skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The premise of "perfect sound" is almost antithetical to the current state of the audiophile world. Some of the most expensive, well reviewed "audiophile" systems have worse specs than your run of the mill, mid-fi system. Heck, look at the obsession with vinyl, no matter which way you look at it, no matter how much superstition you have, the simple fact is that it has poorer fidelity than a CD. That "magic" quality that makes vinyl sound better than digital? Distortion. Albeit a quite pleasing distortion, but a distortion non the less. Plain and simple.

The world of audiophile gear is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The human ear, just like the human eye, is.. well, rather poor. We have a very small spectrum in which we operate. So these magazines like stereophile will plop an osciliscope onto the latest piece of gear and marvel over the fact that it's flat from 0 to a kazillion and then talk about its "creamy, refined mids." Someone please kill me.

Audiophile USB cables, audiophile mode-correcting rocks, audiophile amps with .00000000000001% THD, that damn marker to color your CDs with? All hooey. I once read in a forum an anecdote about a guy switching from Monster, to some other overpriced cable and being able to tell the difference from a room away. This was not a tongue in cheek post.

The big problem is that this stuff is eerily close to religion. A bulk of the hard-core, $7000 CD player audiophiles I know are actually rather well educated -- engineers of one type or another, but they slip into cognitive dissonance when it comes to anything relating to audio. A phrase uttered far too frequently is "You can't measure what I'm hearing." Once that mindset is adopted, confirmation bias is king. Here's a $4k pear audio cable. It'll increase the air in the high end by around 15%.

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/audio-designline-bl...
You mean the .io part right?
I do, because the Google Apps security policy is way too inhibitive for me to add my work account on my android phone to use the native apps. Essentially, the policy requires me to enter a 6-character password (read: a password, not a PIN) every time I want to unlock my phone. I would much rather not use the native google apps and just access Gmail via my phone's browser, as terrible as the interface may be.
> Again, I stand by my claim that your problem is not with standardized tests, but with the goals of the school system.

You really only care about those standardized tests, don't you? Any other point of interest just sort of gets ignored.
> This is Next Level Shit. This is absolutely next level execution.

Crashed the first time I tried it.
I'm finding HN harder and harder to deal with without comment upvote counts to provide perspective as a filtering mechanism. I find that regulars and comments like this always tend to get upvoted, even when they're normally far from the most insightful comments posted.
That's not Sandy, that's Irene from 2011...
and nice explanation why it's also not a Fibonacci spiral: http://xahlee.info/math/fibonaci_spiral_hurricane.html
Internal Coding Guidelines: Keep it beautiful
nice concept !
Hurricanes always have a logarithmic spiral shape.

What would be really remarkable is if a hurricane were to look like an Archimedean spiral.
How do You Improve Problem Solving Skills?
I seriously lack problem solving skills particularly when it comes to solving algorithmic or mathematical questions. I think the issue is that I can't think "outside the box." I am only good at solving problems that I've sort of encountered before. For instance, I struggle through Project Euler questions and take long hours or even days to solve questions and I'm not even past question 10!

This worries me a lot since it seems that there is so much emphasis on the ability to solve problems or puzzles to get to good companies. What can I do to improve?

Some background if relevant at all: I'm a 2nd year student in computer science in a university, not very strong math skills (as pointed above)
The case for a distributed, smarter, cleaner power grid
Meet the robots that will compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge
Shootitlive: How 4 people can serve 150,000
"Most people just make the mistake that it should be simple to design simple things. In reality, the effort required to design something is inversely proportional to the simplicity of the result."

Sort of off-topic, but did Mr. Fielding mean to say either "inversely proportional to the complexity" or "proportional to the simplicity"? This quote implies that as effort increases, simplicity decreases, which seems out of spirit with the context of the quote.
Never stop for anyone approaching you on the street in China. Even if it seems legit they are probably attempting to scam you.
>What exactly is illegal about researching the effects of the drug on the brain?

Unless you dot all your i's and cross all your t's, you'll end up ending with illegal precursor substances in your possession. Synthetic drugs are one of the most serious causes of death in the club scene, stuff like 5MAOI-MIPT, 2CI etc.

For the record, the air force has switch from amphetamines to modafinil and yes, it is adderral for "ADHD"
Toxic is not too strong of a word here.

The use of a unilateral change-of-terms clause, without notification or assent, in their contract with the users of their website invokes an illusionary promise of a contract which vitiates the entirety of the contract at its very roots, including the severability clause.
Disney to Buy Lucasfilm for $4.05 Billion. NEW STAR WARS MOVIE in 2015
This looks awesome, and something we'd love to have in Zenbox. To that end, just two requests:

1.) Any chance of OAuth support? Our users are in general not technical, and in any case they all appreciate one-click integrations over copy/paste API-key, or even worse, username/password ones.

