skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The musical world has already tried out relative scales. It was in fact the first thing tried in notation. Look at the notation device used for Gregorian Chants to see it yourself.

We already use relative notation for most instruments. Trumpets, Clarinets and Tenor Saxophones typically read notation where Bb is equivalent to C on the page. What you'll note we Don't do, is change our relative pitch between songs.

No. Relative pitch is Very Hard, because as a musician, my hands don't play relatively. When I see an Eb on a notation sheet, my body knows how to play the note without me thinking about it, and it has to, because sometimes you can have notes flying at you with a rate of 32 a bar. This does not leave time to translate between the relative abstraction on paper and the absolute pitch of my instrument. It's not just harder.

It's much, much harder to train your brain and body to be able to map the same object on the page to twelve different body positions, depending on some variable that changes at random between songs.

Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.
And one clueless bloke artlessly trying to bag on it.
Everything in government is political. Western democracy is a decent form of government, but it's not the best - benevolent dictatorship is the best; it just doesn't have checks against it turning non-benevolent.

The problem is where do you draw the line, because it has to be drawn somewhere. You claim that limiting the government's scope is good in all cases, yet this is clearly not true - if we were to take arrest powers away from police for example, society as a whole would suffer.

Limiting scope can be argued all the way down to anarchy, which is clearly not supportable at anything beyond the size of a small conclave.

I have no problem being simplistic, as long as I'm right.

The truth has never been simple in politics, and anyone who maintains that it is, is simply displaying contempt (open or otherwise) for your intellect. As a result, we can't rely on simplistic solutions for politics, and have to be cautious of things that try to make it one-size-fits-all.
If that theory was correct, one might expect Forth to be really popular among Japanese speakers. I don't see a lot of evidence for that.

I tend to think it's a more general effect where humans actually want a certain amount of irregularity in their languages/notations, to act as markers or error-detecting codes of some sort. e.g. "he", but "him" in accusative case. But who knows; English gets by with "you" being both singular and plural...
Only HN could get from API to the Greengrocer's Apostrophe.

There is no fully agreed upon means make words ending s (x or z) into possessive - the below site gives example of Dumas' and Dumas's as valid.

My general response has been if it looks ok with just an ' leave it and move on. I can open my own shop with the left over apostrophes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Nouns_ending_with_si...
Would a good translation of La Francophonie be "the French-speaking world"?
Or it could be confirmation bias--if you just bought a Tesla you probably want to feel good about your decision.
How to use Eclipse to write and debug Groovy scripts
>What if the European countries had to had to pay for their own defense?

The European countries pay big bucks for their own defense, thank you very much.

And the US doesn't provide any defense at all. It merely uses its pressure to get the European countries to participate in its inane crusades and wars, from Korea to Iraq, which are for it's own interests.

Plus, defense against what? The only thing that brings any trouble to European countries is mostly aligning with US interests in some wars (e.g EU got some terrorist attacks by islamist groups in revenge for this -- few and far between in any case).

Not to mention that what the US officially considers "threats" are either lies (like Bush's WMDs in Iraq) or BS third world countries that couldn't harm a duck even if they wanted to (and which could not care less about having any war with Europe) but happen to be rich in oil or other resources.
Surgeons in South Africa
I don't see any evidence to support your very dramatic claim.

Quite the opposite. From early chemotherapy on to the human genome, stem cells, the Allen Brain Atlas, The Gates Foundation, modern biotechnology, organ regrowth, medical devices like the CT scanner (half invented in the US) or the da Vinci system of robotic surgery, etc etc etc the modern healthcare / pharma / biotech world owes a spectacularly massive debt to the US. To say nothing of the surrounding infrastructure everything requires related to technology from the microprocessor to the Internet. How much did that tech speed up R&D, try quantifying that little contribution.
GitHub really become the standard for open source projects in such a short space of time, even the big name projects felt compelled to switch. Congrats GitHub.
I've seen a bunch of companies start to use icon/emoticon characters in their email subjects to get attention - Newegg, LinkedIn, etc. It certainly works on me. I'm afraid soon every mail will have an attention-grabbing icon and we'll just get inured to it.

I have to admit, if I launched an email campaign, I'd use them too...
Three things I did to prevent Drupal registration spam
How were you taught notation in the past?
I think this notion of the drugs companies needing incentives for R&D is somewhat of a myth. A large amount of the research, which they avail themselves of, is publicly funded at places like NCI and NIH. That's right, we the taxpayer helps produce these 70K dollar drugs.
In Sweden garbage creates energy. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/28/163823839/swe...
Sub-saharan Africa ≠ South Africa
Thanks, interesting reading.

Still, I prefer my rendition. The problem here is the incompatibility between the rules of pronounciation -- French permits silent letters to end a word, English in general does not. In translating to English you must choose either to honour the French or the English rules of pluralisation and possession.

