skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is so outrageous to me that my kids' grandparents are lonely as heck wasting away in their 55 & older retirement community in an inhospitable desert wasteland at the same time I have spent literally tens of thousands of dollars on child care.

I'm not judging but genuine question.. have you ever brought up the potential for co-habitation or discussed this point with them or your SO? Maybe it could work out.
Ask HN: What can we do to help Andrew Auernheimer?
It frustrates me that I did not lift a finger to help Aaron Swartz. Part of the problem is that I feel so damned impotent when it comes to actually doing anything. Petitions make our numbers known, but they are all bark and no bite.

I'd like to open a brainstorming discussion here about what we can do to add a systematic bite to our bark. And not just a bite, but a focused bite that we can all get behind to take a chunk out of injustice.

I'll be honest, I don't think I have any great ideas to address this. I have a couple off-the-wall ideas that I'll throw out there. You should do the same. If someone comes up with something brilliant that we can all get excited about, well, let's stop procrastinating and start our counterattack, shall we?

For my part, here's some brainstorming:

1. We are the new media; let's do what the media should: The SOPA blackout was an inspiring success. Can we be more systematic with this method? What if, once a month or so, we democratically chose some injustice being perpetrated by the justice department (the Andrew Auernheimer case, for example), and focused all our energy on a repeat of the success we had with the SOPA blackout? I'm imagining a simple voting site with a countdown and instructions for participating once the target had been selected. Each target could have a list of subscribers - people or companies willing to take a public position on the issue - giving us a better idea of which target might be successfully addressed.

2. Can we put our money where our mouths are? What if someone started a startup that allowed us to automatically funnel money to politicians that behaved the way we wanted them to behave? For example, with a few clicks, I might put twenty-five dollars towards the reelection campaign of a politician that started an investigation into the case of Andrew Auernheimer. If a politician did so, they would automatically receive my 25$ along with whatever other money was donated to the cause. If more than one politician did so, it would be split among them.

This is a serious problem that affects all of us. A lot of the public tolerates us as witches and wizards and have little compunction about turning on us for doing harmless things that seem scary to them. The first step in doing something about it is choosing something to do. Well, let's get started, damn it.
Careful now! You wouldn't want to get caught thinking bad thoughts about HN and get hellbanned to the cornfield! Happy thoughts!
Will do, hacked this together in a couple of hours so that didn't make the cut.
Is there anything like this as an API which takes a paragraph of text and returns an audio file TTS read out of the text?
They pull $4B a year from over 7,000 locations around the world, it's hard to turn a ship that size.

Especially when mobile phone subsidies is becoming a big part of their income stream. That's like crack to them now, hard to turn away from that.

But if this DIY/3DP movement is going mainstream in the coming generation then they need to make a big move. Imagine if Radio Shack makes a comeback consolidating the parts market by buying up the likes of Sparkfun, Quirky, and IndieGogo while partnering with Digikey for retail distribution.

Then imagine they developing mobile apps that can quickly identify and give contextual information to individual parts so the average consumer hobbyist can be empowered to chase their dreams.

I would bet on that instead because empowering others will always be a better purpose. Otherwise they're going down like Sharper Image or Best Buy because Amazon is here coming to eat their lunch.
Боевики живут на деньги государства — PublicPost
Probably not a popular place to talk about that, given the audience :)
Lots of purely civil cases revolve around exactly that. If we have a contract that says I'll do some work for you and then you'll pay me for it, but then you subsequently don't pay me, then I'm in exactly the scenario you describe. But then I have to sue you for the money in civil court — I can't get you sent to prison for it.
Bigger problem is that Americans don't understand high density living. That's going to take a few generations.
These guys rock. I'd been using SoundGecko to que up and convert articles for listening on the train. Syncs with Dropbox or Drive, done. Love the concept of putting a dedicated station for content providers, social aggregators like HN.

Re. HTML5 audio, until recently Chrome for Android had a problem where if you closed the screen/changed tab it would cease the audio playback.

With the new Chrome Beta app, it solves this. Download it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrome.bet... - hopefully after testing this change will be pushed to standard Chrome.
there is also an App called Travelload which agregates all necessary travelling information and compiles it in a handy list.

Those location aware reminders are not so helpfull imho, if I am in a hurry switching trains, or afraid that there might be a traffic jam, or unsure at which gate my plane departs. Must take hours to prepare those with location aware reminders esp. in such huge areas like airports.
Valve starts promoting Steam for Linux to Windows users
Bullshit. I dare you to show a video of CoD alongside any casual game to kids under 10 and I guarantee that the kids would go nuts for CoD. That is assuming no prior experience to video games.

Mobile is just making it 'fashionable' for people to play games and imho just a funnel towards the diehard model.