2.) Can we retrieve a list of documents that have been signed (or sent to be signed) given an email address?
Open Source "Less bullying, please. More giving."
Star Wars Episode 7 will come out in 2015. They also acquired all of the assets including Indiana Jones, Star Wars, ILM, LucasArts and Skywalker Sound
The most important thing is that you separate the different layers of the app so that you can refactor later. Using Spring is a good way to keep that separation.

The frontend layer needs to be agnostic of how the middle layer is implemented, and the middle layer agnostic of the backend.

JSON and REST are universal, so if everything communicates using that, you are in good shape if you ever partner with other companies or get acquired.
This is a fantastically informative comment, thank you!
A detailed description of Shim: Fedora's bridge from Win 8 UEFI to booting Linux
So, is this using embedded lua inside an actual web server like Nginx or is it a Lua application specific server ?
MDMA still has limited clinical use and is under research, as is LSD but it is under quite tight controls.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2008.104...

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1987-01824-001
This was more of an oversight of some other changes than a conscious decision. It's definitely a known issue though.
I submitted this. Upon giving it some thought, you're right. I'm deleting it.
Researchers caught espionage malware mastermind on webcam
Nicely done.

I would love to see links to other companies' coding standards docs.
Thank you. Do you have any criticisms, by chance?
Disney to acquire Lucasfilm Ltd
EFF, 9 other groups, push Open Wireless Movement
If people actually pay taxes/ssi, $65/hour isn't that nuts any more.

Sure, you can go ahead and go the "no paperwork" route, that'll get the job done cheaper. But it's probably not a good plan for a web service.
Great to hear that it works with all your tools!

Follow the development at https://github.com/mozilla/r2d2b2g/ . We are working on the first release, so feedback is more than welcome!
I mean the nav, the "Picks, Popular, Recent" at the top, etc. etc.
Do You Own Saxony Carpet?
8pm PT: http://ycombinator.com/apply.html
I'm not a fan of the pricing model - deleting user data after a period of time is a bit harsh in any circumstance, but I don't see an alternative. I'd say cap the number per account, but then you can get multiple account abuse issues.

$5/mo is cheap enough to warrant an impulse purchase, though. Good on you guys.
"Actions have consequences. If you were more responsible, you wouldn't be in that mess in the first place. Not my problem."

"Oh, you got old and need medical assistance? Sorry, not my problem."

"You've been shot? Maybe you shouldn't have looked so suspicious to that cop. Not my problem."

"You have cancer from all the pollutants in the air and water that my company produces, but you can't afford health care because we laid you off? Not my problem."
$4 Billion and it's 100% owned by George Lucas.

Does anyone know if that 100% is literal? That he didn't give away ANYTHING, even for a pool for employees?
Isn't AAC a better codec than MP3 as far as quality per bit goes?
I too wrote my own system - which uses Perl. Mine is called Slaughter and the upcoming 2.x release allows you to fetch policies/instructions from remote servers via one of:

* rsync
* http
* git clone
* hg clone

etc. It is pretty extensible and covers my needs. Beyond that it is a little hard to know.

http://steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/new.html for the upcoming 2.x release.
this is actually quite a well written and amusing exploration of antipatterns that are used or arise organically, especially in design-by-committee or firefighting shops.

I'd say finding this article hilarious would correlate well with professional coding experience :] and also I honestly had to laugh at myself a few times reading it, clearly laid out these ideas are obvious but they can be sneaky sneaky
Let's keep in mind here that one of Siri's core strengths, and why it must be a system level service, is that it can delegate queries to apps and 3rd party APIs. As impressive as Google's Voice Search is, it cannot execute tasks for users (reminders, setting appointments, sending messages) and, what's more, it would probably be a huge security to hole to let it access apps, the data of those apps, and execute code. This is the job of the OS. So let's be cautious about trumpeting this as a Siri replacement. At best it's a Nuance or Wolfram Alpha replacement.
Lucas will not keep destroying your childhood.  LucasFilms Sold to Disney
I'm no media/film expert, but this sounds like a great acquisition for Disney. The current library/brands and Disney's distribution can squeeze any cash left from past movies/brands. Going forward this can be a true money-printing machine. Lets just hope they acknowledge the internet is the retail distribution channel of today.

Also, funny how life works. Pixar, a spin-off of Lucasfilm back in the 90's "acquires" Lucasfilm. Am I right in saying that Disney's movie division is headed/managed by the Pixar guys?
Besides being a well-established startup in the digital signature space and writing all their software in Haskell, Scrive has a good API. I have used it myself for a small project, to build a petition service, and it was very straight-forward. Of course, their typical API user is a large organization with a lot more complex requirements.

