skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who want to run their own copy of this, here's how to do it:

1. Find a Mac-based server (a co-located Mac Mini will be fine)

2. Run `say -o output.wav $TEXT` to generate the voice

3. Compress the WAVE file with `lame` or the system builtin `afconvert` to get the MP3 file.

`say` command supports multiple languages and dialects, but you'll have to install the necessary voice engines in OS X 10.8. Man page for `say` can be found here http://pastebin.com/nWbvJAAX

The complete list of voices/languages supported so far:

* English (Australia): 2 voices

* English (India): 1 voice

* English (Ireland): 1 voice

* English (Scottish): 1 voice

* English (South Africa): 1 voice

* English (UK): 3 voices

* English (US - Female): 7 voices

* English (US - Male): 6 voices

* English (US - Novelty): 14 voices

* Arabic (Saudi Arabia): 1 voice

* Chinese (China): 1 voice

* Chinese (HK): 1 voice

* Chinese (Taiwan): 1 voice

* Czech: 1 voice

* Danish: 1 voice

* Dutch (Belgium): 1 voice

* Dutch (Netherlands): 2 voices

* Finnish: 1 voice

* French (Canada): 2 voices

* French (France): 4 voices

* German (Germany): 3 voices

* Greek: 2 voices

* Hindi: 1 voice

* Hungarian: 1 voice

* Indonesian: 1 voice

* Italian: 3 voices

* Japanese: 1 voice

* Korean: 2 voices

* Norwegian Bokmal: 1 voice

* Polish: 1 voice

* Portuguese (Brazil): 1 voice

* Portuguese (Portugal): 1 voice

* Romanian: 1 voice

* Russia: 1 voice

* Slovak: 1 voice

* Spanish (Mexico): 2 voices

* Spanish (Spain): 2 voices

* Swedish: 2 voices

* Thai: 1 voice

* Turkish: 1 voice
following your reasoning, Linus was a kernel hacker, he had no idea about other fields of computer science like distributed revision control systems, right? Good luck with your argument.

The reality is that Linus is good at kernels and DRCS for the same reason and is not mere "knowledge", and for the same reason you should pay attention when he talks about software in general.
Zero calories/carbs is why I drink Redbull instead of the Starbucks stuff.

Japan has plain cold coffee, it's harder to find that here, otherwise I'd be happy to drink it.
And the old "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes"

(and the modern version of that calculation, a station wagon fill of microsd cards, is calculated at 500gig per second here: http://www.dansdata.com/gz105.htm )
I'm not sure this concept is very new, last year, Danny Choo made a relatively detailed article[1] about Clone Factory, offering a similar service for about three times the price of the large version.

[1]:http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26119/Human+Cloning+in+Japa...
Yes I've seen that but I belive it's more suitable for high volume data, say, tens of terabytes or more. As the prices are high for something like my personal backup.
The maker-bot style, plastic printers are not the only printers out there. For example, I know that the current Z-Corp printers create figures out of a sort of powder and literally use inkjet ink to put the full spectrum of color you would expect right into the surface of the model as it is made (it can get to be a millimeter or so deep, so it doesn't just scratch off). Although you do have to coat it in a lacquer/sealant to strengthen the model post-print. I wonder how the Japanese machine accomplishes this, or if it even needs to?

My experience comes from some work I did for a startup that has such a machine, and uses it for similar purposes (human figures). They've got a decent page showing off their examples: http://www.actionfigurelabs.com/figure-gallery
The charges are not related to The Pirate Bay, it seems: “Gottfrid was arrested under suspicion of being involved in a second hacking case along with accusations of four instances of serious fraud and four attempted frauds.”
How a Man Found Out He Has Testicular Cancer From Taking a Pregnancy Test
Most OSS contributors work for free: if you remove both money and vanity, what remains as motivator?
>I guess great minds think alike, because I'll be jumping ship for web development on Linux in short order.

