skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> on the African savanna, where humans evolved

Um... answer's right there. Indeed this was the case on the African savannah, pre-agriculture.

We're no longer living in that environment. In the 21st century it's trivial to get sufficient calories, vitamins, and a balanced diet without eating meat.

Other points about our environment: (1) Relative to the African savannah, most of us burn many fewer calories per day. Fat asses in front of a computer instead of chasing down antelope, yanno. (2) We live 3x as long now, so our health concerns are different. That high-calorie blob of fat is tasty because it meant not freezing to death at age 16 and hence those taste buds were strongly selected for. Today we don't have that concern, and all those fat blobs may mean living to 60 instead of 80.

The survival needs of proto-humans on the savannah 100kya are not a very good guide to nutrition and health in the 21st century.
Very neat ideas here. I love the idea of helping Rdio choose what to play next by this combination of your recent plays combined popularity as defined by other users.

I also appreciate that many of the UI changes for these features are very subtle.

I just wonder how many users would actually find these features useful. I had to explain the concept of the "Collection" of a few people recently, which scared me since it's one of Rdio's core features!
EN (which powers the Rdio create station feature that rolled out recently) has similarity data and popularity data for songs & artists natively.

Popularity of a single song: http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/song/search?api_key=FIL...

List of songs by an artist ordered by popularity

http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/song/search?api_key=FIL...

Since we have Rdio in our Rosetta ID space, you can natively use Rdio IDs and get them back in your calls:

http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/song/search?api_key=FIL...
Music listening is completely subjective based on the smallest of changes within any given moment. Sure, the ideas of play strength/stars/constant radio/genre/BPM all helps in culling a mood, but it will never go all the way (without some sort of brain connection device).

I may create a playlist one day based upon a certain artist (with similar artists in the mix) however the next day I may want to listen to something a bit heavier, making those playlists irrelevant no matter how far I've drilled down my preference list.

While Play Strength is a good concept, it's still just a feature that can become just as underused or overused as a star count.

Instead of focusing on how 'perfectly-automatic' we can make a playlist based on features such as genre, BPM & play strength, we should be focusing on tools that help better understand our moods, the environment around us & the energy and vibes we intend to create from the music itself. The Effect > The Cause.
Source for the following: personal recollection from when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. I had a part time job as a systems programmer/admin at CITHEP (Caltech High Energy Physics), mostly dealing with their VAX-11/780, at the time that Wolfram was using that machine to develop the predecessor or Mathematica.

Wolfram and Chris Cole started developing a symbolic math system, which they named Symbolic Manipulation Program (SMP), when they found that Macsyma was unable to handle the computational needs for their physics research. For problems that they considered to be medium problems, Macsyma could do the work, but it was very slow. For problems that they considered to be large problems, Macsyma ran out of memory. Thus, they needed something more efficient in both time and space.

Wolfram and Cole planned on writing in C. They asked researchers in the symbolic computation community about this, and were told that it was a terrible idea. C was too low level. To do a high level system like a symbolic algebra system, you had to work at a much higher level. Using anything less than Lisp pretty much guaranteed your project would take forever.

Wolfram and Cole decided on C anyway. (BTW, C at CITHEP was not quite standard C. Norman Wilson had hacked the compiler to handle float and double expressions the same way FORTRAN handled them, making C almost as good as FORTRAN for numerical work, and C had mostly taken over from FORTRAN for physics computation there).

I recall seeing the factor of 100 number, or something like that, in one of the first public presentations of SMP. On the research problems that Wolfram and Cole considered to be medium sized, SMP was beating the Lisp-based systems by around a factor of 100.
Interesting! Most things I tried cannot be introspected though (e.g. DSolve, LaplaceTransform) and it's of course a far cry from a commented source file or notebook. Still, more than I thought was possible with Mathematica.
I agree, I'm more interested in this innovative design than the debate itself.

