skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I very much see dissertations as the beginning of forever projects; but maybe that's because my advisor's dissertation was†, and his own advisor (Ishii, cf my first post) saw it that way as well.

Which is what led me to quit my PhD (only leaving grad school with a measly master's :) )- I felt that I was too young and inexperienced to embark on such a journey. I fully intend on going back to grad school in a couple years' time, and treat my PhD as such then.

†: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/29264
Interesting, I just installed it and the few random articles I listened to appeared to be using TTS still? Maybe I got unlucky.
Every place that you go away to seems magical. When you live there, the warts show themselves.
Sure, just give me a couple more years ;) But cschmidt shared his, and his sentiments are positive.
It uses ES5 getters and setters to replace the property and react to changes. This is what makes it realtime, after the set all bound properties will have their new values.
You're 18 years older than me, but our paths are certainly similar. I also did a PhD because I liked the university lifestyle, didn't want a job, and wanted to keep messing around with my honours project for a few more years. I think did a 20 month post-doc before working out that to get promotion I had to game the system in the same cynical way as everyone else was trying to do, so I quit and quickly failed at running my own startup.

Now I'm writing software for someone else's startup. It's not what I'll do forever, but it's helping replace the academic programmer in me with a real software engineer, and keeping me interested as I learn new techniques.
There was very little paranoia about letting kids run loose 50 years ago, when I was walking a few blocks to school, and playing untended in my own back yard or my neighbors'. This was I think in large part because of low key but pervasive surveillance, largely by state-at-home mothers. That few mothers worked outside the home also affected traffic levels in a couple of ways: they didn't commute, and the fathers, freed of pick-up obligations, could carpool. We had in general pretty good schools, partly because there were few professions yet open to women, partly because men who were teachers didn't get drafted, partly because professionals sent their kids to the same schools as everyone else, so there weren't long commutes to a private school--I didn't hear of an elementary school that was other than public or parochial until later.

It was a very homogenous middle class world--how homogenous, and how kept that way, has been documented in civil rights cases in the years since.
There's nothing innovative about a bad business model.

One-time forever pricing for a service which costs you ongoing money to run is suicide unless you're subsidizing it somehow.

You have to have a subscription Basecamp account to buy the $25 one-off thing. So you're essentially paying a fee to hide projects that you don't want in your company Basecamp.

This is essentially a free tier with a one off filter.
Ok, but what you're really saying is its an app rated 4+ that has a mature images option. Yes its a little awkward that the settings to turn it on are only available via a website - but so what?
I wonder what a young Steve Jobs would have thought of his App store. The guy who went to India looking for spiritual enlightenment.

Forcing a certain level of quality is fine. Protecting users from scamware is also fine. Apple goes far beyond this. They nanny the user and force upon them what Apple perceive is right and wrong.

I got my first iMac 5 years ago and I thought Apple were awesome and innovative. Now I just find them overbearing. Like success has lead to the corporate types making decisions instead of those that originally drove development and change.

I have an iPad for testing. I avoided getting a new Apple computer in favour of a Linux computer. First time I turned on my latest computer i felt somewhat liberated being away from an Apple logo. Looking back I had the same feeling firing up my Mac for the first time. I felt free of a virus filled Windows and I remember thinking that the future had finally arrived.

Its interesting how feelings and perceptions change.
the keywords here are audiences vs niches. See, audences are made of people with worldviews. Niche is.. well, impersonal agregate, an industry - without any beliefs, pains, dreams...
If your definition of "sensible investment" is "very low probability of very high payout with very high probability of 100% loss" you must think the lottery is another great example of a sensible investment.
Valve starts push toward Linux gaming
> EDIT: And in some places, virtual machines

All VMs run on hardware.
"Different from Aaron" isn't a legal defense. This guy is an ass, but he's not a criminal.
I do wonder how many of these utopian small towns ever really existed, and when (1920-1950 or so?).
Telltale is doing what one normally understands as microtransactions - we're talking about credit-based gaming, as opposed to episodic like Telltale.

I haven't dismissed microtransactions completely, though I'm doubtful that they are sustainable in the long run. What we've currently explored in the game industry when it comes to that really amounts to the gaming equivalent of Groupon - a surge of interest due to novelty, followed by apathy or downright aversion due to well, how un-fun it is.

And this isn't just mobile specific - look at Zynga and how their player numbers are dropping off a cliff. I have serious doubts about the sustainability of microtransaction-based gaming.

So, leaving aside microtransactions for a moment, this leaves us with "paying for content" (as opposed to paying for ephemeral virtual currency). I've included episodic gaming (e.g., Telltale) in this thought, and I don't believe mobile is better than traditional gaming platforms (PC, consoles) following this model.

