skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've long held a fascination with the myriad ways humans have invented for writing things down. Sites like Omniglot [1] get a semi-regular visit from me. In a side quest, I spent a little while looking for alternative systems for representing math and music and came up unbelievably short. There are remarkably few alternate systems for them.

Wondering why that was, for fun I decided to try and come up with some different approaches to representing math and music to see if I could better understand why there's so little variety.

It turns out that it's incredibly hard. With math (at least basic arithmetic and algebra), after you mess around with the basic symbols, there's not really many other places you can go with how actual equations are structured without losing lots of the easy-to-use mechanical features that modern notation supports. In a few ideas I essentially recreated a parse tree, which made reducing the sides of the equation relatively simple, but moving things across the equals turned into a nightmare.

With music the obvious alternatives fall into a couple categories:a system for each instrument, something that can succinctly capture the expressive bits of a given instrument (fingering, bowing, vibrato, etc.) and throw out bits that don't work on that instrument (vibrato on a piano, pizzicato on a wind instrument etc.), but it gets impractical stupidly fast. The other alternative is a universal system like we tend to use today, but you end up with all kinds of space wasting piano roll-a-likes or hard to read while playing encodings like A2--B#2--C2--

This will probably not replace current notation, but it represents quite a bit of creativity and at least a noble attempt at doing something which most of the people on earth haven't managed to do (almost all musical traditions in history essentially exist in a state of verbal transfer). I think it's cool and has lots of great ideas.

[1] - http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabets.htm
Why wouldn't it work if the spread was high enough?
According to page 87 of the specification document (March 23rd 2013 revision), it's 12mm+-0.5mm, with a service limit of +0.5 to -1.5mm. There's a varience request in place to allow installation of 1/2" (12.7mm) string, so long as we use COTS imperial string with +0" to -1/16" tolerances.
MC Orangethirty has a nice ring to it.
Those are pretty dishonest stats though considering the vast majority of that land is extremely rural and much of it is owned by the Federal government (the Feds own 28% of all land in the country). The UK doesn't have something like Alaska which is both huge and empty (Alaska alone is 7 times the size of the UK, but has just 730k people).
I agree. But as the article goes on to point out, we are not more trusting of complete strangers, but rather strangers who've been vetted by many AirBnb reviews, background checked by Uber, etc. Technology has changed the definition of a 'stranger'.
Is my peers defined as those in the same field as my work, or other coders my age, or all other coders?

I'm in a traditionally non-coding field, so my ability to code is significantly above average compared to them on the occasions that I do sling code in order to help solve a problem (I would be one of maybe 2 or 3 in an office of 100-150 that would be proficient in this). On the other hand, I'm probably well below-average if you compare me to anyone who actually codes for a living.
Background Checks
In plain words: I suck. The day I stop sucking, is the day I stop learning. I'm not better than anyone.
> What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer?

The formal name is "Regulatory Capture" [1] but the common name is
simply corruption.

The interesting thing the article fails to mention is most of the
countries which the US imports rice from actually ban rice imports
from the US. The US, specifically California central valley, had and
mostly still has a huge rice industry, but since so many countries
ban our imports farming rice not as profitable as it could be.
The countries which ban rice imports from the US are typically trying
to protect their own rice farmers.

NOTE: I'm using the term "ban" in loose manner, since in some
case they just make importing rice from the US painfully difficult
and expensive though endless and unfair regulation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
You need to contact a lawyer for this kind of stuff. In regards to users, they never read it. So it might as well be in binary.
15% of every billable hour?

Will the engineers PLEASE wake up... A deal where an organization is taking a cut of your gross is NOT worth it.

So you work for an entire year, working nights, weekends, and they will take %15 off the top? At 200/hr, if you gross 400K they're taking 60K?

Are they really providing 60K worth of service? No. It's your reputation on the line. Your ass working weekends. You being called at 3am when the server crashes.

If they find you the contract, offer to pay a finders fee that seems reasonable.

They did the work up front, fine, then pay them up front. But don't let them keep sponging off of you like a leach.
"You basically need 3 elements to play an instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score."

(1) Hummingbird translates length in a trivially superior way to standard notation. No contest imho.

(2) I would say it does a somewhat better job on pitch as well. Both have huge shortcomings so I can well imagine far better systems.

Dynamics is a push so I'll say Hummingbird is an improvement in translation. I don't think it's a big enough improvement to climb the mountain of inertial standard notation has in it's favor. I'm typing this on Qwerty keyboard too, yep.
Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaJF6DizVK8
Taxis are not the problem. Private cars are the problem, and the city does a pretty good job keeping them out of Manhattan as well, with tolls on many of the bridges (any bridge into Manhattan connected to a highway is tolled; local street bridges are not) and a 19% parking tax.

