skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm one of the guys behind this, thx so much for all of the support (and to @yegg for posting).

Here's some more detail as requested by @ClayM and others...

The Year of Rock is the work of two guys, myself and @bsstoner. It's powered by the @getinstinct platform, which we also built.

Starting next week, we'll send a weekly guitar lesson by email to everyone who signs up. The lessons are entirely interactive. They listen as you play and give you feedback on each note, using pitch detection software we designed. You can demo some lessons we've already made at http://getinstinct.com

There's no human teacher, it's entirely automated and works in the web browser. The entire site is built in JS and HTML5 (including node.js on the backend), except for some Flash for the audio processing (unavoidable given the current state of browsers).

One thing that's cool about the Year of Rock is that the course is partially crowdsourced. After we create the intro lesson each week (such how to play a blues scale), our users can add practice music and riffs via our tab editor. There's a voting mechanism similar to HN or reddit to help the most popular submissions bubble to the top.

From a usability perspective, we've learned that the course needs to be more flexible than Code Year. Almost everyone will skip weeks or start late. Some people will enter the course with more experience than others. So the course can't be too linear. It should be okay for people to approach it like a buffet.

There's still plenty of time to adjust things, so would love to hear any questions/ideas/comments...
I understand your point. Change can come from the top down (government) or from bottom up (citizens). But if the middle ground (often the government/civil service in India) is stopping change or reform, pressure must be put on it. Usually this is from the top, as from the bottom, its usually only possible via a revolution, and that may not bring the changes the people who lead the revolution want (see Egypt as an example). To change mass opinion in India, not those demonstrating already, but billion plus unable or unwilling to, will be very tough. Many of them do not want or are unwilling to accept change of any kind.
>the type of people that were unlikely to buy anyway.

As someone whose Android app has wound up on some pirate sites, it's not so much the lost revenue I'm worried about. It's the possibility that the version of my app on some Chinese pirate site has been repacked with malware.
If you mean by using qemu user space emulation, it doesn't work very well.
yes. reddit.com is a community site made up of sub-communities called subreddits. Subreddits have a path of /r/<community name>.
The point gets lost of we starting debating about whether or not we like Michael Arrington as a person.

Wouldn't that only be relevant if people didn't read the argument and commented solely on the title? The article in question was pointed directly at Arrington, so it's not like anyone's going to miss that.
Randomly chosen letters have fairly high entropy, about 4 or 5 bits per character. Written English has much, much lower entropy, generally around 1 bit per character. You can see this if you compress written text. Most compressors on normal English will get to 12-15% of the original size.
Why I wrote SkillBot - my personal learning assistant app (in node.js)
It seems unlikely that it's a tablet. The public effort to get Ubuntu working on tablets just began in the 13.04 cycle, and it's focused on the core (e.g. power management and memory usage) rather than the user interface; see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7

Right now Ubuntu on a tablet is "essentially unusable", as https://lwn.net/Articles/525458/ explains.
Literally no-one has the right to say such a hateful, awful thing to another person. Even if the content is even vaguely justified (and it might be), the speaking of such words is so awfully damaging that it crosses well over the line of abuse. There is such a thing as psychological abuse, and having someone that presumably you care and trust and know if you are listening to them speak about your personality attack you so viciously, so self-righteously is an incredibly traumatic act.

The simple fact is that you don't have the right to say that to someone, not ever. To consign someone to permanent failure, to even call into question their reality as a person ('broken') is unutterably cruel.

We all have the right to choose who is in our social life, and we have the right to choose our boundaries, as arbitrary and possibly awful - or healthy - as they may be. There really are people in the world that have serious mental illness, and it's okay to not want them in your life. But that does not give you the right to consign them to a label, and to predict their future, and to dehumanize them, calling them 'permanently broken'.
LocBox, San Francisco. Frontend Engineer, Rails Developer, Data Scientist, Inside Sales Representative. Relocations Welcome, H1B Transfers Welcome.

