skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always been interested in learning to play instruments (who isn't?). I tried playing piano when I was younger, but gave up. I am currently (on and off) trying to learn guitar.

I had just bought an iPad in 2010, and was playing around with it and thought that it'd be cool to play guitar on it. I made a quick prototype and sent a video to two friends. They said it was cool. So I committed and started hacking. :-)
Yep. I remember that when I saw the initial announcement (don't remember where), I grabbed my account name just incase I ever wanted to try the startup thing, trying to make sure that I could get my name rather than "some31337d00d_27".
Thanks for catching this (Xcelerate below too). I'm updating the post to reflect it (having some trouble with caching on Posterous it appears though).
I believe you're missing his point. He isn't criticizing App.net for copying Twitter. He's pointing out that it is a poor business model, even from a sustainability standpoint. There isn't enough of an improvement to cause people to switch over. I agree with him.
As I was reading the last bit I was thinking he made his office INTO an elevator. I think that would have been awesome.
You can test how well this would work by collecting a corpus of whatever sort of comments you think HN could do without, and then checking to see how many of those commenters would have run out of karma using whatever combination of initial karma and cost to post you have in mind.

I'd be open to experimenting with charging karma to comment if someone did a study of that type and showed that it would work.

(I realize it's not a perfect test, because people would make different comments if they knew comments cost karma.
But that is a desirable direction to have error in.)
Apart from Excel.
I don't really care what you believe. I do it with Mono and open-source libraries.
American chief executives are not overpaid
It's even more apropos when we consider how many people in the future may be wearing Google Glass-like augmented reality devices. In Minority Report, you might see someone else's advertisements, but if they are projected directly on your viewscreen (or retina, etc) then advertising and propaganda gets even more creepy, as it's more private.

A plausible version of such a dystopian vision is one where your new glasses get infected with malware that spams you with advertisements, which I believe I read about in a novel by Gibson. A more frightening one would be one in which what you see is based on propaganda.
Surely someone here has posted a job ad asking for "awesome", "rock start", "ninja", etc. Tell us how it went. What kind of people applied? And did they really fit the description?
Typically not for emphasis pauses, though, just for clause or item separation pauses. I find it disruptive to visual parsing when they're used this way because I don't expect it. It's becoming common to use sentence breaks ("Every. Single. Day.") to express things like that, but that bugs me since it implies a falling tone on each word. Personally I'd prefer ellipses ("every...single...day."), but that's not perfect either. Writing is always an approximation of speech.
hmm, to fight noise, make every char and click count. If you want to upvote, give up one karma point. Downvote? Minus one point from you too. And, finally, daily word limit, so that people give couple of thoughtful and conside comments.
This is a really neat idea, I think this market still can be disrupted in many ways, trying to flip the coin like they do is certainly one. I'm kind of excited with this since I'm also working on an idea related with changing the way in which recruiting works, this proves we are right and that the jobs market needs a change.
Yeah, I was surprised why it didn't mention that as being the same problem in a different, more familiar form.
I suspect all the time he saved by not having to think about what to wear he more than spent in thinking about how to justify wearing the same thing all the time, and writing blog posts about it, etc.

I don't know why Jobs always dressed the same, but it could quite reasonably have been to "brand" his image. He was, after all, the front man image of Apple.

Jobs was famous for controlling every detail of his presentations, it's inconceivable that he would not extend this attention to his dress.
Clojure is probably the best bet. I don't know much about it but lots of people seem to use it, and any decent Lisp that lots of people use is probably a good bet.
Third, actually:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290390-nba-and-nhl-get-t...
Interesting View from Google Maps (Top-down vs 45 Degrees)
They speak español.
There are two reasons why I do this:

I don’t have to think about what to wear.
Free advertising.

The first reason I stole from Steve Jobs

Really? It says something about lack of imagination, that's for sure. Ironic that one would have to steal such a thought. Also, Advertising != modesty and lack of adornment. So this is sort of un-original and missing the point.
Are false positives really such a problem? Most repeat criminals do it because they are dumb and/or impulsive. If you get 10 hits, you just send a cop around to ask each one if they did it. The one that says yes gets arrested. A major fraction of crimes can be solved this way. Many more can be solved by slapping surveillance robots on people and catching their next crime.
It's still missing some things that most people take for granted.
Woa woa, 140 employees? You mean over 1000 now.
Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-1000-employees...
Experimentation with government seems to have stagnated. This sucks. According to Sid Meier, we should have come up with some cool alternatives to Democracy by now. What the hell?
After this section below I stopped reading. He probably is a good UXer. But also an arrogant one. The best ones understand that they always need to learn.