But there are certain situations where you need a taxi and the bus or subway won't do. Think the elderly, families with small children, etc.
#mcbain.mcbain:after { content: ' That's the joke.' }
Office with a door, and without a phone/line. Good chair, nice monitor(s), and trackball. A/C, clean carpets. A plant, and a rubber duck/action figure for debugging. A window if possible.
I don't think that's true. I think there are a lot of developers that are either 1) unskilled/inexperienced and know it, 2) inexperienced, but think they are awesome, 3) experienced and skilled but believe themselves to be adequate, and 4) skilled developers that know they are skilled.

And I'm sure there's a whole range in between. Perception of ones skills don't always (may I say rarely) match up with their actual skills.

Personally, I think I'm average. There are moments where I think I did something smart, but they are fleeting. Is my perception accurate? I have no idea, I've never been graded by someone with far superior skills than myself. I'd consider myself insecure with my skills, but always striving to do the best I can.
Unroll.me Redesigns Yet Again
Odd, no mention of driverless cars, which are sure to wipe out the taxi industry entirely.
I am building a product (http://mailrecipe.com) that converts email conversations into workflows (like bug tracking). The idea is to have personal communication with the customer, even while automating workflows. Will something like this help in your case?
> What I don't get is why a city as dense as NYC supports any transportation method that puts a few individuals above the public good.

Well, for one thing, NYC is answerable to NYS. Lots of people commute into NYC from its suburbs, they like to drive, and they do vote.
> A debugging switch that, when enabled, turns a valid program into an invalid one is madness.

You mean like gcc's -Werror? Or enabling asserts? Both of those seem useful to me.
actually in both settings you have an example of shared values being affronted.

Strictly speaking, yes, but certain values are much more likely to lead to mutiny if disrespected. I'd like to think most managers would get deposed/abandoned pretty quickly if they disrupted their employees' access to food and safety.
I wonder if this works in parts of the world that don't even have 2G...
Well, this clearly shows that at least one of the 3 qualities of a good programmer are alive and well. :)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
Brain Made See-Through with New Imaging Technique
pg, any chance you'd be willing to swap out techcrunch reporters
for bloomberg west on the next demo day?
> People don't expect their email to be read by others, especially the government, period.

That is inconsistent with the wide usage of GMail, which (robotically) reads your mail to give you directed advertising. So GMail users at least cannot claim that they expect no one else to read their email as they've opted-in to having their mail read by running the service at all.
Bitcoin Just Took a Major Nosedive - But Why?
"So you work for an entire year, working nights, weekends, and they will take %15 off the top? At 200/hr, if you gross 400K they're taking 60K?"

Your view is very myopic. If your best alternative without them is 100/hr or even 150/hr, then in fact you are still net ahead.

"If they find you the contract, offer to pay a finders fee that seems reasonable."

Who is assessed the fee and when? In this model, they are taking an "equity" stake so to speak. The developer bears lesser risk for a souring relationship.
But the problem with your argument is you are assuming they did nothing to protect their privacy. They specifically addressed the email to someone. Or had it specifically addressed to them.

As the other poster said, consider the urinal. Whether intended or not, there are about to be a lot of images of people at the urinal taken by a capture device. Should men just get used to this idea and expect these pictures online?

I roughly get and agree with what you are saying. But, consider, it is trivial to build a microphone that can pick up every word you said within your house. Do you feel that police should be able to use such a device from a van outside without a warrant? Hell, it is trivial to build a camera that can see through most clothes nowdays.

That is, the laws are there precisely to cover things which may be easy otherwise. Hell, it is trivial not to pay your taxes. Illegal. It is trivial not to honor a contract. Illegal. We don't make laws against jumping to the moon. Because... not exactly relevant from a legal perspective.
And yet you enjoy no 4th Amendment protections for parcels you send by a private carrier such as UPS or FedEx. They can snoop in your stuff all the want and it would be at most a civil matter (with rare exceptions).

Your analogy would make better sense if you were talking about using a government-provided email service. But trust me, you don't want to do that, at least if it's anything like my government-provided work email.
When I lived in Santa Barbara we had a gas furnace. I'm surprised that, given the cost of electricity out there and the moderate temperatures which are nearly ideal for heat pump efficiency, that the financial incentive isn't there to convert even for moderate use.

But, thanks for clarifying.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, England, Russia, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, New Zealand, and arguably PRC, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, India, Mexico, Indonesia, Qatar, and Chile, are all developed nations not in the US or Eurozone.

