skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mixest was a project I built this summer because Pandora is too mainstream and Spotify isn't random enough. I wrote a scraper and crawler in node.js that constantly searches for new blogs and adds new music to the radio. Instead of an account system, I used HTML5 local storage to keep track of favorite songs and recently played songs.

You may have seen Mixest on HN 3 years ago, back when it was written in PHP. Its data was destroyed last year by a PHP virus, so I rebuilt it from scratch.

I've been using it as my hacking playlist, and I hope you guys will enjoy it too!
The main article is here:

http://www.economist.com/node/21561888
I recently saw a good comment, something like 'the best minds of today are working on Internet advertising instead of curing cancer, cleaner sustainable energy, etc.'

Tough problem though. I don't want Google without ads. For other web properties like my favorite blogs to read, NYT, etc. I would be happy enough to make micro payments if doing so was really easy. (Actually, I do pay for the NYT, so why the ads?)

Maybe the conversation should be about easy to use and secure micro payments.
Khan Academy - Reverse Engineering
I definitely agree. While it may be entirely true that the Flynn effect can be explained without any difference in what is being defined here as intelligence, I don't want anyone to write with the preconceived conclusion that there must not be any difference in intelligence, which it sounds like is the case with the statement you quoted.
As someone said in the article comments, if you liked that story, go watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4oB28ksiIo

Defcon 18 - Pwned By the owner
What happens when you steal a hackers computer zoz
I think there are various ways to approach this. One could argue that, for instance, watching TV for 6 hours per day does not enrich a particular person's life, no matter how convinced they may be that it does.

Your second sentence is a type of an argument I've encountered numerous times, but I can't seem to recall what it's called. I may get back to this later.
There could a freemium approach as well. The paying users get a better experience (more storage space, faster delivery, faster search), and the free users get the basic package. Seems to work for Dropbox and they dont show me ads, except ads for Dropbox itself.
I found this solution for a very similar problem, which is roughly the same approach:

http://dira.ro/2011/10/17/heroku-s3-canvas-and-the-security-...

Implementation here:
https://github.com/dira/cross-domain-image-proxy

And a jQuery plugin here:
https://github.com/rlmattax/jquery-s3-image-proxy

After weighing the pros and cons of proxying versus this, I settled on the postMessage strategy -- but still no fun at all, and I'm so glad that CORS is finally an option.
In fact while testing mrsync to synchronize search indexes among prod servers they overloaded their switches cpu and took down the site for a few minutes.
Here's Lehrer's barely-used Twitter account. His most recent Tweet called Samsung plagiarists: https://twitter.com/jjonahlehrer
Loving it. Thanks a lot for sharing! I always love ideas that keep the randomness alive and don't try telling me what I should find interesting.
Which modules are missing on Pypi?
I'm very afraid of Scoutzie, that's what I think of them! They're a very close competitor with more resources and YC backing, and their execution is better than mine for a lot of things. But we'll see, as long as Folyo clients and designers are happy that's enough of a reason to keep on doing my thing :)
Is there anything I can do about it?
The Palm browser, as is noted, was actually pretty decent (I used it on the Centro).

The Android default browser (granted, appearing after Apple's) is superior on several points, in particular automatically zooming/scaling to the main body text of most web pages.
Kept hitting the next button until I realized it was not, in fact, the play button. Nice concept and work though! Would eat again.
It is probably named the same as many other popular products; "spark" is a common english word. With 7 billion people on this planet it is impossible to avoid naming collisions if you're going to use something from the dictionary.
IQ measures your potential to perform and learn in various areas. Per wikipedia, one of the standard suite of tests includes, "Comprehension-Knowledge, Long-Term Retrieval, Visual-Spatial Thinking, Auditory Processing, Fluid Reasoning, Processing Speed, Short-Term Memory and Quantitative Knowledge and Reading-Writing Ability"

The argument that James Flynn makes, is that your potential can increase, through your environment.

That is - your IQ isn't simply a function of your genetics, but also of what you are exposed to.

To put it in concrete terms - someone who worked every day, from dawn to dusk, in very manual labor - let's say cutting wood, chopping it up, and stacking it, will develop their potential for abstract thinking very differently than if they had instead gone and gotten their PHD in some abstract field like Logic.

Same person, same genetics - very different IQ.