It gets me thinking as well, like what if people for and against the issue could vote up comments independently. So you get the the agreed talking points on both sides of the issue facing off against each other.
Flashing lights are much more visible, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is that you can drive the LED much harder and run the light for longer if it's flashing. Peripheral vision is much more sensitive to flashing lights than solid lights, because we're evolved to be more sensitive to fast-moving objects.

Movement is another key reason for flashing lights - motorists have a great deal of difficulty in accurately judging the speed of cyclists, who are travelling more slowly than them and at a much broader range of speeds. Flashing lights make it much easier to judge speed and distance, which is why the FIA require flashing rear lights to be used on the rear of Formula 1 racing cars in wet weather conditions.

As another commenter stated, bicycle lights flash at the wrong frequency to trigger photosensitive epilepsy.
The 20-Minute Exercise To Eradicate Negative Thinking
It'd be pretty awesome if this happened to the Facebook user list.
It reminds me of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011013
Amazing and unreal anamorphic illusions
Windows 8 Store Downloads Beat The Mac Store
Doesn't solve the problem. Suppose I have three kids, then get immortalized and sterilized. Each of my kids does the same...
Because it is an alert. I need it to fade in and then disappear. I mean I guess I could build it but was wondering if there is a complete library out there to handle the alerting and all the options a modern notification library has.
One thing I love about Twilio is that it's now been around a while (at least by startup terms) but yet there's still so many opportunities for cool and simple applications like this to be built that get me excited.
Just curious - When you mentioned payment over phone, do you mean via SMS? I'm not familiar with that 4-digit MMYY pattern, I've always been prompted for month & year as separate fields.
The standard demonym for Damascus is "Damascene."
Uh, where's WebRTC?
Can you believe that cops get paid more than developers in SF?
I'd rather deal with resetting OATH 2-factor tokens, than rely on proprietary apps like duo or authy, or rely on the security of mobile networks (for SMS). That complication is an unavoidable consequence of not relying on trusted third parties (like authy or duo), right? Apps like those also encourage fracturing of the 2-factor ecosystem, rather than relying on a single standard.

I realize that corporations with lots of employees to support see things differently, and centralized 2-factor proxy in that environment makes more sense.

The only problem I have with google authenticator is that it's barely maintained. Even obvious features like rearranging order of accounts, haven't been implemented.
http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/issues/list?ca...

Although they could add some export functionality, that would be a problem, now that I think about it, because anyone with even brief access to your phone could export all the OATH seeds to their phone.
What else do you want said? Regulate facebook?

Yes, they're scummy. But they didn't force you to put your personal info or photos on there. Don't want the internet to know something? Don't post it on facebook.
I care about my privacy to an extent, and in my experience, Facebook's privacy tools give me more control over my privacy than any other product on the internet (except email, perhaps). To assert that Facebook users must simply not care about their privacy is to be blind to the possibility that most users are comfortable with the controls Facebook has provided.
Google's umbrella.
Ha! Nice punishment. Thanks man.

I actually joke about it sometimes but it is really messing things up for legitimate people.

The fact we do not have other renowned stories makes the spam one stand out so much.
Their competition looks even less stellar when you see that amazon just dropped their storage prices by 25%
Can GTD and Pomodoro Work Hand in Hand?
It's all about optimizing recommendations.
If you just have a star or not starred. There's a chance the service will recommend a song you will likely hate (now you could be clever here and factor in skips).
So now we have Hate, Love, Unrated. This works except for your OCD users will want to rate everything. And the more ratings you have, the better your recommendations will be.
Maybe, but I imagine someone like Musk would be pretty good with rhetoric and knows if he utters the wrong things at a press conference it could lead to disastrous results for his companies. He's just being diplomatic because it pays to be diplomatic.
It's great that Alfred got a window manager. I've been looking into so many that I've forgotten their number and names. But for the last couple of months I've been using Slate[1] and it does everything I needed -- actually I'd love to have a restore initial size action, but I can live without it for now.

