skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OT, but I've seen this come up before and I wonder if HN could explain/justify this grammatical curiosity:

> "A gang were accused of selling weapons..."

"A gang" implies a singular entity (gang), but "were" is a pluralized use of was, as if "gang" was plural (as in, 'several gangs'). (I lack the vocabulary to properly articulate myself, since grammar is not my strong suit. I am probably not describing terms completely accurately). I've noticed this more and more in regard to singular forms of entities (typically compromised of many singular parts, such as corporations). For example: "Apple were..." or "Google have..." or "Microsoft are..." I notice that this seems to be more of a British English phenomenon.

My question is this: Why are people using what I will call pluralized modifiers on what I would consider singular nouns? What I would consider the "more correct" forms of the above examples are: "The designers at Apple were..." or "Google's board of directors have..." or "Employees of Microsoft are..."

Is this just a cultural clash between American and British grammatical conventions, or is there an elusive (to me) practical reason why one version is "better" than the other?

I apologize for thread jacking. Hopefully the more relevant comments will rise above this one.
But you'd have to get rid of the existing hum, which is, as the article states, a challenge even for recording professionals.
We use workflowy like this to manage all our projects, and it works great. I don't see any particular benefit to using twitter, though.
And you seem to be making a bad assumption about why an open source project might want to host downloads as well. Maybe you should check out my github profile? I have a handful of Safari extensions on there. They're open-source projects. But in order to actually install it into Safari, you need to have a Safari developer certificate (free, but still takes effort to acquire), load up the project in Safari's Extension Builder, and install it that way. It would be ridiculous of me to require people to do that just to use my extension, so I build the extension and upload the build product to my github project. This way anyone can download the built product and try it out (which is really just a codesigned xar archive of the project with a fancy extension). Meanwhile, the source is still open for all to see on the project.

Edit: I just remembered my HN name isn't my github name. https://github.com/kballard
When I say "in general" that means not so for every vendor.

That said, Apple's track record on this topic is not exactly stellar.
Subsidies.
That's saddening, I love Shankar's music and am always going to think of him as the greatest sitarist to ever live. RIP.
A genetic counselor quoted me ~10%. Any genetic counselors on HN?
I don't think it's quite as easy as mixing in some of the correct hum in to your recordings. The real trick is to eliminate the authentic hum (which reveals the recording to be altered) and then substituting the correct hum. Really you would need to have someone with decent mixing/audio engineering experience to get this right.
"...Shankar was born in April 7, 1920, in Benares, a northern Indian city famous for its temples to the Hindu god Vishnu..."

For someone who confuses Shiva (the destroyer) with Vishnu (the maintainer), one has to wonder how much truth there actually is in that article.

I for one am taking it with a grain of salt. Like most things in west that are about east, it is not the facts that are important, but how good they have dressed into what west expects them to be (as something originating from east).
Another approach, dub the inverse wave of the real hum over your recording, which should (in my limited understanding) cancel the hum out, leaving a humless recording for a fraudulent hum to be overlayed.
Gists are now wrongly named. For instance: https://gist.github.com/4260740 this sounds a bit weird that this gist is named "readme.md"
Interface type cannot be statically allocated on multiple property class-types
The language is simple, which is its main virtue. Problems are easy to solve and communicate. Most problems are already solved as well which is how you spend less time writing code and more time delivering functionality (or taking holidays).

Agree with type inference, but null pointers are fine (if you know what you are doing and use commons.lang validator). Don't really need lambda, but its coming anyway. Compile time evaluation - no thanks. Verbosity is solved with tooling.

I'm proficient with common lisp and scheme (ive even built my own scheme vm) and I'd rather use java over either to be honest because it is so hard to get anywhere with lisp variants and the only ide worth mentioning (slime/emacs) is unreliable and clunky. It's a ghetto.

I spent 2 months trying to build something in Haskell. Its fine for data processing tasks, math and comp Sci focussed stuff but for productive every day use, its a pain in the arse. It's also write only.