Fancy marketing presentation: https://scrive.com/gb/en/scriveapi

Documentation for devs: http://api.scrive.com
Pretty in line with classical music theory. Further, one would expect that I6/4 chord which was not functionally analysed in the article will be in majority of cases followed by V chord, possibly the two chords sharing the same bass note.
Before they launched the cleaning service, Exec was already offering cleaning (and providing cleaning supplies to their workers) as part of their normal $25/hour service. I suspect they realized that the costs don't work out, and with two people at $65/hour it's "only" 30% more expensive that their standard service.
Show HN: a simplistic e-commerce website
You can see it at www.tradespring.net. TradeSpring intends to make it as easy as possible to list items to buy and sell online (easier than craiglist/ebay). Does it immediately seem simpler or does it still seem like a pain in the butt/not worth it?
Disney to acquire Lucasfilm, set to create new Star Wars by 2015
The current flash architecture is, from a building blocks perspective, identical to dynamic RAM architecture. There is a 'memory controller' which arbitrates delivery of the data from the data bus to the devices themselves based on device specific constraints.

Of course in the case of DRAM its contingent on whether or not that particular row has been refreshed lately or not, and there is a 'page' register which is used to provide part of the address as well.

If you look at how Intel and others have constructed their PCIe cards which have flash on them you will see that the controller presents a "memory" type interface to the PCIe bus as it would in the case of connecting it to the physical memory bus.

The benefit of putting it into the physical address map, combined with its non-volatility, would create opportunities for "on demand" server type OS's which boot in milliseconds rather than seconds.
Thanks for asking. I have been struggling with this problem since joining work.
I'm well aware of these generators with two shipping-container sized units right outside my building, tested fequently. So, I concede and simply disagree.

I agree they will likely lose some customers but I disagree that there was too much they can do now. Were they in the mandatory evacuation zone? (I don't know) Will 20 drums (10-ish hours) really help if this is a multi-day outage? Did the customers plan for a failover to another datacenter, or put all their eggs in one basket? (oops!)
No. It applies to the whole terms of use.
I'm not sure I understand why you won't vote for something that is in your best interest -- you prefer not to help yourself?
In the press statement they say it is $4 billion "transaction value", which tends to translate to enterprise value (not equity). So that $4bn number might be equity + net debt + any other provisions, etc.
For those of us who haven't played Doom 3, is it normal to have those rapid flashes of numbers when you're smacked by one of those red guys in the demo they're showing it off with? Or is this a weird bug introduced somewhere along the line?
Agreed, these ux complaints are getting annoying.
Mozilla lost up to 9 million Firefox downloads due to Microsoft’s BCS violation
It's a Python app that calls into embedded Lua.
Disney to buy Lucasfilm
Thank you for asking this so well. I have been keeping the page hanging around in a tab, waiting until the answers showed up!
Nope: someone will come up and say "network neutrality" and believe he would be right in this case.
This means that Disney now controls Marvel, Pixar, LucasArts, ABC, ESPN, A+E, Disney Channel plus all their own original content and of course the parks and merchandising rights for everything stated above. Those businesses most likely control the top 10 film franchises of the last few years. This is a pretty insane acquisition.
The reason I chose Puppet was that it allows my servers to pull their configuration instead of my pushing it to them. This is important because my servers are all remote and behind firewalls that I don't control. Using Puppet, my servers can make an outbound connection to the Puppet Master without having to mess with firewall ingress rules.

Things like Salt or Fabric require direct access to the target servers and won't work in my situation. I'm not sure about how Chef works as it wasn't available (popular) when I was setting this up several years ago.
"Gallery" and "Settings" aren't really circles either. I don't see any point in enforcing the shape of icons.
> This is the job of the OS.

No, Apple has made it a job of the OS. There's absolutely nothing fundamental to the problem that makes it a job of the OS.
ick. I don't love the send workflow. Lets say I send I need to send a course override form to my academic advisor and she opens the document and all of a sudden has a "hellosign" account? That download link is a little misleading.
Does this mean all the current "Markdown" implementations out there are in violation of this licence term[1]?

How would one reasonably convey that their formatter is markdown-capable?

It would seem to me that there's a significant difference between "Bloopdown - a Markdown compliant formatter for blah" and "Markdown v3.Ice-cream-pony"; the latter clearly trading off the name of the original, while the former is descriptive.

I'm not sure where "$X Flavored Markdown" falls on that scale, although I'd be surprised if something like GitHub hadn't sought permission or clarified the naming provisions.

[1] Having checked a couple of different projects, none of them mention having sought or received that permission, but I suppose they might have
I've been going to China for more than a decade and lived there for a while too. I use the opportunities to practice my "street" Chinese and try to understand rural dialects. But I've never been taken in by any of the scams or folks coming up to me on the street. Worse is knowingly overpaying by 10-30rmb when buying something because I didn't want to haggle for ages.