More at http://www.getlocbox.com/careers and http://www.techcrunch.com/2012/10/31/locbox-series-a/.

I’m CEO at LocBox (http://www.getlocbox.com) and we are looking to work with great folks that share our mission - empowering local businesses to generate sustainable revenue from their best customers. We want to do it with Data, Algorithms and Design in a space that has traditionally lacked all three but is finally turning the corner (and fast).

Most local businesses resort to unsustainable daily deals or boring Email Marketing to acquire and retain customers. We reject that status quo and our hundreds of (paying) customers agree. We’ve also developed a new search/crawl/tech-centric way of acquiring our own customers and disagree with the obsolete feet-on-street Sales model. The company is very small but generating material and predictable revenue; net revenue growth has exploded in the last 2 quarters.

Our tech/product team is 6 at the moment and the company as a whole is 11; we're looking to at least triple the tech team size in the next 6 months. The tech stack is standard-issue Rails/HTML/CSS/JavaScript and is deployed on AWS. The product and tech team operates on 2 week sprints and there's a decent bit of Halo-playing and beer-drinking at the completion of sprint milestones.

We also just launched with a $5.1M Series A in the press w/ TechCrunch, AllThingsD, GigaOm and VentureBeat.
Ready to talk to us? I'm saumil at getlocbox dot com and at http://www.getlocbox.com/careers.
If every senator and representative did this, we could abstract away Congress.
AWS does not, and has not ever, charged for stopped instances (except for things like EBS volumes, which are billed separately).
> using people's words against them is a problem with or without perfect recall

Yes, it is! But one thing I've learned in managing online communities is that you don't give people the ability to do something you don't want them to do. I don't feel having perfect electronic recall should be a feature without more context sensitivity.

> For trade secrets, etc, you do what any high security facility does

Except for the Steve Mann argument: it's a prosthesis. When you take the hardware away from him, you're disabling him. He becomes disoriented and cannot function as well. It's like taking away a wheelchair, or crutches, or a hearing aid. And when more and more of your potential employees rely on these devices 18 hours a day, more and more will be negatively impacted. No, I think it's something that has to be fixed in the legal system or fixed in the entire design of a wearable system.

> Works of fiction I've found interesting in this vein

The novel "Snow Crash" has wearable computing used only by a subset of wired individuals derisively called "gargoyles." Everyone else still uses workstations.

The "Old Man's War" series of books has soldiers with embedded computers, including a subset of soldiers who have them embedded since birth.

The novel "Permanence" also has them, but used for pervasive IP rights enforcement.

The novel "Signal to Noise" has an elite intellectual class with implants that work with pervasive wireless sensors and fully immersive workstations.

The film "Stranger Than Fiction" has AR-style overlays at least during the opening sequences.

The short film "Sight" touches on AR and behavorial control a bit: http://vimeo.com/46304267

This kottke.org piece covers a few other shorts: http://kottke.org/12/04/the-real-google-glasses
It's possible that the server choked for a moment, it should be okay if you try again.

Edit: Also make sure you have JS enabled, otherwise the form won't work.
You Wouldn't Sign Up To Do This
> If you're that broken, you just don't deserve romance and love.

Woah, woah, woah. Surely you don't mean that anyone deserves my or your or anyone else's romance and love. These things don't mean anything unless they're freely given.
The entirery of the centralized European visa, asylum and police systems runs on WCF and C#. These systems are used constantly every day by a large part, if not the majority of European embassies, consulates, immigration ministries, foreign ministries and police departments. Not ready for production?
Couldn't one implement some logic in the voting system based on the interdependence of bills?

"You can't vote for this service without voting for one of these bills that include a tax increase that would cover the cost of said service"?

On second thought, I can see how this would get ugly fairly quickly.
The community promise for C# applies only to the ECMA 334 which is stuck in c# 2.0 from 2006 [1][2].

