skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I speak Japanese, and thought the Japanese quality wasn't bad at all - at least not in a distracting way. I don't speak Portuguese, and there was a bit more of an echo, but it still didn't sound distracting at all.

This also seems like something they can grow with over time - I bought a nice USB mic because I was doing many screencasts, and the quality was much better. I'm sure over time as they grow in translators, and those translators become more skilled, the quality will go up.

Seems like a huge win-win to me - translators making higher and higher quality translations more and more quickly. I could see this driving the efficiency of the market in a great way.

I do wonder how they'll ensure quality though - are the videos vetted by anyone, both for translation accuracy and sound quality? Are there reputations for the translators? Lots of approaches, just curious which they're taking.
Who else is going to do it?
No, there really isn't a need for all of them. SLF4J solves 100% of the problems 95% of the time. The problem is Apache's "Not invented here" syndrom. Commons-logging, Log4j, developers need to just abandon their projects and work on SLF4J.

BTW "architecture astronautism" great term. I <3 Java, it has a culture of overengineering, in which I do not participate.
It's worth noting that Ballmer has publicly laughed in the face of two of the biggest innovations in the last 5 years - the iPhone and the iPad. Now they're racing to catch up.

It seems like Ballmer, Sinofsky, and Gates pushed out people building products along those lines - J. Allard and co. only to pick up their vision later with Metro UI and Windows 8. (J. Allard and his team were behind Xbox, Zune, and Courier which basically gave a roadmap to Metro UI, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. J Allard also wrote a famous memo about internet connected apps back in 1994.)

Sinofsky and Ballmer also pushed out Ray Ozzie who was trying to make cloud computing a meaningful part of Microsoft's future.

Now that all the big vision is gone, where is Microsoft going to go? Continue to be a fast follower of Apple and Google?

Microsoft is a company without vision because it already achieved what it set out to - a computer on every desk. They won that battle. In the meantime, people's desks already have computers on them and are putting computers in their pockets, purses, and appliances. Microsoft was too busy with traditional computers to have a vision for mobile computing.

Maybe Microsoft should change their company goal to a computer in every pocket. Or a Microsoft app on every home screen. Or every computer to be powered by Windows. Or maybe a computer on every surface.

Without a big goal, Microsoft is going to be just another big tech company like IBM. It won't change the world again. It already did. Now it's just following everybody else.
"While many other countries recognize similar exceptions to copyright, only the United States and Israel fully recognize the concept of fair use."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationa...
This condom delivers an anti-HIV drug, prevents pregnancy, then disappears
Tiny suggestion that may not be pragmatic: since you folks advocate for Open Source Software, it'd be nice if the default tool for conducting interviews didn't rely on a closed VOIP protocol (Skype).

Maybe consider adding an option for SIP addresses on the next round of applications?
I really don't think it's related to his mental state. The possibility that he's being unjustly chased by local police is not at all mutually exclusive with the (seemingly pretty likely) possibility that he's mentally unwell.
Awesome post! Knowing how to use analytic suites is one thing, but knowing how to accurately interpret the data is another.
Marc Aurel:

If something in the exterior world makes you discontent, then it is not that object which troubles you, but rather your judgement of it; yet to blot out this judgement instantly is within your power. And if your dissatisfaction is based on the condition of your soul, who can prohibit you from correcting your views? Likewise, if you are discontent because you are not doing what seems reasonable to you, why not be active rather than discontent? "But something stronger than me is obstructing me." Still, do not be discontent; for the cause for your inaction is not within you. "But life has no meaning for me if this is not done." Well then, end your life, as calm as if you had succeeded; but don't forget to forgive your adversaries.

Words that strike me in their simplicity and depth every time I read them, but that's Marc Aurel for ya :)
> TDD isn't for everyone because not everyone is willing to make those kind of investments in code quality and maintainability.

One thing I've noticed is that code written to be testable tends to suffer from over-abstraction. Sadly, writing nice, compact, easy to read code is somewhat at odds with TDD in my experience.

I personally don't like that I have to make sacrifices to code simplicity just to make it testable. But perhaps I just suck at TDD. :-)
Using D3 for simple straightforward graphs (ie. where you just wanna throw some data in and get a generic graph out) is like using Rails for a simple 1 page static html site.
Another datapoint, since you seem to be seeing only low salaries in your circle: I only know a few developers who work in London, but they all make six figures.

So while it's no doubt true that there are lots of poorly paid positions, and evidently nearly enough developers willing to fill them, there are also plenty of good jobs to be had there.
Insanity: The Secret of Entrepreneurship
While that may be an issue at higher political levels (deaths make wars less popular), young people aren't put off by the risk of death, as armies have know for thousands of years. And given the description of the US military as being Americas social welfare system, is this for the greater good, or not?
Welding CO2 has to be very pure as a general rule in order to avoid contaminating the weld. The gas is used as a temporary shield to keep the weld clear of oxygen and other contaminants. Lubricant in this situation would be a disaster.