[1]: https://github.com/jigish/slate
Good article. I was actually working on my own demo[1] for recorder.js, though it's a bit out of date now. It's a tiny but impressive little library.

Worth noting that, besides exporting to a WAV and adding the object URL to an <audio> tag, recorder.js will also (using the getBuffer method) let you use the buffers directly as an actual Web Audio API source. This lets you do further processing during playback on the recorded audio.

I'm hoping by the time that I finish my silly little app (a loop box that you can add effects to, Reggie Watts[2]-style, using recorder.js and the wonderful effects library Tuna[3]), web audio recording in Chrome will be enabled out of the box on stable.

[1] https://github.com/thomasboyt/web-audio-recording-demo

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=344OpaQCAQI

[3] https://github.com/Dinahmoe/tuna
Lamar Smith, Global Warming Skeptic, Set To Chair House Science Committee
Does anyone else have a bad taste in their mouth from Google App Engine and as such is wary of using Google services over Amazon?

It is probably irrational since App Engine has come a long way but I remember how Google generally treated their customers early on who were trying to adopt to their platform.
The author's proposed solution is to give users the illusion of control, by adding a set of radio buttons to the settings dialog which claim to limit how "other people" can use a post. But the very strictest option is today's default, which people are protesting for being too permissive!

What people are actually asking for is a way to forbid Facebook itself from using or copying a post, which any technically- or legally-minded reader would interpret as forbidding Facebook from storing posts at all. Obviously most users don't actually want their account and posts to be deleted, but they're asking for just that, and become angry when Facebook does not comply.

If you are truly upset that a company somewhere is making money by hosting a service that you post your private life to, there are a couple simple solutions:

1) Find some registered non-profit with blog hosting (does this even exist?), and only post there.

2) Host your own site, set a password so only your friends can see it, and only post there.

3) Stop posting your private life online.
I meant payment over a phone call when the rep asks "what's the expiration on your card?" and I go "0814" etc.
Even after ES6 comes out, how long do you think it will take for node to adapt it? I'd love to finally be able to use python style generators.
That ?gwh= parameter should be removed from the URL. It will trigger the paywall for some people.
Well surely each of them is tagged with both 'cezanne' and 'watercolor', can't you just match search substrings to tags?
pressureNET is our open source barometer network for Android - some phones and tablets have barometers that enable us to build a global network. We're looking to use the data to improve short-term local weather prediction.

You can see all of the source code on github at http://github.com/JacobSheehy and of course you can download pressureNET on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.cumulonimbu...
The EC2 firewall is broken
Glad I could help. I can understand wanting to just have a new "from" address. Outlook/Hotmail does support that. That's the alias concept (https://account.live.com/AddAssocId?fl=nd). I think the Outlook upgrade flow might offer that as well, but I'm not sure.

One big missing feature is the ability to rename to an existing alias. That would have fixed your issue as well. I believe that this is "kind of" supported, but I've never tried it. You can delete an alias and then immediately rename to that address. No one else will be able to grab it for 6 months, but if you've added a bunch of aliases, you might be in a "no new alias" window, and I think in that case your rename action might fail (or might not; I'm not sure and unwilling to break my account trying. :)).
Why are you trying to gain reputation? I don't know who has 5k karma and who has 50, but I do know which posters tend to make thought-provoking comments worth paying attention to.

If you want to engage with the community, then just do so. Ask questions, respond to posts intelligently and politely and you'll find people responding in kind.
This seems kind of expensive, since I found a guy in Houston who put a new front on my broken iPhone 4 for $75.
It did for me, but no biggie -- just open the link in porn mode and everything is fixed.
https://twitter.com/gagepac/status/273891431817547777
> However, this anecdotal evidence says nothing about society as a whole.

