skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Larry Fine's Piano Book is an interesting read. The take-home lesson is that pianos are far more fragile than they look. They are continuously falling apart. Poor humidity and temperature control takes its toll on them, the soundboard wears out, the tuning pegs wear out, all of that felt most definitely ages and wears out and stiffens, they're full of moving parts, and even letting them get too far out of tune will damage them long-term.

Most of those eighty-year-old instruments really aren't worth keeping, and if you want your instrument to live to be eighty in good condition you need to budget for ongoing maintenance, and then eventually get the thing torn down and rebuilt. It's like owning a car.

It's hard, though, because I remember playing with my late grandmother's piano when I was around five years old, and now it's probably in a landfill somewhere. On the other hand, I still have my grandfather's slide rule, which he took to meteorology school at MIT during World War II. The secret is to choose highly portable mementoes of a bygone technological era. ;)
Some comments from a couple years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1238542
This was submitted earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315369

The film itself, without the narration question, has been submitted repeatedly, and yet none them have significant votes, and none of them have comments.

Bizarre.

Anyway, for your entertainment, here are some of the previous submissions.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4147907

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150596

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152659

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152965

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154270

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157927

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161845

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4162900

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4163991

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181890

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4215426

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230576

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261268

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4311325

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4311649

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314737

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316943
You may like dwb[1] It uses webkit and handles what you mentioned. Written in C++, so you don't get the Haskell learning part, but it doesn have the javascript extensions thing (albeit not fully finished yet).

[1] http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/
Lambler, this is an answer I should have written so thank you for that. I upvoted.

It kind of surprised me, given this is an internet and HN is not a religious or kids website, to see her getting offended by me using this word especially in this unregular context. I guess I have seen worst language flying around and never thought someone can get offended. Maybe shes very sensitive. I know for sure, living in NYC, cannot be too sensitive and been working with some women cursing very hard. I dont like it but I tend to ignore it.

This also reminds me, btw, about my friends Asian immigrant girlfriend. Supposedly their culture forbids heavy language. They were dating for 11 months when he used the word "crazy" to describe something that happened to him at work. She broke up with him the same day explaining she doesnt date americans who curse.
Odds are that you have one in your family tree.
Box Raises $125 Million
The Little Customer Service Encyclopedia — Brush Up Your Business Jargon
Architecture at Scale at ESPN
I don't get the negativity on HN for this project.

This team is trying to disrupt a truly oligopolist market - I really hope they do it.

Give them a break on marketing announcement dissection at least until you see what they build.
Common Misconceptions about Summer Internships
"Rahul Tyagi starts his Blog Rahul Tyagi White Hat in year 2008 and in few years he bang the world wide web"
Here is a complete conversation for those who enjoy some Twitterdrama

http://imgur.com/a/aHDr0
Also submitted here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316295

No votes, no discussion. Will this fare any better?
Read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/...

Read everything on Jakob Nielsen's blog about Usability:
http://useit.com/
On Pricing, I must be missing something because All EdgeCast, CDNetwork and Akamai Resellers are similarly priced. And unless you get to lots of traffics for the majority these Big CDN player wont even deal with us directly.

Although with only 7 PoPs i could understand why you think it is overpriced.
How to do customer service properly
From the article:

"active in this sense means the number of accounts that were modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower or tweeting".
The level of stupidity is really high in the linked conversation.

Seems like this industry is getting overrun by amateurs or simply fakes. My employer paid for CEH course at EC http://www.eccouncil.org/

The material was simple, inaccurate and outdated, aimed at creating script kiddies at best. And yet organisations happily pay thousands of dollars/pounds for this nonsense.

I think anon poster [1] at Quora summarized the course well.

"CEH is crap, don't bother and if you take the CEH cert, never tell anybody, they will laugh at you. It's like telling a trucker that you have a license to drive a moped"

1. http://www.quora.com/Is-ECC-Council-Ethical-Hacker-Certifica...
Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his own personal dirigible balloon around Paris circa 1900 (see new post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317490). He was the only person to experience unrestricted personal urban airflight and is certainly a major inspiration for those illustrations here that depict air travel.
(European here) Wait! There are COMMERCIALS in between? Why? Doesn't that defy the idea of high-quality service?
But at least you will know what a braided monoidal basket looks like and whether it is rigid enough to belong to the strongly ribbon category.
I actually enjoy these types of videos. I think actually typing stuff off of the video, and sometimes changing it a bit, works best for me. It's even better when you watch the video once, get the gist of it, then try to rewrite the whole thing.