What you're thinking of is the CO2 used for propulsion in gas driven guns like BB's, pellets, and paint-balls. This gas often has synthetic oil mixed in to keep the moving parts of the guns lubricated.

TL;DR: Welding shop good, paint-ball shop bad.
In the spirit of DRY, here's a link to the a comment of mine, 200 pixels away on this very page, answering that exact question:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289

But I suppose I really should have refactored the comment out into a top-level comment and linked to it from both. :)
Cool, but I can't comprehend why something WordPress would be used for a site like this.
Facebook claims EU 'Right To Be Forgotten' would actually harm privacy
Amazon launches free A/B testing service
Probably caused by a number of factors:

- upcoming changes in tax laws that remove the incentive to move jobs overseas

- IP protection. Its finally sunk in that their Chinese suppliers feed any engineering info straight to the local government.

- increasing jingoism in the United States

- realization that their current line of creating "good American jobs" through their retail chain is falling apart.

- the shine from all of the "good jobs" they created with their NC data center is wearing off.

$100 million is really chump change for this kind of investment for a company like Apple. It's about what Cook made from his first year as Apple CEO.
The Mega prosecution was not spurious. The DoJ's discovery turned up a number of emails from Kim Schmitz and his team in which they openly admitted to compensating affiliates for uploading copyrighted material. Megaupload wasn't killed because of lax regulation over DMCA takedown regulations; it was killed because it was not, unlike Reddit or even Youtube, a bona fide clean-hands user-generated content exchange, but rather a piracy product wearing user-generated content clothing.
When the hoard plays nasty in Left for Dead, I can't say I can beat AI.
Cola is a really hard flavor to nail. Pretty much any cola you buy in stores that isn't Pepsi or Coke is almost certainly going to taste like those cola-bottle gummy candies rather than the flavor you associate with Coke. There are a lot of different spices and citrus oils in there, and getting the proportion just right is really tough (it doesn't help that Coca-Cola is literally the only company in the country allowed to use coca leaf as a flavoring. They have a special permit from the FDA to import it.)

I almost always prefer drinking my own home-made soda to store-bought stuff, but I've given up completely on trying to formulate a recipe for a cola that tastes even remotely like people think cola should.

If you're deadset on making cola with a SodaStream, I'd go to a commercial restaurant distributor and get your hands on a box of real Coke or Diet Coke syrup.
> Sounds like implicit intimidation. I think that if there were claims that he threatened violence, it would have been quoted in the article.

This confuses me a bit. I would personally put "implicit intimidation" under the category of "threatened violence", and it seems that the state agreed.
Lockpicking kit and a book about it? Not quite computer-hacking, but still very related.
I'm all for exploration and self discovery or whatnot, but we're talking about here is effective use of resources. My perspective of your opinion is you feel that PhDs should keep fitting into the spots where they are requested by big corporations, to develop their products that require high technology and expertise to be done quickly and cheaply, because everything else is just a solved problem that an expert would be wasting his time on.

My counter is that these things that we take for granted are not "solved problems" and innovation in this space is the most fundamental and disrupting innovation one can engage in, and increasingly the press would turn the public's eye away from this fact since obviously those who control the aggregation of news can control what a large number of people think about different topics. But perhaps you already knew that and find change at this level and its consequences too scary to contemplate.
Okay, that kinda leaves Israel since I'd never move to the US :P Thanks!
Interestingly, I've been getting closer to wanting something like this. The biggest reduction on customer support we've been able to do so far is short screencasts explaining features quickly and clearly.

But as Zenbox gets more and more international customers, this works less and less - we get emails asking for support in several different languages pretty frequently now. I'll probably look into Dubjoy, and hope it'll have the same customer-support-reducing effect as the English ones.

Are the prices standard across all videos though? Most of my videos are ~30-90s long. And although every time someone on our team answers an support email it costs us real money, we'll have to be very careful about which we translate, and into which languages, or else we'll easily spend several thousand dollars.

Another question - are you guys planning on providing any player chrome, like Vidyard, allowing users to select the language? Otherwise I'll have to figure out how to present the right language to users, which'll be a bit of a pain.
The Commerce Department.
T-Mobile to sell Apple products in 2013
> Larson-Green is best known as a driving force behind the new Windows 8 UI and, prior to that, the Office ribbon bar.