Seems to me that nothing prevents Microsoft from suing people implementing features found in c# 3-5.

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/port25/archive/2009/07/06/the-ecm...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language...
Wow, impressive list. Clearly I need to get off my backside and develop more. Thanks for the kick!
That's discombatulary!
Direct democracy enables citizens to vote for a balanced budget as well.
Hmmm ... what if there were someone doing this in every state?
I see a great opportunity in this for some sort of voting mill mechanical turk like system for people who aren't political and need money to sell their vote to some fascist with an agenda.
I'm not talking about software that needs a server (like VNC); I'm literally talking about clients that talk the Microsoft RDP protocol. There are plenty to choose from for either platforms

Also if your work using something like Citrix; clients exist for both platforms for that as well.
Mastodynon makes me sick
Mastodynon is a combined homeopathic preparation used for the treatment of infertility brought about by gynecological disorder such as secondary amenorrhea and luteal phased disorder or insufficiency.
Mastodynon is a combined homeopathic preparation that works in maintaining the normal production of hormones (gonadotropic hormones) essential in the improvement of menstrual disorders and other gynecological disorders including idiopathic infertility.
Mastodynon had undergone scientific trials in the improvement or menstrual cycle. This combined homeopathic formula exercises dopaminergic result essential in the reduction of prolactin secretion through adenohypophysis process.
Google Trends: Ruby on Rails v. Node.js
Ubuntu release Touch OS January 2nd
Show HN: Always on GPS logger
An android app that logs GPS coordinates periodically to an encrypted database directly on your phone, so you can track and review where you have been throughout your life.

http://www.rareventure.com/ttt_manual/manual.html

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rareventure.gps2_trial

Please give any criticism you have to offer.
I think most people who say you should hire full time, or you shouldn't hire consultants (or vise versa) are doing you a disservice.

It's hard enough to find quality team but then you add requirements on top of requirements and you wonder why you have a hard time finding a job? Seeing postings like this reminds me why employers are hiring 24/7/365 and failing.
Is it time to go back to the early-'90s-shareware model of annoy screens? Release two versions of your app to the app store, one free with a ten second long "you're a bad person" loading screen, and one that costs a bit.
Show HN: Maker Time - a clock/calendar inspired by PG's maker's schedule
She Can’t Sleep No More: The political economy of Marissa Mayer
I have always been lazy to update those lists. Now I see the logic behind that. :)
Google Play Store Improvements Wishlist for 2013
Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future
The current protest is not against anything in particular. Repetition of such incidents,to brutality of this particular case and the harassment women face on a daily basis made this the last straw that broke the camel's back. The call for death sentence and chemical castration is just a knee-jerk reaction. The politicians are supporting this demand because solving the problem much harder than stipulating harsh punishments.
These might interest people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition_in_Linux

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_sof...
How do you decide whether to run a spot or on-demand instance to handle dynamic load? What happens if spot instance cost suddenly spikes?

Also, how do you use regions/availability zones?
+1 Moving towards more state-level government instead of centralized federally.
At The Pool | Los Angeles, CA | Full Time | Front-End Developer (but be a rockstar)
That looks a lot like http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html, honestly.
Cool, I'll add in a animal wordset. I'll do the animals of the chinese zodiac (pig, dog, tiger, horse, monkeys etc). I'll also do another for the zoo (penguins, eagle etc)

Please feel free to suggest new word sets. Next major release will have new lesson sets. (two weeks from today)
NoRedInk (www.noredink.com) | Full Time | Palo Alto & SF

NoRedInk is transforming education through adaptive learning and personalization, and we're looking for a lead Rails dev & technical partner. We're one of America's fastest growing startups, and every 0.25 seconds, a student solves a question on our site. We solve complex and fascinating data problems while striving to eliminate the "red ink" on students' papers and empower tens of millions of students around the globe.