You are, however, correct that most of these countries issue their debt in US dollars ("sovereign debt") rather than their national currencies.
I haven't looked into building anything(I've just played with demos when they're available) but my understanding is that what is offered in most of these neurointerface platforms is an API for simple things, and then low-level access to digital signals, with one channel for each area of the brain being sampled. So if you're doing things low-level expect to be applying some DSP knowledge.
Not much info on that page, except for the link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpWmGX55a40
Watching it now. It gets interesting at 16:30. By the looks of it, developers won't get direct access to the hardware; everything will go through a Google-hosted cloud API.
SimCity Arrives On Mac 1.3M PC Copies Sold Despite Connection Requirements
I've used traditional notation for more years than I spent minutes looking at this. I'm not sure anybody can say anything useful beyond "hey, this isn't what I'm used to".
> C, D, E... system that is not the norm

For those studying music theory in the English-speaking world, A-G is the norm. (German has H as well.) That being said, I've only ever met musicians from the commonwealth... I will not comment on other languages and whether or not they use solfège since I've no experience in that area.
I just want to bump this question - they talk about lifestyle, allowing people to travel, etc. Does this mean you have to be based in the US, but you can then go on a trip and keep working? Or are they happy to work as agents for anybody around the world?

Also, what level of talent/experience are you looking for in your freelancers? How do I know if I meet the requirements :-)
It's extremely hard to get an accurate idea on where you rank. The sample size you have to draw on is small and biased. I just find it overwhelming that the more I learn, the more I realise I don't know.

However I will say, your ability to admit insecurity about your skills/acknowledging you could be better probably places you _above_ average! The scariest devs are the ones who think they're very good, but in reality are poor. For example I know something I'm really weak at is writing good multi-threaded code, I try and keep things as simple as possible, but I know other people who think they can write great multi-threaded code, but spend vast amounts of time debugging deadlocks.. Hmmm
Fantastic perspective.
I don't know, the explanation in the article seems pretty pedestrian to me. Who's looking for exotic answers?
No. That's cow-orkers.

Piers are raised structures, including bridge and building supports and walkways, typically supported by widely spread piles or pillars.
As someone who spent years as a front-end developer, and now am something more of a "full stack" developer (I like the title "Product Developer"), I would highly encourage people who consider themselves front-end to spend some time learning about things behind the scenes. You'll become an overall better developer for it.

Not to disparage this service, but I worry that it's just going to encourage a new generation of folks to never actually learn to actually develop software, and continue the less than great nature of much JS in the wild.
Prediction: everyone here is better than everyone else here
One of my points exactly. :)
So would you consider the various blind musicians (such as Ray Charles) not real musicians? After all they can't read music.

Edit: I do otherwise agree with you that a full musician should understand much of the theory of music, and not just be able to repeat a group of notes that they heard (that is, they should be more than just a human tape recorder).
Why some people create new languages or new alphabets? Because it's fun, and why not?
Unstructured Data: Turning Chaos Into Performance
Empirical evidence shows money does make people more happy. But there's a lot of if's and buts.

It depends on current earnings and it also depends on what others around you earn and it levels off.

And it's not logical in any way. Halving your wage but then quartering everyone else would make most people more happy (As per experiments)

Commute time for instance is something studies show people don't realise the negative effects on happiness. So earning ten grand more will make you more happy but if it increases commute time you could end up less happy overall.

And I think if you earn more but end up less happy you're more likely to waste the money on stuff or quitting your job or missing a promotion and many other things that might in the end make you earn less long term.

If you want more money and the happiness that goes with it I think don’t concentrate on the money.
>I don't understand why people consider bitcoin something worth investing in

You don't understand the power of frictionless micropayments and monetary privacy?
The problem I have with your reasoning is that we are not talking about an act that would have dramatically worse results were it directed toward women. In fact, because there is a much more vehement reaction to anything oppressive to women, a similar "shove" would actually result in more pro-feminine reaction than this one will pro-masculine, so in my opinion, you're ignoring the realities of activism, which will turn that shove on its head.

Like I said... I don't find your view "wrong" in any absolute sense. I find it mildly objectionable that it's arbitrary (which is fine) while hiding behind claimed rationality (not as fine).
Show HN: Real time Markdown editing and export Etherpad plugin
Hummingbird - shot down in flames.
I think I'm better than 75% to 100% of coders who think that 'coding skill' is a total order.
Do you know of any more resources about this system? One of my side hobbies is learning more about alternative representation systems for languages, math, music etc. Finding resources on alternative music systems is kinda hard in my experience.
> 1. deterministic destructors that run at the end of functions (therefore making things that look like tail calls not actually tail calls) and

Couldn't owned boxes (~) passed through the jump transfer their ownership to the next frame (so they'll be destructed by whoever finally does return), and everything else just get destructed before the jump?
If you do this let me know. I want to buy tickets.
Indeed. I bow to your wizdum. ;-)
Hi Michael -

Welcome to HN, and thanks for creating an account and then posting a minute later. We're happy to have you.

