skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to Learn a Musical Instrument Like a Hacker? (specifically piano)
I want to learn to play the piano, as I currently have no artistic form of self-expression. However, I feel like learning so many computer-related skills has changed the way I learn (for the better, I think). So, to all you of that have also spent enough time persistently working at code that you are a relentless skill-learners, what's the best way to learn an instrument in a thorough, engaging, and efficient manner? I'm planning on learning the piano, but any general advice would be useful, and would help more people.
Did Oracle fork CentOS?

I thought they just copied RHEL, exactly how CentOS & Scientific Linux did.
I read an article a while ago which did some research on weight and social group, and found that overweight people tend to have other overweight people in their social group, and through social pressure, tend to stay overweight. This seems like a direct support of the author's point.
> Outside of racial profiling within America's law enforcement [...] there's really no "white privilege" in America.

Spoken like a white person. As a fellow white person, let me tell you: you're wrong.

Some years back I shaved my head for a year or so. The difference was astounding. People treated me very differently. Suddenly they were scared of me. I mentioned to some friends that people were now crossing the street to avoid me. One of them, a tall black male, said, "Well now you know." And he's right. I look for it now and I see white people doing stuff like this all the time. I'm sure I miss a lot of it, too.

Anecdotes aside, a study shows that people with white-sounding names get 50% more job callbacks than people with black-sounding names: http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

I agree that there's substantial class discrimination, and further that being poor in the US is a bucket of shit. But although white privilege may have lessened in the last 50 years, it is still alive and well.
By extension, do you support "empowering" the employment of men in a female dominated profession by decree with the same zeal you show here toward women in tech?
I cut my teeth on the Z80. Fun chip. Moving to the 6502 was a shock that took me months to get used to.

But at some point, I would think in a language I called "6502 C", and code would pop out of my fingers. It's an interesting experience, writing big programs in assembly code.
But here is the problem.

It just might be that women generally get so late into the tech game that there are just far fewer of them who are any good and have any experience.

I know a few amazing women in tech, but only a few. I don't think my experience is unique.

Hopefully people like Merissa Mayer will change that.
Forgot Windows XP Password? 2 Solutions Introduced to Help You 
Are you usind Windows XP? And When forgot Windows Xp password,do you know how to reset it?In fact, reset windows xp is an easy think, if you don't believe, read this article.
I was thinking it would be nice if there was also https://gist.github.com/3135754.json

Then I checked. And there is.

Not to mention JSONP suppport.

https://gist.github.com/3135754.json?callback=foo
learn it the hard way
Dealership Career Jobs
We are recruiting, training and placing individuals in positions throughout the automotive dealership industry.We work in close partnership with car dealerships across the nation and provides job placement assistance to each graduate.To know more Car Dealership Careers Please visit online.
The benefits of diversity come with costs. Shared viewpoint and culture makes things much simpler. Things people consider universal ("well that's just common sense!", "It's about respect!") reasonably often turn out not to be universal. The very notion of the benefit of diversity is itself not held by all cultures.
Google Chrome Web Lab is now live in beta.
I've always wondered if the saturated fat in coconuts is bad for you..
> Tech is supposed to be meritocracy.

You can't have a proper meritocracy if the prospective field don't have access to the same level of opportunities. Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on (i.e before education has finished).
Do you have evidence for increasing diversity helps?
SMS of Happy New Year - New Greetings  
Sabke Dilo mai ho sabke liye Pyar
Aanewala har din laye Khusiyo ka Towhar
Es ummid ka sath aao bhulke sare Gum
New Year ko kare wel-come.
This will be awesome if it's ever completed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_Greenway

The East Coast Greenway, or ECG, is a project to create a nearly 3,000-mile (4,800 km) urban path linking the major cities of the Atlantic coast of the United States, from Calais, Maine, to Key West, Florida, for non-motorized human transportation.

I can attest that the part near Raleigh, NC is very nice.
Every single company is engaging in patent war. If you're going to walk away from Apple over this, you need to walk away from the whole industry. Go become a pastry chef or something. Otherwise you're just being hypocritical.
Wait, can you provide any data for the "questionable results" of affirmative action?

I don't see anything wrong with helping people be more comfortable in tech, when the typical format does not work for them.
Chores around the house: if this causes you more than five minutes of mental stress, outsource it. Some people can program, some people can carry boring tasks to completion, these people should trade to maximize their mutual welfare.

Projects: Accept that "shipped" is less of a binary "Is it perfect and ready to ship, if not it is still in development" decision and more of a totally arbitrary point of technical/marketing readiness at which you call something shipped. You'll continue improving it later, but that is no excuse for not getting it in front of customers (be they paying customers, your boss, or the other OSSers) today.
3rd Largest Botnet Takes a Fatal Blow
A woman had a compulsive habit of tearing papers to shreds.