Enlightenment for me was discovering and writing a forth interpreter and compiler. Then discovering RPL on the HP48 series of calculators. Before that it was BBC BASIC (not to be confused with mere BASIC) and ARM assembly.
I hope you mean prefix not postfix. Postfix (or Reverse Polish Notation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation) is completely "unintuitive" for both mathematicians and laymen, and I wouldn't wanna see it in any school... maybe for speakers of RTL languages like arabic it looks more natural, but... no
I just meet a 25 year old guy, at the hospital whose leukemia had gone into remission using stem cells from his sister. His description of the whole process sounded seriously like science fiction to me.
Having a family member who is going through an experimental treatment at the moment, all I can say is, even if the outcomes (in reality) are hopeless, there are many families out there just grateful that options exist.
It always seems to be this time of year for musicians lately. James Brown was Xmas 2006. Etta James and Johnnie Otis were January 2012...
Nostalgia will return in the form of JS emulation...
They might like the book "Super Scratch Programming Adventure!" It walks through building several games in a comic-book format. I thought it was good.
I am not sure why exactly is this a big deal and even surprising. Apple's iOS sells on limited hardware and they do a release annually or lately semi-annually. On the other hand, there is a new worthy Android device coming out every two weeks from big shots like Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson to name a few. So it was only a matter of time before Android caught up with iOS and captured the market.
What now for North Korea?
When java turned up, we were all still writing c. C++ was still fairly unstable then. Microsoft's compiler was actually probably the best on the market and it was still a hunk of shit to the point that most people just did win32+c. On UNIX it was always C.
Why do you think creativity and curiosity require protection through insubordination and rebellion?
The American convention is simple: stick to the singular. British English convention can be more complex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Singulars_with_c...
It's just a cultural clash.

A number of words like army, company, crowd, fleet, government, majority, mess,
number, pack, and party may refer either to a single entity or the members of the set
composing it. If the latter meaning is intended, the word (though singular in form)
may be treated as if it were a plural, in that it may take a plural verb and be
replaced with a plural pronoun: the government are considering their
position (alternatively the government is considering its position). See synesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Singulars_with_c...
This image is lovely, but I could not use it in staging environments for certain clients: http://i.imgur.com/ZAD2Z.png
It's a quirk of British English. Collective nouns are often treated as if they were plural. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_Brit...
You're right: this is a British English construct and presumably allowed by the BBC style guide.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#section_2
It's unfortunate that a lot of people live outside of the US.
Gang is plural, so in the King's English 'a gang were accused' and of birds 'a flock were flying' I've noticed that in various US sources a 'gang' is singular even though it is composed of many individuals, sort of like a corporation is a singular noun reflecting a collection of possibly many people. One of the things that makes English fun.
In "British" English, a collective entity (such as a gang, or a company) is generally referred to using pluralized modifiers. It's a cultural clash, there's no practical reason behind it.
The general premise is that there is an arbitrary, recoverable signal which has been convolved with the data signal. The generating function for this signal is a matter of record if you have access to the utility logs, but difficult to obtain otherwise without being physically at the time and place where the effect occurred.

I strongly suspect that it can be compromised under both of the following conditions:

1. You take recording A, then you take recording B at a time and place which you want to assert that recording A took place at. You recover the thumbprint from recording B, suppress the thumbprint in recording A, then apply the thumbprint from B to A.

This is not a trivial process, but you only really need a plausibly consistent result. A reasonably basic understanding of signal processing theory, a copy of MATLAB, and many pots of coffee should do the job. Then, you could automate most of it for the next guy.

2. You take many recordings at a series of locations of interest, while taking data about the power grid from nearby locations and from distribution nodes. You then attempt to predict the signal at a location from the characteristics of the surrounding area.

This is almost certainly possible, as generalization from distribution logs to the local effect is what makes their fingerprinting technique possible in the first place. It is not a trivial undertaking, and it's questionable how well it would be generalizable. But at the same time, it's largely a question of if you want the data badly enough to do the legwork, and whether you have a reasonably functional understanding of machine learning.
It sounds cool, but I wonder how reliable this method is. What's the false positive and false negative rate? Errors here would have real consequences -- for example, according to the article, it was used as a crucial piece of evidence in putting several men behind bars for decades.
I can't imagine how app design in InDesign should work. Yes, InDesign has some effects, but they are not the same quality and power as PhotoShop's, and overall many of the tools lack pixel-precision that is needed.

Sure, it can work 90% of the way, but I'd recommend designing only in PhotoShop - it is the tool, best optimised for that.
Except you would get the harmonics at 120Hz, 180Hz, 240Hz, 300Hz, etc.; there are some harmonics that are going to be within voice frequency that you wouldn't be able to filter out easily without taking out some of the body of the voice. It would (at the least) be obvious that the signal had been tampered with if it were missing all of the 60Hz harmonics.
Just thinking about it, couldn't you get an isolated recording of the hum, and then mix the inverse of it over the appropriate audio sections? That should leave you with a humless track.

- step 1: Set up a recorder in a relatively isolated environment, ensuring that the hum is being recorded.

- step 2: Record a 30 minute conversation with the target, ensuring that you have enough to splice together something incriminating.

- step 3: invert the hum recorded from step 1 and mix it into the track from step 2. This produces 30 minutes of humless audio with the target.

- step 4: edit the 30 minute recording to produce incriminating audio clip of about 30 seconds.