And it's plain faster. Having this tutorial in text will probably take you more time to read than you could have saved copy pasting.
You can sign up through iTunes, and Apple likely gets a cut of this, but I'm guessing Hulu's hand was sort of forced once Mountain Lion allowed AirPlay streaming from the Mac to Apple TV.
A -vague- suggestion: did you tried to run ghost users on HN by saving some bunch of users' session on the site?... You should be able to know if HN scale and maybe replicate the crash.
@intended, thanks for informative post. People tend to think all govt ventures are of shabby quality. I've a few friends who are engineers at KPTCL (Karnataka Power Transmission Company Ltd). It gives me goosebumps when I hear their experience about planning and building new sub-stations, high power lines etc. Minute details that go into these things are simply amazing.
All I can say is GP's assumptions about PowerGrid being archaic is not correct.
Unfortunately, you can't rent TV Shows from iTunes anymore[1].

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20110826/apple-pulls-the-plug-on-tv-re...
So you wouldn't work on a company like Dropbox or any other of those file storage systems? Or a VPS/cloud provider? Or an image hoster?

And what about physical things? If you're working on a retail job, the customer buying piece of rope may be planning on using it for tying people up. The guy renting a car may be planning to use it on a hit.

Ultimately, it's not possible to keep track of everything people do with the services we offer.
When I finally broke down and signed up with Twitter over a year and a half ago, my first half dozen handle choices - all based on my fairly unusual given name were taken by what appeared to be placeholders. (No profile, few is any tweets/followers/following and nothing recent).

I'm surprised that 34% are active. I'd have guessed at something more like 5-10%.
I wouldn't call that a "Haskell based browser". 1500 lines of Haskell against maybe 300 KLOC (guessed) of webkit alone. That's not "Haskell based", that's only using Haskell as a glue.

The same goes for uzbl, too, of course. Things like the Grail Browser [1] (a Python webbrowser, including the possibility to run client-side python-code - but sadly obsolete and not maintained anymore, as far as I can tell) are so much cooler than just tying webkit to GTK using $LANGUAGE.

I mean, it's not like HTML layout engines or JS-interpreters are somehow impossible to write from scratch.

[1] http://grail.sourceforge.net/
GitHub Game Bytes #1
The Ubiquitous B-Tree
I feel the same way. I've become very cynical of software engineering/programming. Most of the things we build are simple CRUD apps. Pixels on the screen. Virtual widgets. And to make matters worse, the purpose of most of them are trivial and silly. Or if it's not silly, it's not needed because the market is flooded with similar apps.

I don't have any ideas. For me, my default is to be bored and do nothing, rather than pursue a trivial, boring idea. I don't care if I remain this way until I die :)
Final Fantasy III for Android has been completely rethought for touch controls and it shows. Pinch to zoom for secrets, clicking on enemies to select, swiping across screens for changing characters in equipment/magic/status view. Well worth the $16.
Recursive and Iterative Functions
Professional Translation
> First, it's difficult to google/copy-paste

That's a feature! No seriously. Among an august audience like HN people might have more discipline to properly grok the code they're copying, but I know of plenty of places where people will just copy and paste disparate chunks of tutorial code into their editor then start randomly changing lines and variables (with a hundred questions demanded of the poor folks in some irc channel) until it sort-of-but-not-quite works. Forcing people to write it from scratch, having had the construction demonstrated, seems to aid the mental digestion of the code much better. That's just my anecdotal experience anyway.
API stated it was a hard problem. Hard problems dealing with cryptography can take years and some times produce PhDs when they are cracked. It is easy to tell it is a hard problem, it is hard to say for sure it is not possible. If you have done the hard work of show it impossible please share and save others from repeating your work.
ZNGA also hit new low (2.85): http://www.google.com/finance?q=znga
Something about throwing out musical instruments bothers me... the same way as it does with books.
If you read interviews and/or talk to people in the industry, they would tell you that more RAM expands the possibilities for many of the games.

Even for AAA titles like Battlefield 3, the difference in 64 players in a pc to 24 players on consoles according to the developers, was mostly because of the lack of memory.

1GB is huge for a game console. Just for comparison the PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.
I wasn't disagreeing that it was testable.

I think most people who are consistent with their Bayesian reasoning would grant that SUSY as a solution to the Hierarchy problem is ruled out at the 90% level. More precisely, if you had asked these theorist 25 years ago where they would expect to see SUSY conditional on it existing and solving the Hierarchy problem, they would have put well over 90% of their confidence weight in regions that have already been ruled out. (But obviously, if your prior for SUSY is sufficiently high, you can still claim its likely no matter how much parameter space is ruled out.) I am eager to take 10:1 bets that SUSY will not be found at the LHC.