Who stopped at just Pokemon?
> Star Citizen, Wastelands 2, Double Fine Adventure, many others.

how many of those has actually shipped?

...yeah.
I've invested a lot of time in trying to learn Haskell properly.

On one hand, it's incredibly rewarding when a completely new and strange concept finally 'clicks', then you write a few lines to test your understanding and it just works.

On the other hand, it's frustrating to realize that there are still a lot of concepts you don't fully grasp, several libs that are still out of your reach, yet another completely new way of structuring your code that you are yet to unravel. Essentially, that you are (I am) still a newbie.

All in all, I find Scala better suited to learning FP and applying your newly-acquired knowledge to develop mildly useful apps, as quick results usually lead to more motivation. Just IMHO.

(Not to mention there are many libs that aren't yet up to par with their JVM counterparts, but that's another can of worms.)
Those are the specs of a high-end phone in 2012, though. And it's still a bit far from the $50 low-end Android phones being sold in Africa right now, but it's also lower than what would be mid-end today, so somewhere between low-end and mid-end.
Why you must have a vision for your product
Ask HN: What's the advice for a brazilian startup for approach VCs in US?
Substantial discussion from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700
The 5 Emotional Stages of a jQuery Upgrade
I love you.

Just sayin' :)
Luckily it's her cublicle, not yours. Some people find that kind of environment stimulating.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2012/08/15/do-...

http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/20/magazines/fortune/stats_CEO_...

for the down votters
Slaves, really.
Adreno 200 (what the S1 is using) is probably the worst GPU of the entire 5 years of modern touchscreen smartphones' existence. You really don't want many more pixels than that. Virtually no 3D games work on it, and even some more "graphics intensive" 2D games can be too much for it with a 480x320 resolution. I remember Angry Birds working pretty poorly on it initially, but they fixed it later.
If the copyright holders are unable to form a class action suit against one tiny group... I don't see why they should be entitled to going 'one level up' and getting federal involvement and making it a crime.
Until they will have device that will be interesting to non developers that will be low-end.

Most probably I will consider it for buying to my mother then.
As a person coming from a former Soviet satellite republic, I must say, that the more I read,the less and less difference I see between the countries that are well known for disregarding human rights and the "land of freedom" - the US. The only difference I can think of is that they probably won't shoot you in the broad daylight, like it happens in Russia. But other than that, the image is complete - if you do something the government doesn't like,they can absolutely destroy you. They can put you in prison without a court order, freeze your assets for indefinite amount of time, spy on you, send agents to follow you, deny you the information why they are doing this, and they do threaten journalists to not write about some cases or risk prosecution for violating "national security".
I am honestly sorry for people who live in the US and happen to do something that their government perceives as wrong.
It's been a while since I actively followed TTS, but the speech of this one sounds surprisingly good. The service itself is useful as well. It could be a bit more interactive for my taste, but works quite well!
hey longzheng, cofounder of tldr.io here, petercooper just pointed me to this thread. Please send me an email: stan at tldr io
I've pointed them to this thread to see what they think. Look forward to seeing this progress. (And as an aside, I really wish someone would crack the TTS 'uncanny valley' problem 100%. It's a surprisingly difficult problem.)
Banks got retarded amounts of taxpayer money because of "too big to fail"
I'll bring it up when ever it is relevant. The "Ortiz=Murderer" faction doesn't get a free pass to make their outrageous claims simply because the question has been discussed elsewhere.
All kinds of large Lisp codebases are written in an imperative style. There's no reason it's any more difficult to write that kind of code in Lisp than it is in any imperative language.
Tell HN: A script to download your saved story links
I posted this about 12 hours ago[0], but it got very few upvotes, so I'm posting it again for the different audience.

In response to a question asked recently[1] I've re-implemented my scripts to retrieve my saved stories. The scripts are fragile and not pretty - I just hacked them together quickly to get the job done. The question has come up before, so if anyone wants them, let me know. If enough people ask then I'll stick them on GitHub or something and make them open.

My concern is that it is scripted access to HN, so it might be regarded as "unkind", and I'd be interested to now what the HN crown thinks.

Thoughts?

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094367

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5060631
Clickables:

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094367

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5060631
Sexy Asian Babes Panty Girls#
Developer preview probably means very small production run, which in turn means high unit price. Final, mass produced devices of course should be significantly cheaper.
SoundGecko plus tldr.io would be awesome
Growth hacking is a bad idea
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed answer. We might actually disagree less than I thought.

However, with your main point I still disagree. If I understand you correctly, you say that the problem can only be fixed bottom up: that we can't fix equal representation in tech by having some conferences with equal representation. I don't think it is that clear cut: for example, having an event with a disproportionately large amount of (1/2) female expert speakers might allow more women at an earlier stage of their career (depending on the event, maybe even high school) to picture themselves on such a career path.