For more details about NoRedInk and the position, go here: goo.gl/qZN3Y
I think anyone downloading apps from a Chinese pirate site can expect to get malware sooner or later. I wouldn't be too concerned about it if I were you.
/js box(5,6,3,7)

creates a wooden block 6 wide by 3 tall by 7 long.

/js box0(5,6,3,7)

creates an empty box 6 x 3 x 7

/js load()

opens a file chooser dialog so you can load your own scripts.
HN is not more civil. Perhaps less likely to be distracted, but not nicer (if that's what you mean by civil)
The only potential catch is that this is a lot MORE targets for espionage. You only need to find one person with some life circumstances (new kid, long commute, conflict of interests, etc) and spearfish/blackmail/torture/teach scala accordingly.

Granted, your proposal does address a lot of things, but this is something that would need to be addressed. Thoughts?
Uh, the smallest uninteresting number is clearly 14.
Thanks for the purchase and the feedback. I'll resolve the issues you've raised. I've tested it on iphone 4 and 5, but not 4S.

It would be a big help if you identified the iOS version you are using.
Hi,
Thanks all for the comments!

I didn't include queues, live streaming, and other features because unfortunately they are not available as a separate gems.

I tried to cover all the things that are possible now (via gems or simple code change).
Maybe in a future post I'll cover all the new things in Rails 4. But as it's still on development I prefer to wait until a beta or release candidate.
I'm with ms4720. We should repeal the 17th Amendment. The short reason is because State governments no longer have representation in the Federal Government. There are other benefits to repealing it as well such as less money and noise spent on Senate elections.
I outsourced the voice over on elance.com. Lots of voice-over providers to choose from. (any language/accent you want)
As predicted, the Hackulo.us shutdown simply spurred the adoption of more effective software piracy tools. Between Aptoide on Android, which somehow is available via the official app store and also doesn't require rooting/jailbreaking [1], and these new iPhone piracy services, I wonder if we'll start to see changes in the way we approach software monetization. Requiring in-app purchases, for example, is quite effective.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bazaar.ins...
Can't you put the whole app folder into one JAR? Also, you could put all the jacks and plugs into a a separate JAR. So, you have two JAR files to include into each project.

I think you could have each JAR have src/main/scala/[Obvious folders] type structure, so for your app.jar you could have src/main/scala/app and src/main/scala/external for the external.jar.

You can make it as granular as you need, but the more you break things up, the more packaging overhead you'll incur.
Yummy Raspberry Pi
As an author, I believe that everyone who pirates my book is helping me spread the word. PDFs are nice and all, but for a science textbook I find that nothing beats the printed book: you can flip though pages quickly and find the information you are looking for.

Obligatory product plug: [ High school math, mechanics and calculus for busy adults ]: http://minireference.com [ eg. Calculus I fully explained in just 25 pages ]
(UK) Google Nexus device stock email notifier
Mapping has traditionally focused not on the past, but on the future. Specifically, in considering courses of action. The Olympian perspective maps provide allow people to account for far more information than they can derive from their immediate surroundings in that particular moment. Having visualized a potential course of action, maps then lead back to the here and now, and indicate where the first step should fall. In other words, they're about identifying the optimal path from this moment into a future moment that is preferable to others.

In carrying out this process, there have always been four limiting factors. The first results from the precision and accuracy of the map itself. The second results from how well people can locate themselves in the map, and accordingly, how much confidence they can place in the plans they derive from it. The third, has to do with how swiftly people can toggle back and forth between the cartographic view (outside the bubble looking in) and the ground view (inside the bubble looking out). For example, 18th Century mariners using the lunar distance method for determining longitude at sea may need hours to gather raw information from the relative positions of the horizon, stars and moon then run the calculations to correctly position themselves on a map in order to determine the precise compass bearing they should follow, which is something we can no derive in realtime. The final limit has to do with the kinds of information that can be mapped, and how swiftly it can be refreshed. Once, we could only map coastlines. Now we can map the clouds above them. At the extent of the mappable expands, so does the range of factors that can guide our plans for the future.