I didn't bother bringing religion into it because that's a whole 'nother can of worms, but it has such a societal impact on what's deemed "acceptable" if not downright "expected" that we've illegalized the options available for people because of it. I've also read a few AskMeFi's in which husbands and wives have both asked the best course of direction for a babycrazy spouse that wouldn't take no for an answer once they sealed the deal, due either to religious belief or family pressure. Unfun stuff.
It can take a surprisingly long time before the effects of sleep deprivation are fully overcome. I'd suggest a week of sleeping 8 solid hours before ruling that out.
Crazy .. Love it!
It's true that raising a Series A is always difficult, but it's also true that there are far more seed dollars available than ever before. It seems to me like this has to cause some sort of shock to the ecosystem, even if the total volume of Series A dollars hasn't decreased.
I only use one, three, and five stars, and it determines the "mood" of the song. One star songs are slow and chill, Three star songs are upbeat, and five star songs you'll want to rock out to.
Web Developer 
EPB has an immediate opening for a Web Developer in its IT Division.<p>The Web Developer’s primary responsibilities are server-side development, support, and maintenance of current, pending, and future customer-facing online projects, as well as the technology stacks on which these applications depend.<p>The Individual Must:
•	Develop and support the underlying software that powers EPB’s customer-facing and internal applications and websites.
•	Collaborate on and develop technical architecture, third-party integration, and final implementation of EPB’s server-side, data-driven applications.
•	Understand project requirements and potential impact on existing applications and user interface/user experience.
•	Any other duties as assigned by supervisor.<p>Qualifications:
•	Must have a four year college degree from an accredited college in Computer Science or related field. (An equivalent combination of training and experience may be considered.)
Must have the ability to work within project-specific development environments and multiple programming languages.
The Web Developer will work on a team whose work consists of and depends on the following technologies and skills.<p>Programming Languages, Platforms, and Frameworks:
•	Python
•	Django
•	Ruby
•	Rails
•	Scala*
•	Haskell*
•	Objective-C and iOS*
•	Android and Java*
•	.NET and C#*
•	SQL / NoSQL
•	HTML/XHTML
•	Javascript & JSON
•	SOAP & XML
•	Shell scripts
I don't think that the government could tax it, as it's not money :)
I'm not a lawyer or anything even close, but if your income is not money, but something else (e.g. potatoes), would that be taxed?
I think it rhymes with 'squashy' or 'washy'.
Creating GDB readable coredumps from multithreaded/running application
Gmail "Mute" please
What about Hate, Like, Love and unrated?

I always liked the idea of being able to specifically call out those few liked tracks that are a just a little more special :)
You might have an interest in "The Uptime Project": http://www.uptimeprj.com/

The similarly-named "Uptimes Project" seems to have expired, leaving only its dried corpse on the web.
The False Promise Of Kickstarter
and Reason's rebuttal http://reason.com/blog/2012/11/28/kickstarter-its-cool-and-a...
I'm glad it is helpful!
Modern Language Wars
my thoughts exactly: http://jordanwallwork.co.uk/2012/11/my-most-anticipated-upco...
It is less the individuals they used and more the methods - the GOP leveraged old-boy contracts to IBM-style, tie-wearing consultant shops, and the Dems went for cloud infrastructure and open source.

It really highlights the old-world vs. new you see between the two parties.
There was also some discussion about this on one of the Apple mailing lists a few months ago, and it turns out there are major differences in how the two grep implementations on OS X interact with the buffer cache. In particular, empirical evidence suggests 10.6's GNU grep build caches its input, while 10.7+ BSD grep does not.

Incidentally, on OS X, you can commonly get another order of magnitude improvement over even GNU grep with Spotlight's index: use xargs to grep only through files that pass a looser mdfind "pre-screen".
ES6 may well be the death of Javascript. They've managed to turn Javascript into Java, which means web programming is about to turn into a buggy nightmare.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Chrome App Store just a fancy collection of links to various websites that also supports user comments and rating?

edit: nevermind, I somehow managed to confuse it with Chrome Web Store.
Scrubby.js
Unless it's been updated since you posted, it is. The newest alerts appear at the top of the stack for me.
100 Days of Rejection Therapy | The Fun Side of Startup
I'm tempted to go make fake HN accounts just so I can come back and up vote this more.