That's great. It's really not as painful a transition as I feared it might be. It's actually pretty astonishing how far the various linux desktop environments have come as far as usability.
> Excellent and dead easy to use. Great work on making it simple.

The acronym should reflect this ease of use for proper pronunciation. How about Text Intelligently To Speech?
> I wonder how long it will be before there's an article that states: "World to lose $15 trillion as AI and automation replace most humans."

Not very long.

We are way pass the points on a bell-shaped curve were an increase in efficiency (due to technological progress, and accumulation of knowledge) produces an increase in overall job numbers.

We are now somewhere over the hump, and are at a point were for every job efficiency creates, it removes 2-5 overall jobs.

Full employment is no longer sustainable.
It is only found on iPads.
And next move: send the worst candidates to strong competitors.
Unit Testing Tools Use is Up in 2012
New Version of Marco Civil Threatens Freedom of Expression in Brazil
MTV Explains why they don't play music videos anymore
I think every OS has lots of crap burden. On linux you have complicated unnecesary things geeks will defend to death. On OS X I recently tried to install octave. How I did it:

Step 1: Create an Apple Store account. Credit cards aren't so common here because bank transfers are basicly free and you automaticly get a debit card from your bank that is universally accepted. If you try to create an account directly you will fail if you don't have a credit card. You need to "purchase" a free App to be able to create an account without credit card information.

Step 2: Download Xcode and skim the licence agreement for 10 minutes so you don't sell your organs to Apple

Step 3: Find the Console Development Tools installation somewhere hidden in the options of xcode

Step 4: Install macports

Step 5: Install octave with macports, this encompasses half an gentoo installation. Things already present on the system like the llvm from xcode get rebuild. This takes hours.
Yes, I agree, terrible headline.

However, I've never before seen a petition like this on the White House Petitions site, so when they get the number of supporters, the White House is obligated to "respond". That's where it could get interesting. The problem is, they won't actually respond. They'll do what they always do with all the other petitions that make them look bad: they'll sidestep the issue, or say why it violates their terms of the Petitions site. It'll never get answered.
I've been a fan of the clean install and it is generally a lot better, but you'll often need to install third party drivers which will then try to install crapware at the same time.
I think you are talking about a different thing than I do. I have nothing against demanding some rigour in reasoning very early on in mathematics courses, what I am concerned about is the purely formal presentation of mathematical concepts, especially those that were first discovered by studying physical or geometrical situation and which naturally arise in such contexts. For example, is the formal epsilon-delta definition of a limit the best way to begin a calculus course? Yes, this is logically one of the basic building blocks of the theory, but what value does it have pedagogically for a beginning student? It is known that learning happens to a large degree via associating new concepts with ones already known, what can such a definition be associated with? This is carried out to extremes some times, I've seen introductory calculus books replacing sentences in natural language with formal-logic apparatus like quantifiers etc. and advertising it as some great pedagogical improvement.

Those are in my opinion excellent examples of courses developing intuition without sacrificing rigour:

http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-006-calculus-revisited-s...

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...

I also love the books by Richard Courant for how they manage to explain the concepts in crystal-clear English writing, present both the applications and the theory, building up the rigour gradually.
However, right now, the gp comment just finds them "lahking."
What you describe sounds like what Dell's "Project Sputnik" is aiming to do.

http://bartongeorge.net/2012/11/06/project-sputnik-profile-t...