Because I don't write many English sentences with de la, du or d', I figure that sticking to the English rule is the best move.
What high cost? US companies pay more money for advertising than for creating the drug.

Add other regulation and inefficiencies, and subsidized research would work with 1/10 the money.

Not to mention that because of the commercialization of medicine, tons of research is for BS like Viagra and other such drugs (like the tons of stupid feel-good "energy" drugs, so that your boss can squeeze even more overtime out of you), where far more important but less lucrative stuff is ignored.

That's how you get the US sucking donkey's balls in infant mortality rates. As if it was some third world country.
Not sure how standard they are, but there are a several hundred you can browse in OS X by selecting Edit > Special Characters... > Emoji in Finder. 🐈
For me it's the RSS feed
It'd be clearer, but much less fun to put it that way :D
One thing I've found frustrating with Webkits console is the introduction of shortcuts recently (year ago?). In particular I'm used to hitting cmd-L to get to the onmibar but if I'm in the tools it does something else now (modal controla = bad).

Then I have to use the mouse, which makes me sad :(
No you shouldn't. Your 345m is heavily weighted by Japan's 127m population which accounts for 2.3% of the research spend from the chart in question.

If you want to play that game then Japan is incredibly subsidized by the US and Europe, but that's not the question at hand. :)
You need to be aware of local climate as well - its fairly common for people to look at mountains in Scotland, think they are quite low (they are) and conclude that they can't be risky or difficult. A 1000m mountain in Scotland can kill you at any time of year if you aren't prepared or don't take weather into account - you'd be insane to try it in winter conditions without preparation and appropriate skills (winter conditions being possible anywhere from October to May).

To me anything involving mountains or boats needs a fairly level headed evaluation of risks (NB that's just based on my experience and interests).

Here is a decent article on the subject: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/outdoors/outdoor-activities...
So why has this not been banned and that contractually enforced by ICANN already?

The potential for both technical and social confusion here is enormous and without a standard, the browser wars and other totally random momentum on the issue will just increase!
Nowadays more so, but back in the day it was a more stable job environment.

That said, while nothing is 100% certain, there are jobs and companies that are more stable than others. Even in trendy companies, not just IBM-style monoliths. You don't often here about massive layoffs at Apple or Google, do you?
Show HN: Stumbleupon for Inspiration
My mate and I recently built a new website that aims to present quotes and videos in a cool, visual way. Imagine BrainyQuote but visually more compelling.

We've just added a feature - stumble. Users can now stumble their way through inspiration. Simply click this link - http://getinspired365.com/stumble and press the right and left arrow keys. If you feel like you are in need of a bit of motivation it is a great way to spend 5 minutes. If there is a particular topic that interests you, then click a tag and you can stumble through inspiration just for that tag.

thanks!
Looks pretty nice. Is there a vim version / close alternative?
clicky - http://getinspired365.com/stumble
This is a really good idea. I know nothing about these guys, so I can't evaluate whether there's true success or just marketing, but the concept is great.

One of the dirty secrets about Corporate America is that "your manager" is really only a manager. What do I mean? A manager is someone hired to make decisions pertaining to a financial asset someone else owns. Actors have managers who handle their reputations and Hollywood careers. Business owners have managers to run the day-to-day. Wealthy people have financial managers. In a corporate setting, you just have a boss.

In a typical company, your manager is the firm's manager and your overseer. Important distinction.

Talent really doesn't have representatives.

Freelancing is the place to start with this, because they know they're on their own, whereas corporate denizens are still somewhat clueless, but I'd like to see this idea branch out. I hope it succeeds.
I always code on dark backgrounds. It's the white that kills my eyes after a number of hours...
This "lie", as you call chemotherapy, has kept my dad alive for 5 more years than what the doctors were giving him when he was first diagnosed. Would he get cancer if he didn't eat sugars,fats and over processed food our western society eats? Maybe.
But you don't know that. Instead, you are trying to neglect the obvious, which is the fact that chemotherapy is actually saving lives of people like my dad. I agree that we should improve the way we live our lives, eat healthier, exercise more etc etc.....but you can't bash companies making life saving drugs.
We still do. The US may neglect their TLD but they are heavily used elsewhere in the world.
How to beat Snake
While you can always go look at Workflowy itself, a demo of your app would be good.
Moderators edit titles all the time but now it’s been 7 hours and no one still has corrected "Github" to "GitHub"?
Tr changing some disk-related settings in about:config.
The US is within a small margin of error to being on par with both Japan (adjusting for their huge fraud in longevity) and South Korea on life expectancy. That sure sounds amazing considering our obesity / diet problems. I'd argue in fact that our advanced healthcare system and large investment is the only reason Americans aren't dying at 70 instead - we're able to keep people alive that would otherwise die much younger. I'd argue if you matched diets to other countries with very high life expectancies, we'd easily match or surpass them in longevity and live to 83 to 85. Our problem is mostly lifestyle.