I can understand, if not personally endorse, the need for "apps" on smart phones where access to functionality like the accelerometer is not available through APIs used to create browser based apps, but Google's insistence on trying to push app stores in the browser will just lead to pointless balkanization of the open web.
Three words: networking, networking, networking.

You are going to get in the trenches with the next generation of self-selected future business leaders. These are the people that will form of the nucleus of your professional network for the next 30 years.
Always felt, that i am not the only one, who tries to avoid the last minute booking. But i do not know why. I thought first its money related, but for me it is not. And the more i think about, the more irrational it becomes. :-)
> self-interest

This term applies to both kinds of people. The first kind of people you listed are also self-interested.

The only difference is what kinds of things motivate them. The first kind are motivated by the pursuit of knowledge and/or sharing it with others. The second kind have a similar motivation, but include money into the mix.
Yeah, I meant for demo, first-impression purposes. I know it's just a easily-changed visual tic once a developer decides to implement it...but might as well entice as many people as people as possible.
Heh I probably should've gone with squashy or washy, but whenever I try to pick a rhyming word, I take the suffix syllable and prepend every letter in the alphabet until I come up with a word (aashi, bashi, cashi...). Kashi won... :\
The Internet Ended With A Cat Slideshow And No One Noticed
This would be hard to prove on really old Linux boxes since uptime rolled over after (just shy of) 500 days.
Interview with John McAfee on Belize corruption
And again on hardware, piping with message boxes in RTOS's is a normal facility. The language in the pipe is not defined, unlike un*x, though serialisation protocols may be. Examples over net layers might be Thrift and Protocol Buffers. A shift to serialisation protocols in hardware such as JESD204B is an example at the hardware level.

The post is useful as a learning device for thinking about design approaches. I wouldn't call it fundamentally object orientation though, any more than I would RS232.
This sounds perfect. I only saw 3 books listed - catered to pain management (not really an issue), but a lot of audio CDs. Any suggestion as to the best place to start?
> Cloudflare left an answer in the comments

They made a whole new post to address that — http://blog.cloudflare.com/choosing-a-two-factor-authenticat...
Simple Node.js/Express.js API for Twitters 1.1 OAuth API
interesting article. This assertion does go against the last 200 years or so (since the Grimm Brothers) of thought about the origins of the English language. I'm not an expert but I did major in linguistics and have studied the history of the english language in some depth.

For me, the strongest points this new proposal has are the syntactical features that scandinavian and modern english share. Syntactical features i.e. sentence structure being adopted from one language to another is very very rare and when it does occur it happens at a much slower rate. There are a couple week points in the theory though. #1 and the article admits this, Old English is West Germanic. #2 Chaucer's english is vastly different from Old English but I don't think anyone would say its a completely new Language, there are too many similarities, shared vocabularies, etc, this has until now led everyone to believe modern english discends from old english and was mingled up with scandinavian and then norman french.

Also, almost all the syntactical similarities the article shows have to do with the split verb that modern english doesn't have. In german "ich habe gestern lange gearbeitet" is in English literally : "I have yesterday long worked" but translated should be "I worked a long time yesterday" . I think they'd need to give support that the split verb didn't die out, (which is kind of suggested in the texts of chaucer and his predecessors), but rather was something that never existed b/c the "original" language, in this case scandinavian, never had them in the first place.
This article makes a lot of assumptions but it is hard to deny that silicon valley is a magnet for people who love technology.

It can be difficult to get a gauge on just how well the two parties are leveraging technology. My guess is they are both data mining their voter databases as well as doing some advanced machine learning. If that is the case I would guess recruiting people would be much easier out in the Bay Area.