The mobile space has been conditioned to expect rock-bottom pricing. Where an indie game dev can move a game like FTL on Steam for $10+, their odds of charging that much on iOS or Android is basically nil. Advertising and conversion on mobile is also notoriously hard, adding to customer acquisition and marketing costs. I simply do not see this working out for the vast, vast majority of devs.

If I were an indie dev right now I'd be gunning for the PC/Mac/console space hardcore. iOS/Android, in gaming and outside of it, is a gold rush with few winners and no economic sensibility.
We overlap the communities of both questions while making sure all the opinions from unregistered accounts are excluded.
It's fascinating to me that our profession is so hung up on the format of the scientific paper. A presentation rarely is that.

Instead, you're telling a story. And part of _any_ good story is a "hook", something that reels the audience in at the first sentence and has them (hopefully) wanting more.

My recommendation to _anybody_ giving presentations is, look at storytelling practices. Make it a fun experience, not a dry list of fact, or a chain of evidence. Reserve that for the actual paper ;)
Really nice and useful work, longzheng! If you like these kind of services and want to be able to convert any RSS feed (not just HN) into a TTS-spoken podcast, check out the somewhat similar site podcastomatic.com. I use it to kill my daily commute by listening to TTS-spoken blogs :)
My thoughts exactly. How many lives would this save? I think on the order of several thousand a year, minimum.
21.3: the type of person she's writing for. I might not call myself "brilliant", but I was a good undergraduate student and a PhD seemed like the next and most respectable step. Anything else was selling out.

21.4-22.0: usual pre-PhD stuff like GREs and those ungodly applications where they make you list textbooks going back to freshman year calculus. Then there were the rejections, the acceptances, and the prospective student meetings. Those were fun.

22.1-23.2: in graduate program (math PhD) until internship on Wall Street turned into full-time offer. Did not return for 2nd year.

23.2-29.6 (now): variety of experiences in industry, some good, some not-so-good. Sometimes wish I could go back for a PhD in CS, but I realize that the opportunity cost of 5 years' income is, at this point, a house everywhere except Manhattan (where it's still a few decihouses).

Here are some observations:

If you're funded, a PhD program isn't that bad. It can be stressful, or it can be a lot of fun. You will probably fall behind with the opposite sex. Your lifestyle will be lower-middle-class. Your social life will be weird. You can't hang out with undergrads anymore, because the first thing you learn (late September, usually) is that college was a different planet to which you can never go back. I had an undergrad girlfriend for a little while, and the contrast between her concerns and mine was stark. Grad school is part of the Real World, and not a financially flush one. Hence, you don't really have much in common with young professionals (who are enjoying having money until the kids arrive and they're strapped again) either. Other grad students are your social pool, and inter-departmental interaction is rare.

It's hard. Self-study in addition to courses is no longer optional. Procrastination will ruin your life. College encourages specialization and creativity: write for a sketch comedy group, go to poetry slams, play cards till 5:00 in the morning, get sloppy drunk once a month (actually, you're not missing out if you skip that). Grad school doesn't. You might have time for one extracurricular activity. Don't start it until you've had a successful first year. You need to become an adult, and quickly. People who manage their time and money like a 28-year-old seem to do OK. They aren't always happy, and there's still a lot of opportunity cost in pursuing a graduate degree, but these people manage to get through it and enjoy the process. People who try to relive college do not.

I don't think graduate school is this horrible wringer for most people. Some are unhappy, but many of them would be unhappy anywhere. Some love it. It comes down to personal and technical maturity, as well as desires. To complete a PhD, you really have to have to want a research career.

What is horrible is the job market people face after their PhDs. That is an outright disaster. But that's another topic.
Real names are really required if you're ever going to sell advertising at scale. Real people are much more valuable than fake ones/pseudonyms. Look at Google+/Facebook policies. Mixel was making a good business decision.
A Ph.D. is not something to be entered into lightly (and many do). I don't regret doing mine at all, but you shouldn't do it with the expectation that you'll get a professorship at the end, and for God's sake, don't go into debt to get one. Only do it if you want to spend a few years researching a subject in depth. And realize that there's a big, big world outside the walls of Academe :-).
Genes which are harmful to individuals can indeed propagate if they are beneficial to the group. If a group that contains a gene is fitter than another which does not, a gene may propagate even if it is harmful to individuals in certain situations. Presumably this is how altruism, community, and patriotism evolved. Kids die in battle all the time, even with no close family members to protect; chalk it up to a gene for "duty."
Ubuntu at the heart of Obama for America success
This is a fair question, and not downvotable imo, especially considering that john/megablast's profile is out of date.