It does seem telling to say "Well, yes, most of these guys haven't produced theories which are testable, but these two guys have! Oh, and yes, of two places where they have produced testable predictions, one (SUSY for hierarchy) is very likely ruled out and the other (AdS/CFT for QGP calculations) is a mathematical technique (rather than a new theory of physics) used to calculate something that few people care about other than because it is mathematically related to quantum gravity speculation.

(I mean, don't get me wrong, these guys are very smart and some, especially Witten, have made very important contributions to understanding the math of QFT better. And Nima has made all sorts of testable models that were eminently worth developing even if they turn out to be wrong. These are awesome physicists. It's just that $3M each is a lot of money...)
This is very true. Honestly, even the best-kept instrument degrades significantly over time. When's the last time you saw anything but a brand new instrument in a big concert? There's a reason you never see pros playing treasured vintage instruments the way a violinist would.

Aside from their historical or ornamental value as furniture, old pianos are pretty useless.
I'm a developer too, for the last year I've been working on my UI & UX skills - and I've somehow managed to get paid to built out product features for the web (UI, UX + code) professionally.

Here's what I figured out (YMMV):

---

For UI design

Books aren't that helpful, you have learn by doing.

Instead, for theory Treehouse offers a primer on HTML, CSS & UI design which provided a great foundation, they have courses on things like colour theory. Really really helpful.

Practice. I designed & launched a bunch of complete web apps, each one with a landing page + full functionality. Each attempt had a visible improvement in UI & UX over the last. I got tons of great feedback and encouragement (you're gonna need it) from forrst. So I'd highly encourage posting there and asking for feedback (tell people you're learning).

Learn Photoshop.

Check out Sacha Greif's ebook on UI design http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ it comes with a PSD and has a great intro into UI stuff.

Check out Lighting & Realism In Interface Design by Mike Rundle (developer + designer) here http://designthencode.com

Get a bunch of freebies from dribbble and deconstruct and remix them to your taste.

-----

For UX

Watch this https://peepcode.com/products/ryan-singer-ux then watch it again. Ryan Singer is an absolute UX god - he understands how to navigate the problem space very very well.

To really improve UX measure how people use what you make (mixpanel, click tracking) & conduct user studies - watch people use an interface to really understand what works UX wise.
Once a few people make the Ouya exclusives people will start singing a different tune, a lot of the hype has been shot down with the logic that it's just a smartphone on a big screen, to me it's an entirely new platform waiting for someone to really make good use of it. The best part is in a few years when the Ouya exclusives are going for round two on the next gen Ouya, people will get to finally play those great Ouya games on their smart phones. (Because who knows, maybe it'll be all funny and backwards, I've seen much stranger things)
Show HN: protonet.info - social infrastructure with the push of a button 
Heya! We're longtime lurkers and do sometimes post, today however I want to present to you with the fruits of almost 4 years of work, hacking, designing, physically building (for the record: 2 years full time). We'd love to get some feedback from you guys and feel free to give us any hints on what we could/should change, or any opinion on whether you think that'd be something you'd use.

protonet.info

So here's our rough plan:

We love the web and the possibilities it gives us, we also love the way the cloud allows us instant and ubiquitous access to our data and apps. Now what we don't like is that these things run on massive server farms and to get all that cool stuff you have to basically sign your digital life away. This is what we want to change, we want to turn the web on it's head, instead of having these massive data centers we believe everyone should have a piece of that infrastructure. It should be dead simple to use and run, should be social and should be easily extendable for devs.

This is our first step towards that goal, it's a super simple, handmade server that runs our social "operating system", basically an awesome NAS, combined with a pretty cool groupchat, combined with filesharing capabilities. Perfect for small companies and dev shops.

Runs on: Ruby on Rails for authorization/authentication/CRUD, nodejs for all systemy things, a great amount of JS for what is being done in the browser and a fair amount of ruby and other glue code.

ps. if you want to have one be sure to enter hackernews into the message field at the end and you get 20% off - just whipped up some code to handle that (paypal should show the correct amount)

pps. we're looking for a great designer to bring our work to the next level UI/UX wise - contact me at ali@protonet.info if you're interested or know anyone who could be
Oh wow. There's a discussion about an anonymity network being used for horrible stuff, and people say "I want to solve the problem and make a network that can't be used for horrible stuff"?

I want to stop people from doing horrific shit to other people in the first place. Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start...
HN doesn't show comment scores to anybody except the author of the comment. So I'm breaking my rule and writing a "me too" thank you note in addition to upvoting pm90's thank you comment. Good comments!
For some reason people say RSS is dead but have a love affair with twitter. I like you use it for consumption and to produce consumable links with tag lines. For example my http://www.twitter.com/pdrintel has 711 followers (a lot for me)and has only tweeted 488 times a ratio of posts to followers could show quality -

What I don't understand is how its any different than RSS besides size limit in content and easiness to sign up to follow someone.