Looks like they plan to launch something soon. Hope it turns out well.
So, I guess Bootstrap editors will be like Tetris to the game development world? Everyone and their uncle has to create one of those, as if it's some rite of passage.
Papa… Je veux un BigMac | Bleent
How a India govt fooling people with techology - Aakash tablet
A china made tablet running on Android is projected as next big thing in India
I don't that cubans have many 10Mbps connections.
Infographic: Unit Testing - The Advantages
Very true. Here in Japan I've been told my natural gestures when speaking enthusiastically are at risk of being overbearing, so I've had to learn to control them.
Wow, a dispassionate, logical analysis from a cybersecurity professional! What a refreshing change!
This is by design; when you set up a situation where everyone is a criminal, any time you decide you want to haul someone in or stick someone in jail, you'll have no trouble finding something they're guilty of.
4GB would fit a lot of hypertext. Now, if they could create a "teacher's" version with 16GB, you could have multicast multimedia sharing over wifi, which would enable classrooms to use video content with only a fraction of expense in Flash RAM.
Wingman app to find your closest Wingman for hitting on women together
I just recall the Wolfram article and I seem to think it was pretty handwavey as to what/how things get offloaded (to Mathematica specifically of course). But I will say that at least half the homework of my Calc 1-3 courses was spent well past the "understanding" stage and more into "getting fast enough to do it on an artificial, time limited test situation" and basically memorizing pages of identities that I quickly forgot because they so rarely came up in my physics courses. This was pretty much the case with almost every math class since about algebra 1 in middle school.

And in particular I would like to hold up Electricity and Magnetism 2. Calculating the momentum of a magnetic field, in all but the most trivial case, takes a full sheet of paper: being rows and rows of 8 inch long equations as you carry out the tedious work of canceling terms; moving things in and out of square roots; and multiplying large polynomials together. It's all basic algebra stuff you learn in high school but it's a slog to work through and so time consuming that you actually lose track of the big picture and end up with very little better understanding at the end.

As far as I know that's why things like tensor and bra-ket notation had to be invented in the first place. Without a compressed notation the ability to get a correct answer to any interesting problem became less a question of knowledge and more a question of probability of transcription/sign flip errors.

not that anybody teaches sophmores tensor notation.
> "I now have some very hard numbers that support the fact that users from all age groups love Windows 8! First, the download and purchase stats."

Correlation doesn't imply causation. It could be that people downloaded your app to distract themselves from the pain and frustration of using that operating system.
Due to the asymmetric nature of most end-user lines, 10Mbps of upload bandwidth seem far from modest. Around here you'd need a 100mbps (download) line, which is available but pricey, and as far as I know they're not even available in most of the world.

If you're talking about countries where this censorship is common, even a 10/1 line is probably not affordable by anyone except an elite.
++ to this.

Also bear in mind what future positions you might have available.

I remember about fifteen years back I was interviewing for somebody who could grow into a technical lead (they needed to come in as a developer and help build a team around them).

One of the people we talked to was completely unsuitable for that role - but was amazingly impressive in other ways ("I do Linux. Here's a phone number where you can dial up into my Linux box and play with the web server." In the mid-90's this was... unusual... for the average candidate).

Six months later we had a technical-support-growing-into-ops role. Guess who was first in line for that job.

As far as I am concerned saying 'thanks but no thanks' politely and quickly is all win. It makes the candidates keep some respect for you, helps the company reputation, overall saves time (IMHO) due to the people who repeatedly nag, ensures that you have good concrete well defined hiring criteria, etc.
So we should spend 100% of our lives being productive and contributing to the betterment of humankind, is the implication?

Maybe some people want to, you know, do mindless fun things in their free time.
App idea! Now listen to your tweets from timeline!
Surface and iPad mini: Keep or return?
That will never happen.

China is producing lots of consumer goods for American companies (and global markets), and China doesn't take criticism lightly, so if they get criticised, China will cut off trade.

There was an Anti-Counterfeit goods event at London with lots of big name execs from corporations there who were trying to stop counterfeit goods. Not one of them wanted to name the perpetrators, who was responsible.
I went online shopping this weekend for a laptop for Mrs. expralitemonk. With an open heart we considered Windows or Mac. On the Macbook web page I found: specs for each model, estimated battery life, and the price. On one page! For all models! http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo... Every Windows site I went to required multiple clicks just to get rudimentary information. If you want my money, please make buying your product easy.
Could this be adapted for African markets? How about a version with 2X the battery?
What happens when no one needs to work?
This is a nice one, however I'm still confounded by the lack of progress since bell labs made an online text to speech converter many years ago. Particularly, the notion that the interpretation of each sentence is idempotent is just wrong. Want to see what I mean? A human would not speak like the following; there should be differences in intonation, "emotion" (sounding bored, angry, excited, etc. that varies depending on the number of times "dogs" would be said), speed, and delay. In addition, you have to breathe at some point, and even the best audiobooks have some level of breath noise.