There's a history of people who produce Android versions of their software which aren't anywhere near as polished as the iOS one. If that's the case, then of course nobody's going to pay for it.

If you have two versions which are more or less identical, that's different.
Legitimate software producers do use similar methods I outlined above. Examples, and correct me if I'm wrong, my memory is quite shaky on this subject, ubuntu installer, steam installer, most PC games, and I think even the open office installer uses similar.

The examples are usually just advertising other products they own, or features within their software so not exactly direct examples but its not a huge jump by any means.

While I agree the population of customers they will attract are those shady toolbar guys, it certainly doesn't follow that they cannot make a business out of pushing good software. I think as long as they tailor the ads to relating software or software people will likely install alongside the current piece it could work. Taking the high road could even payout bigtime down the line when more developers catch on and realise it won't detract from their image/brand by using such a service.
Sun software division was profitable and was getting more and more profitable. The hardware part was responsible for the deficit.
At what point did I ever say there was no trouble ?

There will always be people who try and get around the rules. Including using Apple's artwork without permission.
I wish github would fix how they parse closed issues. Yesterday I typed "fixes #8011 and #8012", and it only marked the first one as closed. Next I tried "fixes #8011, #8012" but it only marked the first one again.

Also, while I'm at it, support@github.com claims that "fixes otheruser/remoterepo#800" when merged into otheruser/remoterepo's default branch is not supposed to be marked as fixed. wtf?

And no, I am not going to email you a video showing a bug on your site.

http://heybryan.org/shots/2012-11-26-1209-github-fail.png

http://heybryan.org/shots/2012-12-03-1530-wtf-github.png
SIP would always be ideal since we could integrate our existing SIP handsets with your service for voice calling.
Now, if only we could somehow provide the comment threads, and allow us the ability to assign voices to different handles. I imagine something like a booming Voice of God for pg, annoyed grammarian for tptacek, maybe an old Mac-style gibbering lunatic for losethos, etc.

:)

EDIT: I just tried to listen to A Tale of Two Cities from Gutenberg on SoundGecko. I think I broke it. Anyway to cancel a job?

EDIT2: It got it! Awesome!
Please don't listen to the idiots telling you to charge a one-off fee for SaaS.

You're not 37signals and unless you have a couple of million burning a hole in your pocket, you should be charging reasonable subscription fees.
Ah, it's coming back to me now. Haven't really worked with midi in 15 years or so.

Correct, pitch wheel is a 14bit message, going from 0x0000-0x3FFF. Though I do remember that stretching that out a few octaves still produces noticeable stepping.

Also, forgot that midi has a portamento time controller, where you could program the time to slide between two notes, and leave it up the the tone generator to bend the note properly.
I'm surprised to not see OSC being included in even the upcoming version of Ableton Live.

This is one reason I prefer Renoise (though it's a somewhat apples to oranges match-up). It has built-in OSC support, and adding custom OSC message handlers via Lua scripting is relatively trivial.
>> Developers should be asked to write code and design systems, whether large scale services or libraries.

Specify. Blurry comments like this don't make the situation any better, no offense. You know that the solution i's entirely situation agnostic.
This is because there is no government mandate to actually report the results of any clinical trial, even the registered one.

Another comment [1] says that there is an FDA regulation to report results within a year [2]. Are you talking about something else, another type of trial or something?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5099671
[2] http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/about-site/results
Yeah but in high performance web app the real competence for C and C++ are JVM languages (Java, Scala, etc.), not Ruby and Python. Twitter switched from Ruby to Scala/Java because Ruby performance was terrible.

Could they have used C/C++ for better performance? Yeah, but Java was goodEnough and for most high performance web apps it is GoodEnough, the cost being some more money for hardware (for Ruby and Python the cost is a lot higher and sometimes not even with expensive hardware you can solve the problems):

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GoodEnough

Just like C++ became GoodEnough and people switched to it from C for high performance apps, just like C became GoodEnough and we switched from assembly to C.
Sustainable Performance
Why your product demo sucks
Goodzer's new API. 2.5B products from 500K local stores
> Which raises an interesting question - how do you make money on a platform like this?

Sell trainigns, certification, support (QA tested fixes for bugs that affected you before they are released to the public). SUN was doing all of that and was pretty successful. The hardware part of the bussiness failed them because of flood of cheap comodity servers.
I've had several friends get Ph.D.s, and here's what I see: it takes very strong, maybe borderline obsessive self-motivation, to feel ok throughout the process and to succeed. In that respect it is probably like doing a high-stakes startup. It's not for everyone.

But I think a lot of this post is about the pain of transition for brilliant students. They go from a position of constant praise and success, to a position of being constantly frustrated and subject to the whims of more powerful people.