So, within your metaphor, the white car might come out a little pinker after taking a ride in the pink truck...

Apart from that, I completely agree with you and women feeling restricted to other career paths much, much earlier is an important problem to solve. Even your example, the CS 101 class, is probably a later stage in that progress.
> But this is crap - way back when you could buy better electricity - the debate ranged from power smoothing to DC/AC - and your smelter or your lights could depend on the Chief Electrical Officer

And even today when it comes to the price it still matters. And in the developing world you still can buy electricity with different quality and uptime.
Saving Brick and Mortar
There was a lot of speculation as to the reasons for Sinofsky's departure a few months back. For me, at least, this item provides a likely explanation from someone who was in a position to know.
Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/science/usc-exhibit-shows-...
Thanks Peter. Already drafting email.

You're absolutely right about the TTS uncanny valley problem. We're betting on the fact that this is an industry effort. Currently we don't have the resources to really invest in the core TTS technology but always on the look-out for breakthrough/experimental tech.
> On a similar note, it’s pretty fashionable these days to see party rounds with lots of investors each putting in a small amount of money. Mark Suster calls this collecting logos.

Collecting logos - now that's a new one. I used to call that "buying trophies" :)

Another saying that I have about Silicon Valley is that it's "Wall Street with jeans".

There's a lot of money, and a lot of power sloshing around. It's not all fairytales and lollipops. When you get here prepare to get fucked. Repeatedly.

Before dealing with anyone always ask yourself this question:

> "How are they fucking me?"

It's a line I stole from Jim Messina - Obama's reelection campaign manager. It's proven quite useful.

Oh and one last important heuristic: never trust a suit. Engineers can be pretty bad at fucking each other when they become founders - but then again by then they're just suits.

An even better heuristic: trust no one.

PS - watch this video and get your cynicism on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzNRUkl9BoY
Don't forget to check out his other lecture series "General Relativity Made Quantumly Simple".
The world was bigger and slower back then. If southern troops were mobilized, there would be days or weeks of warning before they got to DC. By that time, the politicians could retreat, and replace themselves with union soldiers.
Reading this thread after it's run its course, I'm not sure there was any value to posting it. I'm not sure that there wasn't, either. Suicidal ideation is awful, and I'm so glad to finally be in a place where I'm free from it. I hope you get there.
Extra bonus points if the original tech stack used on the website was wildly inappropriate because "it's only going to be a small website to do x"

And big globs of functionality keep getting grafted on until the point where you're terrified to touch anything in case it all falls apart.
Holy cripes, I cannot actually read the copy at all. It does look like an interesting read though.
Fitness Trackers Are Long on Hype, Short on Credibility
While i liked his gumption, I personally thought god i don't want to do that.. I have been playing around haskell on and off, in my free time, and have come to a conclusion that while it's a fun and cool language to play around, it may not be useful(as in career) hobby. It might be categorized as pure fun language learning.
Its like you were reading my mind. I definitely agree that getting discouraged by the lack of progress on my Forever Project is misspent energy.
And the OP is talking only about learning FP, not about general usefulness.

Not sure what you are unconvinced about.
without discontent, no one would care about the lack of progress. :)
10 Common Habits That Damage the Kidneys | Staying Healthy Plus
Hey Andreas, it's not down anymore but here is the tl;dr version:

- Automated text-to-speech radio of Hacker News front page's links.

- Listen instead of reading.

See it here http://tldr.io/tldrs/50fe8b4c8aa388171700184f/soundgecko-hac...
No, but I don't think that's necessarily the point of a forever project nor of life in general. It's not a goal of mine nor of none of my friends who have one; most of the projects from people I know cannot even make money even if (partly) completed.

Edit: If you mean, you need money to live; you of course need some money, but not as much as most people think. Which makes it a question of priorities mostly. There are plenty of fantastic places where $600-700/mo will get you far, even without losing that much from your 'previous life'. You have to sacrifice things obviously, but not that much (depending on what you are used to).
Yep. Android is going to go over the top this year selling 4.x devices well under the price points of any of the competition.

Software ultimately matters more than hardware and we're rapidly getting to that point in mobile.
I'm designing a (runtime, highly flexible) graphical system to aid in the breaking-down, visualising and use of any data.

I don't like the term 'forever project' because it implies this will never be finished.
Nice to see an article about China here. When I read Fred Wilson or Paul Graham I always wonder what they think about China and all the weird stuff happening in this country, but they seem either uninterested or deaf.
It's too late in this generation for another serious competitor to emerge in mobile. Microsoft might be able to muscle its way into double digits but everybody else is just too late to the game now.

Better to focus on what comes after phones & tablets, whatever that is.
A Supercomputer to Map the Cosmos
OK.. It wasn't clear to me from what you said before that you even viewed disproportionate representation in tech as the problem. I agree with that.