Her friends and family thought there was some mental problem. So they took her to see different psychologists and sought after psychiatric treatment.

One psychologist asked her about her childhood, to see whether that had any impact on her compulsive behaviour.

Another psychiatrist measured her brain waves, and analyzed to see if there anything in there.

One after another, numerous tests were done, but each day, the woman was keep tearing papers to shreds.

Finally there was only one psychologist left in the town to see. When she went to see him, he stared at her and simply said.

"Stop tearing papers."

And she stopped.

----------------------

SHIP that thing.
I agree. And frankly I find it the most grating thing about my generation: no spine. Stand up and speak. Don't try to soften the message with tired jokes and deflection. Just make your point. If people are angry, they're angry. Listen to their reactions and if you think you were in the wrong, apologize. If you think you were right, defend yourself. But you never, ever, open with an apology.
WikiLeaks opens new gateway for donations
> (Note that I don’t actually know what it’s going to be, I’m just writing about what I hope it will be!)

I wonder how many other people are kvelling about what they hope it will be.

> Today, feeds are owned by companies, but what if they don’t have to be?

Well, wouldn't App.net be the big company?
Fab is all about design, from their products to website to ios apps. Their stuff is really not cheap, when you factor in their shipping costs its especially not cheap. I was going to purchase a pair of touchscreen gloves from them, but I realized after shipping I was only saving a few dollars from the original manufacturers in NYC (including their shipping cost). I decided to go straight with the manufacturer, which was a small startup, so they could save on the cut they'd likely have given to fab.
But on the flip side, there are some interesting products on fab that I would never have known about otherwise.
Best move I did for a past client was getting them to deploy using Assembla's FTP tool. There is essentially a post-commit hook in their SVN repo that automatically pushes to the test environment on every commit. Deployments to prod use the same tool, but it is manually triggered rather than on every commit. (Competing for best move, was getting them to have separate test and prod environments.)

If you (or an unfortunate client) are using a cheap shared host that only provides you with FTP, this approach at least guarantees that the only code on the site is what exists in your VCS.
If women founders are being underserved by existing investors that would represent a market opportunity. Someone should exploit it out of pure self interest.
Don't make me laugh. Apple started the war on Android and no amount of fanboy sophistry can change that fact.
UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike on a New Jersey diner placemat
There are tons of ideas that are really hard to come up with originally but really really easy to copy. This is one of the reasons patents exist. Saying that any idea that can be easily copied is not worth anything is ludicrous.
I just finished reading "The Blank Slate", a very interesting book by Harvard (and former MIT) psychologist Steven Pinker. In the book, he argues against the politically correct (but factually incorrect) notion that our minds are infinitely malleable at birth, and that our nature is primarily shaped by culture and the environment. On the contrary, genetics and neurobiology play a comparatively tremendous role in determining who we are. And, like it or not, these physical characteristics may differ across individuals, races, gender, etc.

Pinker devotes an entire chapter of the book to gender, and the first half of that chapter to workplace equality. His thesis here is that a lack of 50-50 gender equality in a given profession isn't necessarily indicative of discrimination or unfairness, unless you believe in the blank slate. That is, unless you discount the possibility that women, on average, are interested in different things than are men. He goes on to present a vast amount of evidence that such differences in preference do exist, regardless of cultural conditioning.

This isn't to say that discrimination is non-existent. Many of us have seen (or heard) enough to know that it's alive and well. The point is that we shouldn't arbitrarily strive for perfect 50-50 equality. There will always be fields in which men and women outnumber each other by large margins, and that's okay. The best we can do is to try and stamp out discrimination wherever possible.
What happens when your phone runs out of juice?
> I’d like to CHALLENGE every woman in tech who’s a) got a nice car, b) owns a nice house, or c) is making over $125K a year

In the US you need to have an income of greater than $200k/year or assets not including your home of over $1 million in order to be an accredited investor. [1]

You don't have to be an accredited investor to invest in startups, but it does open up the company to additional annoying reporting requirements such that almost all advisors suggest staying away from such. From info on his own assets that he's posted in the past, it seems Dave's chosen to skirt said law himself, but it seems quite brash to (without disclaimer) push others to do the same.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
If you mean "does it allow your application to be examined before earlier-filed applications" then the answer is yes.

("First to file" is a term that has a lot of baggage, so I wanted to be clear.)
Email-Address leaked from Dropbox
Dropbox investigating possible security breach
I would say the asinine comment was this one:

> There's enough prior art to demolish this easily. It won't even remotely hold up under legal scrutiny if it's ever used by Apple in a lawsuit. I think this is a complete non-issue.

It's just a summary dismissal, with no evidence whatsoever to back it up. My comment was tongue-in-cheek.
I think everybody oversimplifies the issue.

Are you overweight because your friends are overweight, are your friends overweight because you are overweight, or are all of you overweight because you live in the same unhealthy culture?