As far as humans go, the first three factors have absolute theoretical limits while the fourth is theoretically unlimited. Google Glass represents a development in which all three of the theoretical limits are reached simultaneously, while the fourth has the lid taken off. Thanks to our survey instruments, we can expect to map the entire globe with millimeter precision, and locate any object within similar precision. Tools like Glass provided a realtime overlay of information that could, at one stage, only be gotten by consulting a map and plotting a course. And with billions of sensors on Earth and in Space feeding data to enormously powerful processing centers, the range of inputs for cartographic overlays just gets bigger and bigger.

I've become firmly convinced that our arrival at this points represents a seminal moment in human development, one that will stand out in the history of our species for centuries, if not millennia to come.
Interesting, I thought it sounded computer generated. Do you know if it was?
This is a beautiful introduction to DynASM, the code generation library from the amazing LuaJIT. Josh, I hope you keep writing more pieces like it.
Shut up. please.
Tell HN:  Help beat "cramming": Switch to paper billing for wireless
Be sure to check your cell phone bills and block unauthorized third-party "cramming" charges --- and you might want to switch back to paper billing, too.

I'd switched to AT&T paperless billing several years ago for our cell phone service, but I hadn't been logging in regularly to look at the detailed bills. It turns out that for the last six months my college-senior daughter has been getting charged $9.99 per month for stock-picking services; she knows nothing about it.

I just arranged for AT&T to block all future third-party charges, and got a partial refund; I'm going after the rest of the refund tomorrow when their offices are open.

I also switched back to paper billing, so that I can easily check my statements every month. [Forget] AT&T; they can pay to print and mail my statement to me each month, since obviously I can't depend on them not to let third parties take my money without authorization.

(I've read news reports that this is a cozy little arrangement between the phone companies and the third parties, in which the phone companies get a cut of the unauthorized charges until the customer complains.)
There are many, many more people with access to sensitive/classified information in the executive branch. Increasing the size of congress by an order of magnitude will not meaningfully impact that number.
Ask HN: How to contact YC alumni who review YC applications?
I have seen a number of blogs by YC alumni who gratuitously offer to review YC applications. Despite my YCW13 late application still pending (fingers crossed) I am looking to YCS13.

1. Is it a good idea to have YC alumni review my YC application? (I am really interested in some unbiased feedback and the insight from those whose applications were successful must be helpful)

2. Most of these "offers" from alumni are year old posts, is there any suggestion on finding YC alumni who currently spend time giving back in this sort of manner?
Why is it iPhone App marketing? A lot of the publications write stories about android and web apps as well. Trying to focus on a niche?
But direct democracy seems to work pretty well in Switzerland:
http://post-gutenberg.com/tag/secret-of-switzerlands-success...
Nitpicking: but it's not good "in itself", it just has other benefits.
Right now we run everything in the US-East region, and we have all our services balanced across 4 availability zones. If there's a problem in a single AZ, it will affect every layer of our system, but only about 25% of the hosts in that layer. Some of our services are automatically resilient and can handle that easily. Others aren't so great, but we're working on more automatic failover.

When we need more servers for an auto-scaled service, we open spot requests and start on-demand instances at the same time. For most services, we want to run about 50% on-demand and 50% spot. We have a watchdog process that continually checks what's running. It launches more instances whenever there aren't enough, and terminates instances when there are too many. So if the spot price spikes and a bunch of our spot instances are shut down, the watchdog will launch replacement instances on-demand. It will also request more spot instances once the price has dropped back to normal. In reality we don't often run into spot capacity issues -- maybe once a month, and it's almost never apparent to our users.

I spoke about this in detail at AWS re:Invent last month, and the full talk is available online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73-G2zQ9sHU