What you are referring to, is closer to the "Potential for Potential" - I don't know if there is any way, or anyone who measures something like that. But I think that everyone will agree, that IQ is _not_ a measure of your "Potential for Potential" - simply a measurement of your potential - and that is malleable.
...and sadly BrowserID never took off.
Cool, just installed it. Can you say anything about the platform it was built on, Cordova?
While only tangentially helped by timing to reduce the amount of brute force involved, you might find "How I Hacked Hacker News" interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976
Facebook Took My Credit Card Then Blocked My Account
Once they decide to investigate further, you won't have time or ability to wipe out the drive.
Interesting how they have identified hackers to be more inclined to "connect with Facebook". Personally, I connect to Facebook when it's convenient, purely out of convenience. It's easier to not have to maintain so many damn passwords, especially for stuff like commenting on a blog I will never visit again.
I do/did too. It is not fool-proof, but their ratio seems to be lower than other places I have seen.
Didn't you do this about 2 years ago? I remember people had to submit content to it though, I even offered to help develop but you said you were fine.
PowerPoint Templates That Will Make Your Life Easier
"we've seen a deluge of these recently and not a single one has had something fresh to say"

Then stop reading them? Things get repeated, rehashed and re-posted all the time. Just be glad we arent talking about Bitcoin again :)

Personally, I would love to see these articles on HN everyday, at the top, just to make sure every software engineer has seen at least one.
Still wasted the first half of the article talking about the results of a 37 person survey. 37 people with no demographics info at all is so anecdotal that it's effectively worthless.

As far as the second test goes, of course the general trend will be younger people who actually use Facebook will not mind... using Facebook.
I suspect expert testimony in jury trials will be less effective in American jury trials as anti-intellectualism continues its rise there. In Japan with lay judges now we see the opposite problem as the lay judges mostly just decide the case in whatever way the expert judge prefers.
Private Photo-Sharing App Everyme (YC S11) Raises $2.15M From Tencent And Others
I'm loving every single song it's selecting for me. Is there a way I can login and save my loved songs (apart from scrobbling) ?

So I liked a song, then I clicked scrobble , it redirected to last.fm - fine, but when it returned to mixest, it started playing another song, and also lost all my previously loved songs :(
umm.. I hope he doesn't get offended by that.
Predict Closed Questions on Stack Overflow
You can't train someone to be impartial.

Really? Why not? Do you have any citations to back this up?
Is the sunburst background behind Lehrer's head in the table necessary? I thought this was about being 'professional.'

That being said, I'm glad the journalism community is cracking down on people who are recycling, plagiarizing, and not fact checking.
I don't know about $5 to $10/month for Facebook. I would like to see a HN vote/survey on how much people would pay per month for the most used web properties if paying was the only way to see them. For me, the maximum monthly costs would be:

NYT. $15
Gmail $3
LinkedIn $2
Facebook $2

Not sure though about Facebook, HN, Reddit, etc. since they would be so much less valuable without large user bases.
Heard similar language from Google... and Apple... and MS... and ...

The idea that you should or shouldn't "trust" a company...
Can You Read Faster With ‘ReadQuick’?
Show HN: Kinotify, a RubyMotion app for movie release notifications
Wrong twitter account: https://twitter.com/jonahlehrer

I used to follow him. Since I last looked he seems to have been on a deleting spree. Sucks because I really enjoyed his writing.
OK, now how about CloudFront?
Are you comparing hard drives to SSDs?

No, but I mistyped the numbers. That was supposed to read: 60-70ms.
Ah, that's because www.mixest.com and mixest.com are technically different domains :(. I'll get that fixed up, but your loved songs should appear on one of the two domains.
I am absolutely loving this. Any chance of more permanent accounts though? Local storage/cookies are something I go through quite often, plus I'd love to be able to go back to songs at a friend's house or party and play some of these.
Finally, I won't have to proxy s3 requests through my own nginxes.

I've pled for this feature in the AWS forum, over their commercial support (which I bought just to bug them about this), and to werner vogels directly.

Thanks jeffbarr!
Meh. There were some of Lehrer's articles that I genuinely liked, but as often as not I got the feeling that he didn't really know what he was talking about. Although that's not unlike most other popular Internet science writers.
If this is the case, I believe there is a word for this phenomena...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Perl is a really great language at getting things done today. Its failing (and the thing that makes a "mem" perl developer and a star developer) is what happens six months to a year after you complete a feature.

If you are willing to have some discipline up front (and the expense of some amount of velocity), it can save your bacon later.
Bethesda struggling with Dawnguard on PS3: "This is not a problem ...
Very good execution and a good choice for the domain name. The design (green/white/red/hearts) reminds me of http://hypem.com/ - you should check it out if you haven't. It's got a similar theme (crawl indie blogs for music) and has a pretty big following.
This one nails Lehrer to the wall:

"In a third post from mid-2011 titled "Basketball and Jazz," one of Lehrer's paragraphs closely paralleled one written by Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley some three years earlier.

"Lehrer:

"The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time.

"Newsweek:

"In the experiment, 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters (considered non-playing experts), and novices all watched a video clip of someone attempting a free throw. The players were better at predicting whether the shot would go in: they got it right in two-thirds of the shots they saw, compared to 40 percent right for novices and 44 percent for coaches and writers.