However, as I said below, I think having tech conferences with women present might be more than just a trick to pretend that the problem is solved, but actually be a tiny part of the solution.
And it is a right they also exercise, but rarely against an entire university. The schools usually just lose the privilege for one subject.
Once past a certain size and far enough in the hole, being marginally profitable isn't going to help. It's go big or go home that counts. Investors aren't interested in a +-3% annual return, they want 1000% or nothing.
Is this a YC startup?
I wonder when the situation will ever be like this in my country, Turkey.
Creepstreams: an interactive map of insecure webcam feeds
If that were the case, Heroku wouldn't be able to charge for what they provide, and everyone with more than just a trivial app would run their own server.

I think you underestimate what it takes to run your own infrastructure. I'm not saying it's black-magic hard, but it does require a not-insignificant skill set for all but the simplest of setups.
I learned F# as this guy learned Scala. I too dived into Haskell after a while and learnt a lot of new things.

Having learned some great functional tips, I came back to my regular C#/Ruby and applying LINQ and Ruby's blocks seemed more natural to me. However, monads, monoids, functors still don't matter when you switch over.

I've used Yesod to write a small app. A typical form in Yesod (for model binding) has this signature:

newPostForm :: Html -> MForm Blog Blog (FormResult (Text,Text,Text), Widget)

Even after learning Yesod for a while, I wasn't able to completely reason with that signature. Why bother with all the name of the application, sub site, formresult, widget when all you want is just three simple form fields? Rails gives it to you in params[:form]. It's just too easy in Rails with a lot of gems lying around for every task you decide to do. And when you're stuck, you're just a google away from getting your answer.

So my question is: after learning Haskell, do you intend to stick to it? Did I make a wise decision in ditching Haskell?
Aren't those checks essentially rebates on licensing of Microsoft products?
What’s The Single Biggest Innovation In Education In Last 200 Years?
So what you are saying is, that AT&T could have made a webpage with all user data in plain text,and just write at the top in capital letters:
"YOU ARE ONLY INTENDED TO LOOK AT YOUR OWN DATA, DISREGARD EVERYTHING ELSE"
and it would be magically ok, because you know, if you look at other people data then you are not using the webpage as it was intended to?
Because this is basically what they did. Yes, an average American individual would not know how to change the URL,but that does not mean that the data was secure. And AT&T has all legal obligation to keep their customer data secure.
I don't think I've had a more awkward feeling seeing something online ever. Nope.
Because it has pretty significant memory overhead, and because its runtime performance usually isn't better than compiled C or C++ code.
Ahhh yes, I know it well.

Personally mine has this terrible habit of consuming almost 100% of brain resources to the point where I literally can't do anything else productive. So often I have to say "no I'm not going to touch this for a month until I've got some real work done... then maybe I can take a look at it"

Still my forever project is coming to the point where I might be able to release it. Or rather, I'm running out of things to look at in it and think "that's not good enough I need to make it better", now it's mostly "that might not be good enough but I have no clue how it could be made better".

Which is rather pleasant :)
Could be low corruption. The nordic countries usually score low on corruption comparisons. High corruption can make almost any system break.
How not to promote a sponsor on Facebook
I'm stoked that they partnered with geeksphone. I adored my geeksphone one. The pricing is what will be important here, as the low end android handsets are still lacking in the low-end market, in terms of performance anyway[0].

If they beat Androids performance, and development is easy, then it has a shot in my opinion. I mean, your basic apps are there already (such as http://x.Facebook.com), and if it's simple enough to port my mobile web apps over, I know I'll take the plunge.

[0] Source: I sell phones in Australia
You always ask for more in bargaining. Google's going to lowball what the value is to them - if they're smart that is, and I think that can be assumed ...
Yeah parsing is a tough challenge for something as diverse as Hacker News where the content could be anything between a thesis, a blog post, to a picture gallery.

Will investigate Shoutcast but there might not be enough content to have a continuous stream of content.

You'll be glad to know it already switches voices between entries and automatically plays the following entry :)
The article states that films rarely have infirm or elderly characters, though a great film that does is "Away from her". It isn't the easiest to watch, but it is sobering.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0491747/
Yes, Mark MacLeod.
I still use a Nexus One class (HTC Desire) which seems to have specs that are on par. I want Firefox OS but why would I buy another device with the same functionality?
HN Whose Hiring?
I suppose you could train the classifier by having it record what you upvote, or which links you click on. Perhaps a Firefox/Chrome extension could do that?

Some people at Reddit were programming a recommender about a year ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/lowwf/attempt_2_w... It doesn't use a Naive Bayesian Classifier but it might still interest you.
We applied but never got in :P
Test Driven Development (TDD) Traps
The title and the first few paragraphs gave the impression that this was an article about the general utility of the two languages. Only half-way down did the truth out.