http://tts-api.com/tts.mp3?q=dogs.%20dogs.%20dogs.%20dogs.%2....
App.net isn't like other social media networks
Keep TX out of it, troll.
It's a chicken and egg problem. Hardware manufacturers won't provide documentation or drivers for Linux because there's not that big user base, and there's no big user base, because most hardware won't work with Linux... although, I have to find the first piece of hardware that didn't work with Ubuntu on bootup, but maybe it is just me because I buy hardware that after some investigation (googling for 10 minutes) I know will work with Linux. It's really easy.
I believe the "pre-rigorous" stage is basically referring to all mathematics before university.

>The emphasis is more on computation than on theory.

That's grade school mathematics in a nut shell.
Credit to manaskarekar for tracking down this link. I've posted it since I would love to see HN's opinions and thoughts about the long-term implications of rapid technological progress.
"Has Sergey Brin changed the way people use the internet?"

Let me Google that for you.
Should we watch TV?
This is exactly the type of education experience we should be optimizing as a society: self-study, in-depth, yet practical material geared toward leaving the student able to perform some service of value in the world.

I'm a huge fan of a broad liberal education, but many educational institutions have lost the plot. When a free PDF on the web can double your salary ability and a 50K education from the local university will leave you only in debt? The feedback loop for higher education is broken.

I'd love to see this integrated into something with more video material. In fact, if I had money for philanthropy, putting together a job-oriented free electronics course would be near the top of my list of things to do.

Side note: there are instructions for sending completed training material to the Navy to have them grade it. I wonder how many packages the Navy gets from students all over the world consuming this material and looking for a grade?
What prevents it is the non-existence of a contract. Twitter devs live at the mercy of Twitter Inc, which can and will alter the rules as it benefits them. You're not going to skirt the rules with a technicality.
Since i know about RCS and the aricle talks about it: It is mostly a pipe dream for operators, these services (file shharing, video calls, IM) already exist for much cheaper then what the telcos plan to charge.
This is all part of the IMS technologies that have not been taken up by the market for approx 7 years now...its a sad tale of too little, too late
The difference between Angry Birds and Curiosity is that Angry Birds is at least slightly enjoyable.
Women-Only Leadership - would it prevent war?
I don't like this cartoon
Another bucket of fuel to my pool of reasons to think the "Cloud" is misguided.

Last time in a Pycon conference in Beijing, 5/4 speeches were about new cloud offers (it was advertising actually). This makes no sense.

People should not do their stuff in free apps running on devices they don't really own, and these apps should not store that stuff in a cloud vaguely rented by the app maker.

Instead, people should use open tools, running on devices they own, storing things on some storage they own and control.

On my bed, I can use my tablet to browse pics I have taken with my phone, while listening to music I have ripped on my desktop long time ago. It seems necessary to be able to do so, but it is not necessary to hand over all your stuff to Apple or Google or Dropbox to do so. (And all your things should be right there even if you ISP is down.)

The obvious solution I used is a "local cloud" (just a samba server on a little Raspberry Pi actually). But on Android strangely only very few media players on devices acknowledge this need and let my slide pics, listen to music or watch video from the LAN. (I have no idea on iOS, I suppose it is even worse, do they have VLC on iOS?)

edit: clarify
Where are the voices from, and how are they licensed? Could I use the output from this for commercial purposes?
That's not how advertising companies work. When someone pays you money to advertise for them, they are extremely particular about how the message is delivered. Twitter can not promise its customers that its message will be delivered per their agreement if they aren't directly in control of the client.
It is not work I'm currently doing, but it is a data set I have access to which could be used for research into the topic :)

I guess sales numbers for a particular event is too connected to the popularity of the performer, which I presume would need a totally different data set to start predicting.