"Tellingly, Begley misstated the number of participants in the study. (There were only 5 coaches and 5 sportswriters, not 10 of each. In addition, there were also 10 people in the novice group who were neither coaches nor sportswriters.) Lehrer made the exact same mistake in precisely the same manner."

When Lehrer reproduces someone else's mistake, you know he isn't looking up or verifying the facts himself. The honorable thing to do in a blog would be simply to link to Begley's piece and say, "Sharon Begley wrote an interesting article a few years ago about a study on this issue."

P.S. I posted an article to HN earlier about the initial discovery of Lehrer making up quotations in articles in other publications.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370417

I had also seen him "recycle" earlier writings of his in paid publications, because once one of his articles was submitted here to HN, and I thought, "Hey, I've read this before." Indeed I had, in the previous publication where he had first written on the same subject a couple years earlier.
It's a bug; I'll fix it.
The old developers never rebuilt the site after it was hacked, but I offered to take over the project.
Off the top of my head -- a serious sql parser and the whole TAP test ecosystem. After a while I stopped checking cpan for what I needed, since I just got angry.

Another difference: In the Perl world, you can find and have dependency trees with dozens to hundreds of modules installed from cpan -- and you expect it to work, particularly since the module tests by default are run at install. (It is a bit painful with too many dependencies, but it works if you need it.)
I am researching that with the team as we speak. Need to make sure that the right headers are passed back from CloudFront to the S3 origin.
Guild Wars 2: How Devs Used Social to Build a Better Game
I love it. I really wish there was a link to more information about the artist or at least to where the crawler found the audio. I'm sure the artists would appreciate it also. On that topic, how legal is this? Is all the music public domain?
You, sir, are deeply wrong.

You are maligning my company.

YOUR company? You're telling me you get your pick of the best projects, and that you have at least one of triumvirate on speed dial any time you want to hash out an idea? You think those SVPs and VPs and managers-of-managers-of-managers you're putting yourself out there to defend give a shit about you? Ha!

But when you start spreading this delusion outside of Google, you are hurting Google.

Google is chock-full of high-ranking people making bad decisions. They are hurting Google. I want Google to succeed. It had a great run and a really great culture... for a while. It would be good for the world if it went back to such a state.

Without any accomplishments...

Google's problem is that there are a lot of influential but underqualified people who think that if you didn't do it At Google, it doesn't count; you didn't do it at all, and you don't know what you're talking about. Now that is the epitome of corporate arrogance. And it led to some absolutely stupid product decisions, which I won't name but they're relevant to this discussion.

You told them that their languages of choice were all crap

Google's limited language white-list (C++ and Java only, with Python deprecated in production) is a bad decision. C and C++ are the right tool for the job in some cases. I like Go, but I haven't done much with it. My problem is more with the short white-list and the bad justification for it than with the languages themselves. (Although there is no justification for Java over Scala in 2012.)

I disliked C++ then more than I do now. The quality of C++ code I fell into was pretty bad (object-oriented spaghetti) but that kind of code can be written in any language, and so can good code.

You couldn't hack your first assignment.

Wrong. I didn't get into what happened or why I left, but it wasn't a performance issue. My manager was unethical and lied to me and it caused a lot of hardship. Among other things, he promised a 3.4 rating to prevent me from seeking transfer (I agreed to stay on his project in exchange for a decent number) and then gave me something lower (making transfer impossible). If he had been a decent person and kept his word, I'd have stayed on the project for 18 months and things would have been fine. But I lost all faith in him after he openly lied to me in order to keep me on his project. (He also bait-and-switched me into joining his project, promising work on the new system but putting me on the old one. I gave him the benefit of the doubt on that one. Priorities shift unpredictably and it's often not the manager's fault. Lying about the Perf number was unforgivable.)

There is a glass ceiling.

I never made that claim.

That is why I have a problem with what you post.

I doubt that's all of it.
Facebook re-opens notifications channel for developers to send ...
No, I'm perfectly fine with Twitter Bootstrap and similar because its highly customizable and after a few hours coding, it won't even be recognizable.

I'm using an Admin template for a web app and its pretty unique.

I just don't want to be "mocked" because I didn't take the time and money to make a more unique interface. Like North Korea was mocked because the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea's site (http://korea-dpr.com) cost $15 because they bought a template of Themeforest.