I'm not sure you're going to get very far saying (to your knowledge) EVERYONE else doesn't give a hoot about the engineers they work with and only cares about squeezing every last cent, and only you care about "creators." Some of us have built businesses that have been around for a while caring about all parties involved.

This is a challenging business. Best of luck to you.
If I remember correctly the new version of TCL will have special syntax to enforce TCE. Unfortunately I did not book mark the relevant online discussion.
I recently installed DashClock https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nurik.roma... and while it's not strictly a 'learning' tool you could likely write an extension for it to do what you are looking for. I like it so far, better than normal lock screen anyway.
My thought was that a relative-pitch notation might present a steeper learning curve. But I don't really know.

I've worked with intermediate-level musicians who are skilled at regular sight-reading, but who struggle to learn to transpose on the fly. A relative-pitch notation might be like requiring everyone to "transpose" all the time, forcing them to learn this skill before they can proceed.

On the other hand, maybe you'd teach it differently. Instead of learning transposition as carrying around an offset to add to each pitch, you'd learn it as carrying around a scale to which the relative pitches would be mapped. I wonder whether this would be easier or harder to learn.
How can 90% be below average? Perhaps you yourself are not familiar with mathematics?
I used to live in a city with a community land trust. You can buy the house and get a long-term lease on the land but the land trust (a non-profit organization) retains ownership of the land. They also have a right to buy the house back when you sell it, limiting you to 25% appreciation.

The intention is to keep house prices affordable. (Sort of an upscale trailer park, now that I think about it). If you had the means to buy elsewhere, you probably would.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_land_trust
Actual coding skills are not what makes a good developer. Being a good developer is about applying the right knowledge in the right way. I'm great at that. But I wouldn't bet on being able to out-program other competent programmers.
Apparently sanxiyn is planning on looking to add support at a similar level to D: http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1c3clf/c_ffi/c9codm1
Self-appraisal is subject to cognitive bias.

The Lake Wobegon Effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The_Lake_Wobegon_e...

Dunning–Kruger effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Two versions of Goodhart's law
Google Wants To Operate .Search As A “Dotless” Domain
They need to be able to control the currency, thus bitcoin will never become more than it is now. I'd bet on the powers that be squashing it a million times.
A relevant post by Derek Sivers regarding averages:
http://sivers.org/below-average
One doesn't need to know musical notation to understand any of those ideas. Related, one can learn how to read music and never learn any of that stuff.
> It's hard for me to understand how you can blame a company that puts up a paywall more than people using violence (or at least credible threats of it) who enforce the rules stopping others from competing

Because we're not 15 year olds who just read Atlas Shrugged?
Ah -- if you think of the car wash as "light detailing" vs. "automated car wash at the gas station", that's a big difference in the value proposition. (~$5 vs. ~$40).

I agree convenience could easily trump the financial returns from renting the car (or even vs. airport parking costs). It looks like you have some good ideas on that front.
Really awesome idea guys! This is the coolest unlock screen concept I've seen—and the Android unlock screen really could use some help :p
Open source needs near-commodity hardware with open specs and kernel source (mostly). Otherwise the hardware vendor uses its secrets to build a proprietary software stack.

We had Minimo, MicroB, etc. before 2010, for all the good it did. Were you paying attention? Did you see any open source smartphone winners back then? I did not.

Android did help flatten and uplift the smartphone space, and make it open. Qualcomm helped too. Kudos to those two!

/be
What major metropolitan areas? Would San Francisco or Los Angeles count?
UK LulzSec hackers who targeted Nintendo, Sony, plead guilty
Agreed. As a pianist, I not only look at the position of individual notes, but also the positions of the next 3 to 6 consecutive notes. This way I can think in "groups" of notes - which is very helpful for sightreading broken chords quickly.

The one place I could see pitch symbols being slightly beneficial is when notes are either way above or way below the staff. But even then, after some deliberate practice these can be recognized pretty quickly as well.
But if we know that there is a vast invisible finger of society tipping the scales against women in a given context, it does not strike me as necessarily immoral to put explicit structures in place designed to tip things a little bit back the other way.

Seriously? A "vast invisible finger?" No, I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. I'm all for social equality. Equality of opportunity. The way to implement equality is not through further inequality in another direction. That means opportunity starting all the way at the bottom, with basic education, moving up towards higher education, government, and business.

That does NOT mean "hey, we're going to fix this RIGHT NOW, and if women/blacks/pygmys/minority x are underrepresented in any way, we're going to 'tip the scales' in your favor until someone arbitrarily decides thing are 'equal' enough!"

It is unfair to blame men for this situation. It's also unfair to everyone to try and solve the problem of discrimination with more discrimination.
Since the compiler didn't succeed at compilation, no program was generated at all. Removing asserts is really compiling a different program.