Sales outlets and their geographical locations are interesting however, thank you for your suggestions!

I still feel a bit in the dark when it comes to starting off though, do you have any suggestions on literature or tutorials to get things rolling? Any (programming) language works fine :)
How often, in the graph of commercial interactions, does the dissatisfied recruit become potential client?

I've had about a sixteen year industrial career now. Most of it spent in the web / internet space. I can think of six cases off the top of my head.

Two of those are probably causing major recruitment problems for particular companies - since the dissatisfied people are 'names' in a fairly narrow field, and are somewhat vocal about their experiences.

It happens a lot more than you think. I talked to a guy in NYC last week who was originally from the UK and we have people in SF and Cambridge UK among our common acquaintances. Six degrees gets really freaky quite quickly once you've been around a few years.

To pick an example from my own experience - I once went to do an interview after being told that it was a position that allowed telecommuting and was of a certain minimum salary. When I arrived it turns out neither of those was true. The recruitment agent had lied. Wasting a day of my time, and an afternoon of the companies.

I know this because the guy who was interviewing was somebody I hired at another company about five years previous to that. I had a lovely time listening to him call up the recruiting firm and rip them a new one. That firm no longer works for him, or for me, at any company we've worked at. I know of others that we have related this story too have shuffled that particular organisation to the bottom of the pile.

Everybody starts somewhere. Paying it forward pays off.
The relationship between htc and Apple may simply be better than between Samsung and Apple, or Google and Apple.
> Bits and pieces of this are already here. We need a Wozniak to find the best way to put them together and create the new pieces we need.

No Wozniak required. Aren't there already companies that sell Linux laptops that "just work?" Really, the big challenges are in organization, distribution, and marketing.

How about this?
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/zareason-ultralap-430...
I read the specs and tried to bring out the modern key parts with a focus on what I thought a developer should know or be aware of. The reason you don't see much written about this topic is the specs are not easy to read in relationship to each other. What do you suggest for syntax styling?
Forstall is an engineer, not a designer.

Are you chastising him for not recognizing the design of a clock of a railway half-a-world away?

That's pretty ignorant.
Russian does not work: http://tts-api.com/tts.mp3?q=%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%...
Obama did win Ohio...should we deny that fact just because Rove said it?
I didn't mean to imply malevolence, rather misaligned incentives. Their goal isn't to create a stable, long lasting company -- it's to flip it as quickly as possible and make themselves money.

This is important to keep in mind if your company uses them to accept payments.
DVD/Bluray typically use MPEG2- for the sake of discussion this is 'uncompressed' because studios don't make raw video data available. Many consumer videos are transcoded into a more compact MP4 format - of course you need a specialized device or a PC to watch MP4. Most media players nowadays can support mp4 decoding, however. It's not the same quality as mpeg2, but passable to the casual viewing audience, mp4 uses predictive motion encoding, spatial and temporal compression, and reduced chroma sampling sometimes. Modern video streaming services now all probably use moderate-complexity mpeg4 encoding, resulting in a lower bandwidth. (movies rented from Apple, amazon, netflix, etc). A 1.6 Gbyte mp4 file is decent 720p depending on the scene contents and length of the video, at a fixed bitrate.

edit: and it's worth noting that these small video files will typically strip the multi-channel audio and favor a remixed stereo-only sound track. saves more bytes.

edit: kudos to poster below for clarifying my half-baked explanation.
Because the poster will then, potentially, be facing libel charges. Regardless of the merits of the case potential risk of time / money / reputation is non-trivial.
Very true. I'm on "Superfast" broadband in the UK. That means 16Mbps down, 1.3Mbps up.
The only way to get 10Mbps up is to be on fibre-to-the-premises. And even then only if you live in one of the blessed areas.
VLC was available on the App Store for a very limited time. It was pulled over licensing issues:

http://obamapacman.com/2011/01/vicious-nokia-employee-gets-v...