- step 5: overlay legitimate audio from 30 seconds of real hum onto faked recording.

It seems like it could work.

- step 6: Get caught for something much simpler that you overlooked, and ruin your life.

Please don't actually use this maliciously. I suppose it could be a decent defense in court if you could prove that it is possible to fake the hum.
I don't really understand this stuff, but I think this is an already-known vulnerability. It was discovered at least as early as May 2011: http://samsclass.info/ipv6/proj/flood-router6a.htm
And they still have no sewage system...
Funny that they note about the tendency to interrogate strangers about personal details. My wife still gets offended by that. I guess after 15 years, I've learned to just play along and ignore unwanted questions.

Though the article says there is no word for privacy, in Russian private and personal are the same word. Any info that is truly personal is off limits to strangers.
None of what you said is true.

Firstly the market share does not automatically translate into more app sales. http://www.androidauthority.com/developer-economics-128916/

Secondly having Samsung in the market means nothing. It's the ability to sideload apps that is reason for the high piracy rate and less willingness to pay for apps.
The police don't even have to go that far - the "expert witness" was on their staff.
I like your critique of tipping.
The OP also created a language on top of objective-C. Although I have no interest to learn any more languages, I have to applaude him. Objective-C could be clunky and his language Tranquil, takes some of the productivity of newer languages we've come to expect. Very cool!
One tip I'd add is practice data hygiene before you notify anyone. Clean any personal or questionable material off your company-issued computer and/or phone. Be careful only to copy files that belong to you -- do not copy any company materials or things you did on company time, that belong to other companies and were shared confidentially with you in your job, purchased by your employer for company use, etc. for personal use, your "portfolio", or what have you without explicit permission to do so.

If you do copy personal materials, copy them onto a fresh USB stick and be up front about it, or at least keep the disk handy in case anyone asks and wants to review it.

There are certain things you may feel entitled to take that are in the grey area -- e.g., contacts you've made on the job. Depending on what country & state you're in, what kind of job and what kind of proprietary information agreements you have or policies the company has in place, different rules may apply. Consult a lawyer friend if in any doubt.

In any case my advice to you is not to risk putting yourself in a position where the company could ever claim either a) that you took proprietary materials to another company or for any use that did them harm, or b) that they have a claim to any of your personal IP or the value subsequently created from it. (Protecting against the latter, of course, requires that you practice good hygiene during your entire employment, not just before you give notice.)
1) Tell your manager first in private. Talk only positively. Despite being there for such a long time this is something managers deal with on a frequent basis and expect. (Do not tell your coworkers anything until everything is official)

2) Be open to negotiation. You may have no idea how much they may be willing to put on the table or you may be able to up your offer at the new place through a series of counter offers. (If you have already accepted the new offer, only talk to your current employer)

3) Allow for 2 weeks notice starting at the beginning of next week. Be proactive in putting together a plan to transition your work over to other members of your team. (Also while relatively uncommon do not be surprised if they happen to ask you to leave immediately - its typically nothing personal but can be policy)

4) Get the personal contacts of your close colleagues. Spam everyone there with LinkedIn invites to connect. Possibly ask any close colleagues or supervisors for recommendations.

5) Collect and return any company equipment. Arrange for your last paycheck including any unused vacation.

6) On the last day, you will most likely take part in an exit interview. Say nothing negative - even constructive feedback should not be given. They will ask you to sign some paperwork. Tell them you will take it home with you to read in full. Do not send in the paperwork - it only is meant to clear your employer of any liability and void your legal rights.

7) Take a week off before your new job and relax.
Is every famous musician death going to make it to the top of Hacker News from now on?
If you are from Chennai, you'll know what the situation is like in there. At any point, in any such conference, people are constantly trying to brand themselves under the guise of 'contribution to the community'. They are always looking to market themselves at any cost, even though they know it is unethical.

I have visited a dozen such conferences and I can tell this without hesitation, even on a public stage. There is a huge difference in the mindset of the organizers over here (SF) and in Chennai.

Kiruba Shankar is also a clever marketer. I still remember the days when he used to flaunt about his TED talks on Facebook. In all honesty, people like him are the ones who degrade the value of TED.

Here's a still that crops of the 'X' in the TED X event. This was uploaded by Kiruba Shankar himself:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=194646852844

(or)

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/16461...

Anyone active within the Chennai community will tell you how this man is just a marketer and has no credentials or no 'achievements' good enough to give a speech at TED. And he is just one example.

It is important because, without having significant achievements up your sleeve, you are assuming

1) The audience are dumb enough.
2) You can talk what you want and get away with it.