"You get what you pay for. I charge a lot. But, I guarantee you’ll save money in the long run. Most visual designers at 1/4 my rate will take much longer and still not get you where a seasoned veteran will. Note: veteran doesn’t necessarily mean years experience—2 years at a dot com startup taught me more than most people learn in 5–7 years at a big company."
Of course, the correct pronunciation is "filasteen" :)
But I agree. Hard to abbreviate.
This is bs. No one learns how to code in one year. You bearly scratch the surface. If a musician or a dancer would write about their experiences after one year of playing/dancing, it would be laughable, yet with programming, for some reason, it is acceptable. You know almost nothing about programming after doing it for one year.
There is real and legitimate compiler and JIT research, like PyPy, that could lead to reasonably efficient implementations for dynamic languages that can be expressed in RPython.

It is not, however, under any circumstances going to lead to code that's any faster than what an experienced C programmer can produce.

That's a "hard problem" in the mathematical sense is essentially impossible for reasons related to the halting problem and writing programs that can holistically analyze programs. For similar reasons, I find the type-fascism of the Haskell community amusing, although I find stronger type systems useful.

If aren't familiar with the implications and realities of systems programming and/or compiler implementation, stop making false statements about it.

Ask questions, read books, but don't toss out ridiculous bull-honkey like:

>thanks in particular to projects like cython that let you write python code that gets converted over and compiled as c++ that's often more performant than the c++ code that devs might write themselves.

I'm actually pretty familiar with Cython and have spent many man-hours optimizing Python code.

I'm a relatively terrible C++ and C programmer, but I can still produce code that profoundly outpaces Cython.

The only way to write C/C++ code slower than Cython is to use the wrong goddamn algorithm or data structure. (like std::list when you should be using std::vector)

Also, the protocol holds for me here too. I'd gladly say all of this to your face. Stop projecting manufactured confabulations about programming into the ether.
Stock Market Video Review 9/7/12
see commentary and video
I read GTD and practiced it for a few years. I always felt on top of my tasks, but gradually seemed to fork off my own system, although, I definitely still track tasks in a list* wrt context, due date, and time estimation.

One cautionary note with GTD is that it's easy to get caught up feeling like you're cranking widgets and lose sight of the forest in favor of the trees. I welcome suggestions for this.

With respect to BJ's talk / the Fogg model:

- Triggers:
The GTD system helps you capture all your task triggers in one place. This is a great idea that works well in practice.

- Ability:
The most common behaviors for interacting with your GTD system are adding new tasks, deferring tasks, and reviewing. The concept of a universal inbox accomplishes task insertion very easily, but one must build the habit of processing the inbox into their own GTD system __daily__ to really trust it. That was difficult for me in practice.

- Motivation:
The weekly review system provides a renewal and closure based on what you've done recently and have upcoming. The higher-level reviews "20,000 to 50,000 feet" are a harder habit to form since practiced so infrequently. I never really became great at this.

* I use one plain text file for tasks. I group with headers based on the date I plan to work on each task. Some items have hard due dates, but most don't.

# TODAY
x completed task
- uncompleted task 0.5h /* estimate of how long it'll take */
- another task (due 9/8)
- ...

# TOMORROW
- ...

# NEXT WEEK
- ...

# NEXT
- ...

# SOMEDAY / MAYBE
- ...

And 3 separate lists for errands, groceries, and calls:

# @GROCERY
- ramen
- gatorade
- etc.
Actually... most often UI people end up marginalized because they think their ideas and their needs are more important than they really are. Designers are, in general, their own worst enemies.
I'm a little baffled by your first paragraph. Have you been working for a company part-time for an entire year and have never received compensation from a company that is clearly bringing in revenue?

If you like the work/company that much, clearly 7.5% of $X,XXX is greater than 100% of $0. And you'll still be part-time to pursue other things/ideas/etc.
Dan Weinreb was the MIT guy in 'Worse is Better':

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Interesting comment!

When I read portfolios/personal sites like that, the first thought that always crosses my mind is, "They were looking for a creative way to say that they design _________ but settled on a tired cliche." However, that kind of marketing speak doesn't necessarily make me second guess the person's work. Rather (to use your example), some people may be great designers, despite the fact that they can't write their way out of wet paper bags (and thus need to settle on cliches).

Sizable personal bias aside, I have some data that argues you may be correct. When I rebuilt my website last summer, I built a fairly typical main page with lots of space for a headline. I spent the rest of the year A/B testing headlines to see which one got more people to delve deeper into my site.

I ran many tests, but the best performing headline I came up with was "Everything I put in this box makes me sound like a pretentious geek". The difference was truly immense - my pretentious geek headline outperformed everything else by at least 2.5%!

