download (mp4) is the way to go.

Steam

- The film is on Steam for pre-order here.

- In order to work on the Steam platform, the film will be delivered through a self-contained application (emphasis mine) from which you can watch the film in 1080P HD.

- You will download the film application like any other game on Steam.

- You can watch it on your computer or connect it from your computer to a television.

- The Indie Game: The Movie application may have some interactive extras, subtitles and achievements (to be confirmed as we're working on that functionality).

- Like other game applications on Steam, it will have DRM.

[1] http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/faq/
I will ask a question here that I wrote on the original link, because I think it may be useful for others here.

I recently started freelancing (the last 12 - 18months) also, and one thing I did - to generate new business - was wrote a script that sends me a bunch of leads. Right now, it's primarily from Craigslist, but I will add other sources.

I showed it to a friend and fellow web dev and he loved it. So that made me start wondering if others would find a service like that useful.

Would you pay, say $9/mo, to get a handful of curated Craigslist leads (5 - 10) sent to your inbox every weekday?

Thanks.

P.S. The reason I would sell access to these leads is because I can't manage everything. There are some leads that want someone local, there are some that want say an iPhone or FB App developer - none of which I do.
I've been using the lab feature, but I was hoping for a bit more.

I would like to be using a web browser on a desktop, perform a search, get directions, and then choose to have the entire route's tiles sent to my phone. (Along with hotel, gas, emergency responder, restaurant place information.)
Lessons From The Founding Fathers On Leading A Breakthrough Meeting