Could be that there is no causation at all - just meagre correlation: your friends have nothing to do with your weight, maybe it's just because all of you live close to McDonald's, your close proximity allowed for stronger friendships and bigger bellies.

My (German) hometown friends are all thin, maybe because there is no fast-food around, maybe because we have to walk more to get to places, maybe because of a different food-culture we all come from - in this case, it has nothing to do with what I do with them, but what the environment does with us as a group.
Sure. As long as you ignore the fact that Android itself was an attack on Apple. Eric Schimdt sat on Apple's board and effectively stole lots of valuable information about the iPhone so he could turn around and build Android on the back of Apple's efforts. Say what you will about patents, but Android itself was basically an attempt to rip off Apple.

You're pretty much saying if I steal all your proprietary business information and use it to start a rival company, and you try to sue me, then I'm perfectly justified in claiming you attacked first.
Thanks, I am aware of Measles being useful. How about Hep A/B/C, Meningitis and others? More importantly, illnesses and syndromes correlating with increased vaccine usage? That's 1 illness and 1 paper.

I don't think vaccine usage is an open and shut case at all and there are many sub-issues and I'm not getting into a micro-discussion now on this thread.
Spotify + Pinterest = Traffic
This is a good tool. I wish there's an editor-integrated interactive http tool.

OT: Is there an Emacs package that can do interactive invocation of http? Like having a text buffer to hold all the urls. Hitting Ctrl-E on a url to invoke it, and display the http response headers and result on separate buffers.
Instapaper compatibility:
Considering the fact that this is for reading writings rather than codes, I think it makes sense to make it compatible with Instapaper and other services similar to it.

Also the <title> element should be the description rather than gist.io#.
What about women in coal mines and crab fishing boats? It's true that a man has greater mobility towards the top of the career ladder but this "privilege" also exposes him to the much more likely risk of ending up on the bottom of the ladder.

It's not equal to have proportional gender representation in only desirable jobs.
People are quite good at selecting people like them - in my experience, it's quite possible to have a nice diverse group of people, all of whom have exactly the same viewpoints.

I'm not objecting to this proposal in any way - nothing wrong with more investors - but there's no doubt in my mind that the female tech entrepreneurs who'll benefit from this will have worldviews very similar to their male counterparts.

If you really want diversity of viewpoints, you'll need to discriminate on harder-to-nail-down concepts like socioeconomic class or culture.
Email to Text Message
Email text messages are being used by marketers, customers and common people as well.SMS Messages are used for ordering products and services or participating in contests.
Show HN: Mixed Cloud SaaS - Giving your data back to you
Since when do ATM machines have scrollbars, period?
I think it worked. It just disarmed every ad-hominem attack right in the first paragraph.
Secrets to Success
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4240716
Shell social media oil spill a 'coordinated online assassination'
Well, we are talking about FTP, so the string is going to travel over the line in plaintext anyway.
This is largely hindsight bias--because we did go to war with Afghanistan in response to 9/11, you look back at planning prior to 9/11 and perceive it as proof that war with Afghanistan was inevitable.

Prior planning is not proof of future action. For instance the U.S. spent decades planning in great detail how to go to war with the USSR, but we never did it.

Put another way--every war-like situation the U.S. has ever entered was pre-planned to some extent. But we also planned for a great many wars that never happened.
I want mozilla to charge a reasonable price for app developers. Basically, not 30%, but 10%. I want them to be self sustaining and successful, but also apply pricing pressure on the other markets who are just charging waaayyyy too much. I can't believe even MS is getting into the game, making an app used to be free...
Things are not black and white, no pun intended. But Habitat for Humanity is a good example of a charity executed right. They help Native Americans, to everyone else. So yes, if you exclusively help someone solely based off the color of their skin, with the notion of advancing only a certain race, then yes, I would consider that racist. It's not called Habitat for Native Americans. Or Habitat for Blacks. It's called Habitat for Humanity. Also, affirmative action based off of race is morally wrong. (Note about me: My gf is of another ethnicity origin than myself, and I love diversity. I see organizations that are based on race morally wrong, and promote segregation and cultural bias)
1) The Blank Slate was published 10 years ago by a psycholinguist (albeit Pinker an AWESOME psycholinguist but that's besides the point). There's been a lot of research since then to muddy the nature/nurture debate.

2) who's even suggesting that we need a 50/50 gender balance? Where are you getting this straw man from? All McClure has asserted is that there should be more women in tech, and given our 9:1 M:F ratio... there's a lot of room to move before we even start to discuss whether 50/50 is an appropriate ratio.
Isn't this kinda the goal of Status.net?
I have a friend who's a nurse.

He's told me that he's gotten some shit from people because of his profession. From other guys who aren't nurses. Weird, huh? But I've seen more hostility or unintentionally discouraging behavior towards female programmers from male ones than he's mentioned ever encountering from female nurses, so in that regard it's less of a problem.