- I find more useful as a producer of content; than a consumer of content. I also find it has more parallels to RSS than anyone would want to admit.
To me, a turning point in my feelings on UX was reading Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" [1]. It's a little anti-engineer (he argues that engineers cannot do this right and you always need dedicated UX people), but he explains core interaction design principles very well.

E.g., he draws a distinction between mere UI design and interaction design: UI design is just layering another abstraction (the interface in question) on the underlying software architecture, whereas interaction design starts with what the user wants to accomplish, and adapts the underlying pieces to enable that.

Note that this is not a UI book, or even really all that much of a UX book, but it does make a great argument for the importance of user interaction.

[1]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=553473
I've taken some time to consider this issue myself. As other posters have noted its impossible to stop in a system where data is transmitted. I prefer living in a world with free communication (with a channel for criminals) than living in a world with restricted communication. The true crime here is child abuse, not the sharing of data. We don't say people aren't allowed to associate in person without a government minder because they might be swapping photos of child abuse.
I am Brazilian and I get annoyed when people insist the wright brothers invented the airplane.

Santos Dumont was not only a pioneer who flew his 14 bis in front of all Paris. He was a true humanist that believed that science and progress were forces for the good of mankind.

He was not into flying for profit or patents, heck, he even shared the plans for the demoiselle on popular magazines.

If you never read about this man and his life, I insist that you check out this program and the books quoted by nwatson. Its a great untold history. I remember crying when visiting Paris for the first time and seeing the little plaque about him for I remembered not only his achievements but his tragic life. There is a colorful story when he gets stuck with his balloon on top of a tree near the house of Princess Isabel who was the Princess of Brazil and lived in Paris. She sent her servants to the tree with food and champagne, Alberto said that he was not going down because he didn't wanted to share that marvelous champagne with other people =) from that day onwards they became very good friends, the flyer and the princess.
Creating an Unforgettable Name
I think the standard IPO buying strategy for a large institution like UBS is to make many large buy requests to make absolutely sure that all the brokers that want stock get it, then cancel when enough orders are fulfilled.

Since interest was very high on the FB IPO, the assumption would be that it would be fairly hard to actually get stock. So the bank would make a lot of requests, on the hope that a certain percentage would be fulfilled immediately(say 30-40%), after which they could cancel the remaining orders.

Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case, because a LOT of FB stock was released to the market. Add to that that NASDAQ(as UBS contends) did not give a confirmation ID to UBS, and it's pretty easy to see why this happened.
The future is computers,

Let's rather hope they're a passing phase, please.
I suspect it was because - in the days before powered airflight - sea travel was the most common form of long distance travel.

They did have a lot of flying pictures (which I found impressive), but missed that flying would diminish the importance of water transport for people.
According to their CEO, making FFVII is admiting defeat and that they will not be able to make a better game.

They will only release a remake when:

A) The money is needed/correct
B) They make a better game in their view. With I suppose, overwhelming success.
Kuato's coding game is like Dead Space + Codecademy + Siri
Your leading characteristic - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog
170M out of 500M seems pretty normal for me, in fact, better than most sites, hip social network startup or otherwise. In most online communities I'd expect the active/inactive ratio to be worse.
GNOME 3 is a really great, well integrated (if not particularly innovative) desktop environment. Unfortunately, it broke existing workflows, which led to a great deal of criticism on its release. Had GNOME 3 had been a new, unrelated product rather than the next version of GNOME, there would be, if not more excitement about it, at least less criticism.

Making radical changes to an incumbent system is difficult and often thankless, even when the new version is, if not objectively better than the previous, very good. Apple encountered this with the transition to OS X. Anyone who remembers the "Classic" environment can attest to how poorly this transition was perceived by many Mac fans. Microsoft has a real problem on its hands trying to convince users that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7.

Ultimately, GNOME 3 feels like a much better designed environment than the previous version. For those that tried an early release and gave up on it, I'd encourage you to go back and try it again.
The Internet Map Project
The implication of this article is that even the furniture market is limited. You can get some very nice vintage-looking completely unplayable pianos from a Craigslist ad.

I also wouldn't say that a real piano is only for a serious pro. Real pianos are a different instrument from keyboards; I wanted one within two weeks of starting piano lessons. But that brings us to the other half of the equation: New pianos are relatively inexpensive, because manufacturing is increasingly efficient. It's more cost-effective to buy new than to take a chance on rehabilitating a piano from 1962.

EDIT: Incidentally, when I say "relatively inexpensive", I mean "for a piano". There's a very real temptation to stick with electronic keyboards. The temptation is measured in kilodollars.