How can I dislike this woman so strongly when I've never met her?
I thought it was very odd that Google inserted this paragraph in the beginning of a feature announcement blog post. I think it only reaffirms the inferiority complex of G+ by explicitly explaining that they are indeed a vibrant community.
>It's worth noting that Ballmer has publicly laughed in the face of two of the biggest innovations in the last 5 years - the iPhone and the iPad. Now they're racing to catch up.

Copy pasting from one of my previous comments.

I'm tired of these kinds of statements. The golden rule is that companies' employee publicly have to put down their competitors' new strategies. Imagine if Balmer said the iPad is great it's going to kill us, or if Jobs said 7" tablets are good but we'll make only in two years, so wait for us to make it. Or even Andy Rubin saying that Android UI is laggy compared to iOS, fix coming in 18 months. All of them(except maybe Jobs) would be summarily fired or atleast will be forced to recant their statements immediately on threat of being fired. It's almost part of their job to publicly mock their competitors, or their shareholders will dump the stock.

Privately they could be pissing in their pants about their competition, but you almost never hear about that except after maybe 5 years from unnamed sources. Care to think for a moment why?

The more puzzling thing to me is, why do so many otherwise smart people actually think that these people publicly say what they really believe and really believe what they publicly say?
The United States (code) is on GitHub
The most abused part of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Section 13, was repealed in August. Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth, author of the repeal bill, said this at the time:

"The current human rights code allows too many frivolous cases to proceed against citizens, when the Criminal Code already covers hate speech that could generate harm against an individual or group.

Acts of hate speech are serious crimes that should be investigated by police officers, not civil servants, he said, and the cases should be handled by "real judges and real lawyers," instead of a quasi-judicial body such as the human rights commission."

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/07/tories-repeal-sectio...
Is Stephen Colbert running for the U.S. Senate?
Good.

They add no value whatsoever.
How to Successfully Navigate an Independent Career
Not heard of that before, thanks for the link - interesting problem!
slf4j is a facade. It does not do much alone.

logback / log4j2 are 2 implementations of the slf4j facade. log4j2 is a community driven project and it is maintained with Apache License 2.0. It addresses some issues of logback. If you run into this issues in production, you can switch to log4j2, given that you are using slf4j (which is the recommendation).

commons-logging is pretty dead, and nobody makes a deal about it. It has not been updated for around 5 yrs.

You clearly need to understand the difference between slf4j and logback/log4j2. And you should learn more about what the Apache Software Foundation is doing. I consider it better not to trust a single company when it comes to important things. It has often proven in the past.
Great post...thanks. Will check it out :)
They compared Diet Coke Mix with Diet Coke. It's a fair comparison. (and I agree - the soda stream mixes I've had have all been pretty awful)
Steam for Linux Mailing List
slf4j is not a logging framework.
There are two more of them that I know of:

CS 101 - https://www.coursera.org/course/cs101
Compilers - https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers

I will check again later tonight and see if there are more I will add them to the list at http://www.class-central.com/courses/selfpaced
Tim Cook's Freshman Year
Yeah when we do have seltzer at home, I'll drink about 2 liters of it per day.
The guy just seems overly-enamoured with novelty to me; and worse, he sees it as a moral virtue to be such.
You're right. You do sound like a copyright hawk.

Now. Why is the first point about the size of the industry relevant? Unless you're talking about their ability to bribe...I'm sorry..."lobby" Congress to pass the laws they like? That shouldn't happen anyway, regardless of their size. Laws should be passed on common sense and what's good for the people at large, not based on how big is your bank account.

What is dubious about his argument about copyright? First off, copyright is not "property", and shouldn't be treated as property. It's more like a permit. The government allows you to use a certain idea for a "limited time period" as it says in the Constitution. Unfortunately, because of the bribing..sorry, again, I meant lobbying...the "limited time period" turned from 14 years to almost 10x more. That doesn't sound limited at all to me. Copyright was meant as an "incentive" system - not as a welfare system.

Ideas can and should be reused. Whoever gets something copyright, most definitely got "inspired" or copied parts of someone else' ideas. That's why there isn't really something like "intellectual property", because nobody owns an idea 100%. And since you used someone else' ideas, you have to get paid for whatever you added only for a limited period of time, and then allow others to benefit from it, too, and expand the public knowledge. The whole point of the copyright system was to benefit the "public". It doesn't say "the creators" in the Constitution.

The fact that you dismiss DJing and remixing so easily shows that you have zero understanding about why fair use even exists in the first place. I suggest going through these, and hopefully it will change your mind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83lhAlmp5vY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyf_0SMAsFA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg

And here's a law professor discussing some of my points above such as why copyright is not real property:

http://surprisinglyfree.com/2012/12/04/tom-bell/
Could newspapers actively allow search engines etc. to quote them? I am thinking of heise when I say this, one of the few utterly "good guys" where "we won't sue, you can trust us" would actually work.