Here is another example of a 'self-proclaimed' entrepreneur who runs just an SEO business (Ashwin Ramesh)

This guy was DRUNK when he gave this talk. I'm not joking, it's the truth. HE got drunk again with the organizer that night, anyone close to him and his organizer will confirm this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq768Cyeiew

All in all, though this is bad news, I think it's a very good move for the TED community on the whole.
IPython gets $1.15M funding
interested in the false positive (hum is present) in which case the hum you need to "replace" something with needs to have signal correlations that match the ones in the database they've built up.
I have JavaScript disabled by default, so when I see something like that, I assume some style element relies on JavaScript to run correctly. I usually put up with it for the feeling of security I get, but if it is designed to do that I can't say I like it.
Shame on you for not disclosing your association with the BootyLog, keywonc! BAD!
I never really got why back support should be an issue - its all x86 instructions, if only a subset of what is used today right? I'm curious to know exactly what makes supporting old cpus so hard.
Yes, if the community around HN loves and has a certain respect to it.

I'll ask myself the same question. Is every nonsense comment going to make it to the top of a topic that people care from now on?
you can't contribute to Chrome development unless you work at Google, fwiw.
lots of those :)
You should show some applications without having to subscribing.
I wanted to see the kind of applicationd you can produce, but I do not want to register while it is just to discover your product.

edit: I just watched the video. I was expecting to see your product instead of a story board on CRM (Oh? what is CRM? But it is even better than Excel...)
Crowdfunding pioneers Lumawake and Lockitron team up
The x86 features in question are relatively small but pretty important nowadays. CMPXCHG and XADD are important atomic operations, for example.
It's comforting to know others are interested in "retrocomputing". For some reason I like slow old computers too. (Not being sarcastic here at all)
Why does the Hue class have an argumentless constructor that must immediately be followed up with attribute initialization and a call to the actual constructor? Kind of a nitpick, but definitely doesn't seem pythonic - or obvious.

Cool hack though, API looks straightforward.
Nice, these are definitely mixins.
looks cool! I tried building something similar a while back but then life got in the way...
The pricing is a little deterring for personal use. I'd offer a basic plan for much less, and then make up on the lost profits by charging business users a lot more. Same goes for the entries limit - 15GB storage means a lot more than 30K entries, even when you add in some file attachments, so maybe something less linear should work: 5,000/30,000/infinity and beyond.
This thread should give an insight: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3427491
They also submitted it to HN a few months ago, but didn't get any comments – http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4386177
For what it's worth, I'm not trying to be anti-Lisp with my remarks. I'm just trying to point out that this particular widely-cited example of a macro is false advertising.
But that isn't true of many other legit open source projects. As others have pointed out: mobile apps, browser extensions, native apps / libraries, etc. are much more readily accessible when distributed as binaries than as source. Most open-source projects don't want to require everyone to learn how to build from source before they're allowed to use the project, and I think that's a good thing.
Sounds like you were arguing against a use case which the other fellow doesn't believe is a target use of the product.
Proposal: Sustainable Living - Area 51 - Stack Exchange
It should be implemented in Javascript to run the searches from users' browsers instead of a central point.
Nice post, very interesting, i heard the same "problem" in VMware some months ago, they are constantly watching the startup scene to get talents/ideas and study possible competitors. That's a good thing also for startups, Nike has all the funds needed to support startups and innovation. My only concern is about the company ownership of those accelerators, that could be a problem in the long term.
Stefan Sagmeister's logo/branding for Casa da Música takes this idea in reverse – the logo colors are determined by the surrounding imagery: http://www.sagmeister.com/work/featured#/node/192
Thanks, I had a suspicion this might be it, I don't suppose you've got any idea why Apple sell/advertise them in a contract by default there but not here?
Is wireless keyboard safe for your passwords?
Yes. Zazen... If I could go back in time and give myself any advice, it would be the daily practice of silence.
It's not so much that you need to use the memcached API. We've built a set of client libraries that give you a consistent API (check out couchbase.com/develop) though parts are done through memcached binary protocol (for speed) and parts are done through a RESTful interface inspired by CouchDB.

It wasn't about resource constraints; it that we felt going after distributed deployments and having the speed to keep up with application demands (mostly driven by CRUD) was important. That's what devs and ops people kept telling us they'd need.
Use Flash or render your content as images. Neither of them are 100% locked down but its going to give anyone writing a scraper a run for their money.

Outside of preventing scraping, both of these ideas are likely to be seen as stupid.
If you manage your own MP3 directory structure, and like to just drag and drop onto a player to queue stuff up, try http://voxapp.didgeroo.com/

I don't think it has a _lot_ of playlist support, but if you already have the m3u files it'll load them just fine.
Thanks, I replied to codeka above:

Thanks, I had a suspicion this might be it, I don't suppose you've got any idea why Apple sell/advertise them in a contract by default there but not here?