In my experience this transition happens to ALL brilliant students. It is structural, in that up to the completion of a bachelor's degree, the vast majority of the typical academic experience consists of professors creating structured, completable assignments, and the student completing them and being graded. In short, exercises.

But once you leave undergrad, that structure disappears pretty quickly. Whether it's your boss, your investors, or your advisor, the "adults" above you aren't just guiding you to pre-determined success points. They're just other people with their own goals and agendas. And the problems you're tackling with them are not necessarily structured, easy, or even achievable.
It defeats the point of a review. It's an almost sure way not to have the same service as other customers, so what's the point in reading it?
It really disappoints me when good projects are given names that trigger bad mental associations.

Sure, everybody loves bacon – except vegans, vegetarians, Jews, and other swine-shunning cultures – but I really don't want to be thinking about bacon when I'm programming. Nor do I want to evoke the smell, taste, and unhealthiness of bacon, nor the dirtiness of pigs, in the minds of people I talk to about Bacon.

Largely for this reason I will probably not try, use, or try to get my friends to use Bacon. Please consider changing the name, perhaps to something that evokes the conceptual spirit of the project, because I'd like to see more people adopting FRP techniques.
They also actually have a structured format for download (CSV from an Oracle DB Dump).
None of those have anything in particular to do with "right" or "left" as they are commonly understood, not even the "handout to corporations" part.
One good way to self-educate on medical research in general is to read the Science-Based Medicine group blog

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

regularly. My single favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.
Great! Just two suggestions.

1) It's been a week or more since Lecture 1, it's complicated to keep track of what I've learned if I can't watch the next lecture for 1 or 2 weeks.

2) Having to open the console to watch the notes is really annoying, can't you just put the notes with a smaller font in the slides?
A Marketer's Defense of Facebook EdgeRank
Cool Easter Egg on Google.com - mouse over "I'm feeling lucky"
Anyone else seen this before?
Have you tried Schism Tracker? It's an Impulse Tracker clone.
I think this is correct.

The Judicial Conference of the United States determines the PACER fees and appears to draw a distinction between the quarterly "fee waiver" available to all accounts and a "fee exemption" granted by a court after making the requisite findings (e.g., exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information, research is for academic/non-commercial use, etc.).

Sources:

Reports of the Proceedings of the Judicial Conference of the United States at http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JudicialConference/Pro...

March 14, 2001: "no fee … [will] be owed until an individual … accrue[s] charges of more than $10 in a calendar year. … providing a basic level of public access consistent with the services historically provided by the courts."

March 16, 2010: "In order to encourage use of … PACER … by the public, … users [will] not be billed until their accounts total[] at least $10 in a one-year period. To increase the amount of data available without charge … users [will] be allowed to accrue $10 in free usage quarterly, instead of yearly, before they would be charged."

September 13, 2011: "… the current waiver of fees of $10 or less in a quarterly billing cycle be changed to $15 or less per quarter so that 75 to 80 percent of all users would still receive fee waivers"

September 23, 2003: "exemptions to the fee are only to be given upon a showing of cause, are limited to specific categories of users, may be granted for a specific period of time, may be revoked at the discretion of the court, and are only for access related to the purpose for which the exemption was given."

March 15, 2011: The Electronic Public Access (EPA) Fee Schedule provides for exemptions … upon a showing that an exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information. … [T]he Conference approved, a modification of the EPA fee schedule to include the following sentence: “For individual researchers, courts must also find that the defined research project is intended for academic research purposes, and not for commercial purposes or internet redistribution.”
Currently on the Steam client I have installed on my laptop that runs Mint, I can install roughly 20 games from my existing Steam library. Some of these games were available the moment I installed the client, others gained working Linux ports and became available in the Linux client with no action on my part.

Beside the Call of Duty port for Mac mentioned below, I know of no other game that has required multiple purchases for multiple platforms.
Transforming from Build-Measure-Learn into a Kaizen Culture
I'm a big fan of outsourcing development as that was the route I chose to launch my product (http://www.bidsketch.com) in a much shorter time than it took when I was doing everything myself.

I outsourced the early code and design. Quality of both was shaky, but I only had $3,000 to put into it so I wasn't working with much. I later picked up on the last 25% of the development to get into a beta (since my cash ran out), but I was very glad I took this approach.

I've since been able to work with higher quality of developers and designers and improved both areas, but when you have a product that's solving a real problem, customers will be more than happy to pay for that shaky 1st version (as they did with mine).

That said, I have a dev background and learning Rails before outsourcing it was a big help. I know people that don't have a dev background and successfully outsourced dev of their products (I even helped a couple pick their developers), but it's a bit tougher and it helps if you have at least someone with a dev background that can help you pick the right developer.