I know it shouldn't be a really big problem, but I'm second guessing every decision I've made because I'm really nervous about this one. (I've switched between PHP and Python and Linode and Heroku about 15 times now).
Makes sense. If it becomes popular and I make some money, I could use that to give it a facelift. :D
Porting your iOS game to Blackberry Playbook (and future BB10 phones)
Will you two please just stop this?
Pseudodiarrhea gave me a unique loop.
Java security flaw: yada yada yada
During its 400 days it's made a staggering 4 comments 1 of which was on its own submission. It almost exclusively submits geek.com and extremetech.com both of which are Ziff Davis properties and they are not at all shy about targeting and spamming HN - ExtremeTech have at least one employee that spams here [1] and had at least one puppet auto-submitting stories [2], and then there's the mysterious and probably automated 'help' from evo_9 [3] and ukdm [4] who have very long histories of heavily submitting these two sites. Finally we have adeelarshad82 [5] who exclusively submits Ziff Davis properties (PCMag.com is one too).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441016

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=evo_9

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm

[5] http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82
What every founder should know about convertible notes
This is a great comment. Not sure why it we downvoted in oblivion. Sometimes there's nothing to say about an article, really. Way to drop the hammer, dude. Enough with HN pretension.
Love this, already found a great new artist I love. Well done. Another vote for a little more info on where the track was found so information on the artist can be chased down.
I'm a designer, so let me flip your question another way:

Is it bad for a designer to use a stock photo if they can't afford a photographer?

Of course not! Will the design look a bit generic? Yes it will. But that's not a big sin in the larger scheme of things if you have a low budget project. Design is about problem solving as much as it is about creativity.

However I will say the following: Just like selecting "off the rack clothing" use care in picking a theme that best matches your project. In fact for an extra $50 you could even get a designer to help you pick something that best matches the project.
Essential JavaScript: a tip 5 book loaders
The purpose of an API is to interface. Good API design means maximum interoperability. It should be consistent and transparent, while adhering to a published and open standard that facilitates interoperability.

What is that? A well-designed RESTful API that conforms to HTTP specs.

The other critical component that goes along with good API design is good API documentation.
Yeah, I usually don't notice I have AdBlock off until I go to Phoronix. Michael has way overdone it. Phoronix is terrible all around.
Reason no 6: The expression of people's faces when I tell them that I use Perl. “Oh! wow, why?” Priceless.
Sounds like a lot of RFP bids I worked on at my current job.

Big company shows up, dangles a bid the size of Texas (at least in our eyes). We pull all-nighters making a killer design and proposal. The client "changes their mind" and takes the completed bid overseas and has it made for peanuts.
Darren -

Drop a line. I've got something in mind you may be able to help with.
If you hash the user session cookie before looking it up in your database, it has the minor advantage that in the event your cookie database is stolen, it's worthless.
Woah, blew my ears off. I did not expect it to start playing instantly.

Awesomeness past that. Simple. Quick. No bullshit. I usually don't use services like this but I find myself still listening.

You should offer a link to where you got the track, the artist title and song name are great starts.
One interview basically said Apple had bought out all the parts that they wanted to use and HP is/was unwilling to invest in the product enough to get the parts that would be good enough to be competitive.

The same thing happened in the iPod/mp3 player market. Hard to compete when it takes tens or hundreds of millions of dollars up front just to secure parts to be on par with Apple, let alone trying to get ahead.

Most big company management just doesn't want to invest that kind of money to compete with an established winner like the iPad. Samsung is about the only company who can afford to do it and that's largely because Apple is in effect subsidizing Samsung's production costs by buying so many Samsung parts.
Dropbox instead of Git for 2 coders?
New iPhone5 photos leak, comparison to previous models
Open source Java projects: GitHub
Crunching numbers is most definitely abstract. What is a number? Why does it matter? What does it represent? What is zero? Why is zero important? Think about how long it took for humans to actually start doing math. And then think about how difficult it used to be for people to grasp negative numbers. Sure, schools teach things with M&Ms and counting other concrete things, but you still have to think abstractly to apply the same concepts to other concrete things.
Not really. The hash is going to change too much. Let's say you know the first digits of a hash are "ABCDEF". It's significant work to find something that hashes to that. And now you have to generate a whole bunch of them to guess the seventh letter.
My favorite is still the ToS for 500px: http://500px.com/terms

Each section of legalese has a plain text explanation to the right of it, which makes the document very easy to read and understand.
Autonomous trucks are already used in mines in Australia. They are apparently more reliable than humans, because they never drive too fast, they never drive too close to the edges, and of course they never get tired or distracted.
Other uses for Unicode
You need good developers to tackle those interesting questions. There is no answer, because you can only rely on rule of thumb and you must know when to break the rule of thumb.

PEP 8, on the other hand, is to get these good developers to agree on the less interesting things, such that they can use it as a stepping stone to the more interesting ones. PEP 8 requires strict compliance, because if different developer ignore different portion of PEP 8, you end up with nothing.

In short, if you have long lines of code crammed together with no spacing, get them to look pretty based on PEP 8 first before we talk about how easy is this code to test.
The Open Source Technology Behind Every Tweet