Consequently, my homepage contains the words "Everything I put in this box makes me sound like a pretentious geek". I sacrificed branding in favour of results...and I'm pretty sure my University would like me to give back my marketing degree! ;-)
Here's a link to a note Dan wrote about the video being marked "private", as well as a link to some notes about the talk.

http://lists.common-lisp.net/pipermail/pro/2011-April/000464...
Personally, I've been doing this for the last 6 years and I love not having to think about what to wear each morning. It's liberating not to have to think about whether you wore the same thing too recently or whether a coworker will be wearing the same outfit. Wearing the same clothes every day (i.e. clean identical copies) seems to work well when the clothing is neutral and professional. It works as a casual uniform, and uniforms are perfectly acceptable as long as they are not required. Friends may comment at first, but as long as it's not offensive, coworkers get used to it pretty quickly (in my experience). And since few people at my organization do this, I become unique by wearing non-unique clothing! So far, no detrimental effects -- of course, I'm not trying to attract/impress potential friends with my style or facilitate socializing, so maybe that's why it works for me.
The days when you could actually address (work on) a specific
part or area of a storage device are long gone, so overwriting
the old data to securely delete it is no longer possible/guaranteed.

A fair overview of Data Remanence is on wikipedia. You want
to pay attention to the issues mentioned with flash based (SSD)
storage as well as the links to the various research papers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence
Superstar software professional
Requirements are only guidelines
I've learned the value of not working with designers who do not understand the realities and constraints of entrepreneurship.
I for one just don't understand what rights a CC-NC license grants me and am consequently forced to treat all those works as licenced under an non-free but still gratis licence anyway. No loss there if they were released under a license that actually says what it means instead.
> Twitter went through severe growing pains to reach the point where it could handle that much traffic; there's no reason to believe App.net won't have to go through similar issues if/as it grows.

Actually, there is: app.net could just observe what twitter did.

And twitter didn't have to go through it either; There's discussions going on about that since 2008 when their uptime suffered outage after outage; here's something I wrote 2 years ago, for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b2u6t/twitter_o... and I had given that same answer before several time in other forums.

> Any centralized system that has to support tens or hundreds of millions of users in real time is going to be seriously expensive to operate.

And yet, reddit which is much more complex, and of comparable reach (I don't have time to google the numbers right now, let's say it has 1/10 of the audience), costs much less than 1/10 of twitter's operational costs. And is profitable.

> There may well be a point at which it's simply economically infeasible to do it without splitting the expense into tiny slices borne by lots of different parties, the way we do for email.

Actually ... I suspect gmail can easily handle the entire world email infrastructure, cheaply and reliably. They already handle a two-digit percentage of the world email accounts.

For sure, facebook can do that - they already do it (although it is simplified email).

The reason email is sliced is not a problem of scale - it is a problem of control.

edit: removed half a sentence that was there, and which was written earlier.
35 passes was always overkill. 35 was the sum of each of 3 patterns, and each of the 3 was only ever relevant on a certain kind of MFM disk. The "Gutmann method" is completely irrelevant on a modern hard drive.
Didn't see that there was a way to change the size of the eraser brush so I see that you did have it. I just used the brush that was there, so didn't get to see how big the maximum brush size really is.

Understood about the scaled down version to the db. I was curious as I was playing around with the infinite field I ran into some things that I didn't expect to be drawn (basically drawings of nudes) that were far off to the left of what loaded up. With these types of thing I get lost easily, so a map would have helped me. :)

Thanks!
I did the same thing with KDE and have been very productive with it.
There is definitely automation, but it's far from ubiquitous and there are huge swings from industry to industry. Some industries are much farther along than others.

Also, if automation is almost everywhere how come Foxconn has 1.2 million employees?
I agree that UX design is important. But it is basically applying common sense. See common solutions to UI problems and apply them. Actually its the fun part of creating an application.

Also i hate it when they say: Programmers cannot do UX. They are too technical. Well i do it all myself. I dont call myself an UXer. Because its just a small part of creating a product.
`if` is not a function. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/If-then-else#Replace_synt...

Functional `if` and `cond` are here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/cond/0.4.0.1/doc...
Kindle Fire sets Microsoft’s Bing as default search engine
Amazon to Apple: the game starts now
GCC Easter Egg: C++ Undefined Defined Behavior
Ensemble learning is indeed a powerful tool--more than just the sum of its parts.

This is a cool ranking that lists various learning algos and how they do on MNIST (which may or my not be a good benchmark for what you're doing). Links to the corresponding papers are provided, including a few ensemble methods (committees), which tend to perform rather well. http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/
No, Mr. Bezos, We Want Devices not Services
To paraphrase from Yves Behar, "there are two kinds of designers. Good ones and bad ones. Good ones can do all kinds of designs. Bad ones invent new subsets of design to excuse their failings."
Wow, this is exactly what I always tell people I'd like to do one day!