I even take taxis from the taxi rank at the airport or train/bus station(instead of touts in the terminal/station), make a point of photographing or writing down the license plate number and pretending to text it to someone, so they know scamming or stealing from me won't work as well. Never really had a problem and try to make a game out of it, so its less of a chore.
Because I'm a neurotic jew* so I disqualify myself from the jury as biased.

* after writing this I just realized you're a founder of phaxio, and therefore a YU Grad :)
Hey guys,

I would love have your API on Mashape! We have a lot of queries for signature APIs
AP Calculus isn't a good example of the "teach to the test" problem. Most elementary/middle and even high school tests aren't nearly as good as AP tests, and most subjects aren't best taught through rote - the best way to learn US history is NOT to be quizzed repeatedly on which year the Missouri Compromise was passed or how many men died at Sharpsburg.

The problem that "teach to the test" introduces is that students focus on factoids and identifying the correct answer in multiple choice, but in the real world (or in college), I'm less likely to have to pick WW2 generals out of a lineup and more like to need to come up with a few paragraphs on what caused it or how it was won or something. Now AP tests do (at least partially) solve for this with their free response and short answer sections, but Standards of Learning (or other state tests) may not.
Juggling Cloud Data On and Offline
I can't speak specifically to mathematical problems, but in my experience, there are two main ways to improve problem solving skills in general:

1. Practice.

2. Work on developing a better understanding of the problems you're solving. For example, if you are designing a website and all you do is memorize an html/css layout from a tutorial, then you won't be able to solve problems that develop because you won't understand why certain properties behave the way they do.

Therefore, it's important to spend a lot of time figuring out why things work they way they do because by understanding those foundations, you have the material you need to solve problems.
Build something.

I can never really learn just by reading docs, books, etc.

If you want to learn XYZ programming language, write an app in that language. In order to get that app built, you'll need to learn whatever is necessary to use the language.
That's what Intents are for. You can have intents that can talk between different applications in a standard format.

Security is just an excuse for not wanting to try and enable this.
You need to simultaneously level your creativity and pure reasoning skills.

The first and most obvious thing is to level your math - checkout the offerings on coursera. If you have never done higher math, there is a certain type of student (often quite mathematically gifted) that require the ground up approach higher math takes, I'd highly recommend a 100 page book called a concise introduction to pure mathematics by liebeck. This will teach you the mathematical foundations of logic and remember, I often say computer programming is convincing a computer to do something.

Writing and especially debugging code is often abstracted as having a generative model for computing in your head (playing computer in your head to predict what will happen). You're looking at this interface or problem and you are trying to find an efficient solution under different paths through a solution space, until you have closed that space with a provably efficient solution. This involves following out chains of reasoning - if this happens, that will happen and if this and that and the other thing happens, the computer will respond this way and so forth.

For that training, I would recommend learning to play go (the game, not the language) it operates in a binary space and teaches you to run out chains of reasoning.
I keep seeing articles about Computer Science being a boy's club with a "No Girls Allowed" sign out front. I have not seen this. My experience was that Computer Science was filled at my College with introverted guys that played video games and did their CS homework. Most of the time, they didn't even interact with themselves.

The real problem is not there are not enough WOMEN graduates... there just aren't enough graduates PERIOD. The cool kids in high school are not going to hackathons on the weekend, they haven't decided to stop ridiculing the "nerds", so we are in this state.

On a side note: I am not sure how these women talked about in this article are going to fair in the business world if a few comp sci nerds scare them away from their career aspirations. My experience shows that in business being weak-willed will get you no where fast.

I apologize for this rant, but I am just getting tired of these articles that place bias on gender. Guess what? Business doesn't care if you are black, blue, red, man, woman, neuter, etc. If you bring value, you are valuable.
Exaggeration to make a point. A worthy point, although one I'm not entirely in agreement with. I enjoy the "lifecasts" of others in some respects because otherwise I wouldn't know anything about what they're up to. I'm lucky if I can have a meaningful, real-world conversation with a single-digit handful of folks over the course of a week. Dozens? Hundreds? No way. But if I can see them post a joke or a beautiful photo or just a kvetch about a bad day, I have a connection with them that I simply wouldn't have otherwise. Yes, it can get absurd. Yes, sex check-ins might be in vogue at some point. But we don't have to throw the baby out because the bathwater has gotten quite murky.
(P.S. That came out a bit too hard on the original author. I really enjoyed the read, thanks!)
I don't mind manually entering the chosen promotion. (I've seen someone promote to a knight once, but only because he was being a jackass. Promoting to Queen would have been checkmate.)