Yet he's also mentioned that the number of males in the field is increasing, and that there are, in fact, efforts being made to get more men into the field.

Why would a limited labor pool for any profession be a good thing? And why should I believe that the current distribution in a very young field represents a natural equilibrium?
I'm a little confused as to what the problem is. Is it that there aren't enough women in tech, or is it that women who are in tech aren't being treated fairly?

If it's the latter, then I'm all for fixing that problem. But if it's the former, then it may just be the case that women don't' want to be in tech. I try encouraging my sister to learn about programming and computers all the time, but she'll have nothing to do with it. It has a certain, ah, stereotype when you're good at that stuff that she'd rather avoid (although she's smarter than I am and could probably learn it very quickly).
Seattle men busted at the border with illegal candy
Summary: bad science led to low fat diet craze. Reduce carbohydrates instead.
Learn to read music. Use Hanon's Finger Exercises for practice.
Christopher Soghoian Dissertation[pdf]-THE SPIES WE TRUST: ...
Sorry for the cutoff. Full Title is "The Spies We Trust: Third Party Service Providers and Law Enforcement Surveillance"
I guarantee that, shortly after the launch date, many tech media outlets will announce:

"XX million copies of Windows 8 shipped."

"Windows 8 sets record for [carefully worded phrase relating to sales volume]"

...et cetera.

Essentially, Microsoft will make a concerted effort to assure potential customers that Windows 8 is something that is being accepted. I guess that's no big surprise.

Will Windows 8 add significant or measurable value to the user currently using Windows 7, Vista or XP? I would argue that the value added for the vast majority of users will not exceed the paltry $40 upgrade cost.

In 10 years, will Windows 8 be viewed as another Windows ME or Windows Vista (i.e., minor updates that were largely viewed as worse than their predecessors)? I don't know, but my initial guess is 'yes.'
My suggestion would be to break down whatever you are doing into smaller tasks. Instead of thinking, I need to do this...and this...and this...and this...and this...and this in order to complete...change your mindset to "I just need to do this small task to complete". Once you complete the small task, then move on to the next one. Each goal will be smaller, so you should have more frequent completions. Start from there and work your way up
This is technically true at the moment but not for long. Once the crowd funding portion of the JOBS act is accepted by the SEC, anyone can invest up to 10% of their annual income in startups.
Android obviously borrowed from iOS, as iOS did from its many predecessors. Android today diverges significantly from iOS and the last few iterations of iOS have borrowed more from Android than vice-versa. Apple has forced the hand of Google, Amazon etc with their greedy and draconian rules.

Apple is abusing a broken patent system to hobble a legitimate competitor while basically sitting on their ass for the last two years in the phone market.

The iPad vastly outsells Android tablets because it's a better device. Android phones outsell the iPhone because they're better devices in many ways.
Search Amazon for books on the subject. Read the reviews. Buy the one that excites you the most.

I did that for guitar after fumbling with it for ~5 years. Within days of beginning "Fretboard Theory" I had the entire fretboard mapped and the foundations I needed for improvising engrained in my memory.

I'd imagine the Piano would be easier to start with too, since it's easier to thump keys than to produce any clean sounds on a guitar.
Maryland's tech education effort does not compute
> Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on

What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.?
That's not ad hominem, look it up. Your view is childish and pedantic, exactly. You are more concerned with what you suppose to be technically "segregation."

You said all the racist stuff not me. I didn't say that blacks are poor so the get a pass. I said they are social realities that reasonable people, i.e. non-childlike pedants, that understand. :)

There are people still alive that lived under Jim Crow. It is only very recently that public bigotry against black people has been considered taboo. People always trot out "slavery's been over for 150 years" bit but the problems begot by slavery didn't go away over night. In fact, we have some moron on this thread spouting off about how whites are intellectually superior to blacks and the best response most on HN have to that is "Well, we should really consider charitably the intellectual possibility the blacks are 'stupider' than whites."

You've offered nothing more than a false dichotomy in your last statement. Black people have been inundated with the statements both direct and indirect of inferiority. As well, whether you believe it or not, many places even in our current situation are made to feel as the other. Being "black girls" is part of the identify of many "girls that happen to be black (if I'm going to play this pedantic game with you)." Therefore, what exactly with promoting a notion that something fundamental to their identity is good, i.e. "Black Girls Can Code?"

Maybe your jibber jabber would make sense if we were robots or Vulcans, but I mean, that's just no reality. I'm sorry, I can't change that for you. The world is more complicated than you think it is, welcome to Earth.

Do you really want me to explain all of the culture of the Western world to you? I mean it may seem that I'm shirking from a responsibility by not offering you one but it just seems ridiculous that you would need one.
Taubes was right