This is very similar to the German city-states that were set up along the baltic and northern sea some 800 years ago. I recall reading a very interesting article about this in some magazine, maybe I can dig it up. This model is a win-win because the settlers get to make their own very liberal rules (that the host state doesn't necessarily agree with) while the host still reaps some of the benefits of wealth and education coming into the area. Excited to see where this goes.

Edit: Found the article. It's called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-poli...
Shit Apple Fanatics Say, Part 2
In my mind, app.net is incredibly interesting, but not because it is like Twitter. If app.net is going to be successful, it is going to be because they become very not-like-twitter, by becoming critical infrastructure that applications can easily talk together with. In my mind, app.net's competitor isn't Twitter, it's HTTP.
To be fair to John Hammond, I'm not sure creating a (albeit massive) social networking service is in the same league as reverse engineering 65+ million year old, fragmented DNA strands, then bringing the dinosaurs not only to term, but healthy adulthood, and finally housing them in a multi-billion dollar facility on a leased island.

Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't be run from a single room for up to three days with minimal staff.

Also, if say, Facebook Profiles breaks down, the profiles don't eat the users.
> people will notice and think you are weird. You don't want people to think you are weird if you startup.

What a terrible reason not to do something that makes sense to you. If your success in the startup world is so strongly linked with how others perceive your superficialities, that's not a healthy environment to be in. You might as well add "don't be ugly" too, because everyone knows that beautiful people tend to have more success, and you want to maximize your chances of succeeding.
Is "hacker-idealist" the paleontologese for "sociopath"?
nand wear balancing
> "I would've not hesitate to say the exact same thing in person, which is _the_ criteria for wording HN comments"

That is the second criteria. Immediately preceding it is "Be civil." Shortly after is an example: "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The wrinkle in #2 is that once you decide to take conventional venture funding (as opposed to bootstrapping, or fundraising through angels, incubators, etc.), you really don't have the option to just be a small, sustainable business anymore. VCs don't want to invest in small, sustainable businesses, they want to invest in aggressive plays that have the potential to blow up into something huge.

According to TechCrunch the only money Reddit ever raised was $100k of seed funding (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/reddit). That's a very different trajectory than Twitter, who (again according to TC: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter) have raised $1.16 billion (with a B) in funding.

Taking in that sort of money raises the stakes dramatically. Nobody loans you a billion dollars to build a $50 million/year business.
A good developer is one of the most humble people you'll ever meet; for he knows the great, intrinsic flaw there is in being human.
Excellent SVM Demo in Javascript
That's just ISO country codes.

IE is IrEland because IR is IRan, and Iran comes before Ireland alphabetically.
I think the 21st century trick for this is to "privatize" it. Public funds go to a trusted private partner who can operate in the dark. Then it seems like the billions are spent and gone by the time the questions are asked and the damage is done.
>It's more powerful in every way than the PC I was using 5 years ago to write media player UIs.

I agree about the quantity of RAM and probably even the GPU, but is there a raw comparison of the CPUs(not just cores and GHz? I strongly suspect your 5 yr old x86 PC is much more powerful than the ARM one in the Galaxy note.

>I don't know when we'll start seeing things like Eclipse running on Android tablets, or if instead app development will trend to HTML and we'll see web-based tooling around that, but I do think that it is on the cards.

I sure wish Eclipse would get on to Android instead of devs moving to HTML just because their tablet does not support a full-on IDE or programming platform.

>I also can't imagine that the Surface tablets (ARM or x86) are going to sell well at all. Not as good as an iPad for tablet things, not as good as a laptop for Office things.

This reminds me of the folks that discounted the iPad because it was not good as a smartphone for portability(oversized iPod Touch) and much less powerful than a laptop.

I agree that the Surface Pro is trying to create a new market here, but I do think there is a big market of people who want a no-compromises powerful portable tablet for on-the-go use.
Hasn't receiving radio signals sent "in the clear" always been legal? That confused me with the Google case too. There are exceptions, particularly surrounding cars (radar detectors, police scanners are both illegal in cars in some states)

[edit] The issue isn't receiving, it's recording, duh!
I like Guidebook too. Their offices are down the street from us. We're accomplishing similar goals in pretty different ways.
Why I don't wear the same shirt everyday
Or a Power Ranger.
What I always found curious about Twitter, despite its massive concurrency requirements, is how low quality and short-lived the content is. Outside of charting historical trends, there's very little value in mining historical Twitter data - it's only the real-time part that matters. Theoretically, they coould just delete all content older than x days - and I doubt that many would notice.

1bln is funding is unreasonable, both from a technology standpoint (Twitter does go down, btw) and from a "let's figure out a way to monetize this" standpoint.
How is sniffing open WiFi networks different from standing in earshot of a conversation being held in public?