Or would this law mean the state attorney can simply sue Google et al, regardless of the stance of the supposed victim?
Don't read into it much. Google announces its daily Android activations regularly and it has the largest smartphone share in the world.

Facebook does that too.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/facebook-announces-monthly-...

Remember when people knock Google for not announcing Google+ numbers? They are saying Google is announcing numbers because they are bad.
Maybe so, but the FBI still haven't given my friend his work back.
Hackers use government jobs site to steal your data
I addressed the latter point downthread: it's not just that the memo overshot the RSC membership and the tolerances of the Content industry, but that it did so to no good effect: if every reform in the memo had been adopted (at huge cost politically), the content industry would still be able to threaten infringers with bankruptcy and starting a content-rich consumer Internet company would still be fraught.

On the former point, about DJs: making it simpler for DJs to sell music with rights-encumbered samples isn't going to fundamentally change the economics of either the content industry or the consumer Internet. Fair use for DJs is an issue that applies to a subculture of a subculture of a subculture, and even more weirdly, is an issue that has mostly been metabolized by that subsubsubculture: Girl Talk, for instance, wasn't going to make a lot of money selling his currently non-salable tracks, because almost nobody makes money selling recorded music anymore.
Sure, and I would welcome that. But I think smaller publishers (including bloggers) might have problems, too. The law would apply to their blogs as well, they would have to figure out how to allow Google and others to still quote them. It might be so complicated that it would cause a lot of blogs to shut down.

Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that it would make it too costly to experiment and would kill small publishers.
Tim Cook on Creativity
No disrespect to soldiers? Seen the Abu Ghraib photos? It isn't the fact it was soldiers so much as the fact the people keep doing things like that, year in year out. The problem as I see it is that people will make the machines better at committing atrocities.
FYI, that "recommended dose" of eight glasses a day is mythical. No scientific basis whatsoever. If you aren't thirsty, you're drinking the right amount of water.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp
It would be interesting to see an official statistic from the big papers where they get their traffic from. I get my news by surfing directly to their homepages. I think I read somewhere that they get most of their hits through the google search although I cant really belive that.
I would venture to say that the vast majority of piracy on megaupload was done without the knowledge of the people running the site. And it's obvious that some of the affiliate payments are going to go to people breaking the law on any site, unless you run background checks on your affiliates.

Megaupload may have been tuned toward being a 'piracy product' but that does not mean it was anything other than user-generated piracy.
Isn't this a case for the internet bat signal? I must admit I still haven't included it on my sites, mostly because last time I looked they only provided JavaScript hooks making my site vulnerable to their site being hacked. Perhaps they have an API by now?
I totally understand what you mean.

I've gone to great lengths to determine what kind of architecture is needed to truly support TDD and what I've come to realize is that it's not so much about over-abstraction that is the problem, it's that testable code is pluggable, which is mostly at odds with how systems are designed.

For example, standard MVC apps tend to tie models to an ORM in some way shape or form. Think Rails and ActiveRecord and you'll understand what I mean. This makes writing a simple crud app fast, but testing it sucks because you have 2 things tied together - your actual data models and your database layer. Funny that nobody would ever do that with the filesystem, but it's super common with the database.

To make your models clean and easy to test, you need to pull out the ORM bit into something more pluggable.

The same principle applies to writing testable biz logic. A lot of times people don't know where to put it so it ends up in the View, Controller, or Model. All of which are the wrong place usually. Testing that code becomes not awesome because you then have to write a test against what the view outputs, the controller does, or possibly what the model is doing (usually by touching the database).

The answer I've found is to pull your business logic into a separate container that can be tested easily apart from any MVC structure.

None of this means you need to over-abstract anything. It just means you have to figure out the right abstractions and structure for the right layers. None of this is by any means obvious at first.

P.S. I'm working on an architecture framework that simplifies a lot of this to make doing TDD much easier.
log4j1 was the beginning. Then one of the team left and build logback. The log4j2 team wants a logging framework which is build in "the apache way" and under "apache license". The project has grown fantastically and you can expect some cool features in future.

Still logback is a great framework. The log4j2 team learned of it and I think it is also in the other direction.

My (personal) recommendation is you use slf4j and chose a logging framework to your taste. You might choose based on a specific feature, on issue which has not been resolved in the other framework, on the license or how easily you can contribute.

That said, the log4j2 project is pretty active.
500 Startups wiki timeline
Kicksend 3.0 Sets Itself Apart in Photo Sharing
The question I don't know how to answer:

Am I happy because I enjoy my current my current life, or am I convincing myself that I am happy because I don't want to take chances?
The only kitchen product that requires an end user license agreement: http://www.sodastreamusa.com/faq.aspx#b11