Infant mortality? What, you think Bosnia and Russia actually beat the US in infant mortality, or is it more likely they're lying? (given Russian men live to 60).
Is it really okay to make an identification copy, if one of them is open source and the other is commercial software?

I do not think it is. Try and be a little original.
Maybe not child pornography in that instance, but I associate any sexually motivated action involving children (secretly filming them for devious purposes) to be somewhat of a sick act nonetheless whatever you want to call it. We don't need to get into specifics here for it to be considered a warranted worry, we all know there are going to be stories of people using devices like Google Glass for nefarious purposes.
How To Run LinOTP On OpenSuSE 12.3 With PostgreSQL
And also Campfire: http://campfirenow.com/
IE used to have dynamic CSS properties [0], which were most often used in the wild to achieve max-width in IE [1] (at huge cost — in the linked article the author warns against using the very performance-expensive technique).

But the way that technique is implemented is actually very similar to what you're describing: the CSS causes the selected element to examine some of its DOM properties and conditionally apply styles on a per-property basis.

Maybe this is another great old IE quirk that needs some W3 loving?

[0] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537634(v=vs.85).as...
[1] http://www.svendtofte.com/stylesheets/reflections-on-max-wid...
Last paragraph from the article:

> I can provide citations for any statements I've made, but since nearly everything I said is NDA'd I'd like to be careful to anonymize my citations, making sure to find national studies instead of state or county specific studies.

So I believe that if you are interested in any particular claim the OP made, you can contact him for some resources.
You missed the point of my last question. Right now. Today. You have an expectation of privacy in your own home. For anyone that understands how surveillance works, you would know that closing your door is pointless as far as keeping the sound in. By your logic, this is not appropriate. Because, "hey, you should know that it is easy to hear inside your home."

However, if police wish to violate this, using relatively common and accessible tools, they have to have a warrant. Consider the phone calls you place. These are just as exposed to third parties as any email you send. Yet to intercept them police need a warrant. For others to do so is illegal.

Note, the deciding point here is not that it is hard or easy to intercept your communications. Or sit outside with a microphone. The point is that those activities require a warrant. Because they are illegal otherwise.
Why is unicode support so bad in 2013?
git-svn does it perfectly. We use it to track OSS projects that use SVN (we use git internally). So far, it has proven to be very reliable.
I got it. :-)
It's amazing how what is currently the largest Bitcoin exchange service can be so unprofessional. You would think they could have anticipated this.
If that were true, the rest of the world would have radically surpassed the US in terms of drug innovation, research breakthroughs, medical device technology and so on.

Because their lower investment levels should be producing returns so much higher, that they would quantum leap the US while spending less. That hasn't even remotely happened.

Sucking donkey balls on infant mortality? You should become better educated.

How about Canada, at 5.22/1000 versus 6.81 for the US. That's your magic line on 3rd world countries and donkey ball sucking? Well Singapore is 1.92, and Japan is 2.6, so Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Britain are apparently 3rd world countries by comparison.

Half of the US infant mortality rate is due to high black poverty. Maybe you should become informed on the root causes of problems in America before making bad assumptions.
Tons of people are making money from waste.
The last example I have in mind is a guy that created a hugely successful business in France last year.

What he does is basically just taking all the waste that comes of workers building houses.
Then he sells it to the weight.

The magic is that he gets paid by the building companies so that they can leave the site a few days earlier, and he gets paid for the waste he brings back to the factories.
Epic win win situation.

Only thing needed to start is a truck, and a few spare hours a week.
A totally immature market. Many technological barriers for end users to install and use the solution.
Iceland extracts methane to fuel cars from it's garbage but I think the yield is pretty low: http://www.or.is/English/EnergyandEnvironment/Methane/
"the manufacturer can just name a price and everyone has to live with it"

Considering the context of the discussed business and that the offer is not always just something optional, I might add "or die with it..."
Would it be crazy to scrap the TLD system altogether and build something better in its place? I'd love to allow for wildcard TLDs, or even remove the dot requirement altogether. Built in unicode support, but with a layer of security to prevent against similar-looking character abuse.

I know that very idealistic and probably naive, but the current system just feels very archaic to me. Can't we do better?
Slightly off-topic, but I've been intrigued by one way functions for quite a while now. How does someone go about making a one way function like MD5 and SHA1? How do you know it can't be reversed easily?
The re-painted feature is a very nice idea. It will really be useful when you it's available in a number of browsers, so that you can compare the results.

I'd rather have a cross browser developer console. It would be easier to have the information in the same in format when debugging browser issues.
Strangest Twitter user?
Good point, although "eventually reaching philosophy" is a lot easier than reaching it after exactly five steps. Also that requires clicking the first link. Still you are right it's a phenomenon that should be ruled out.
The US patent and IP system is completely perverted.

The reason to have copyrights and patents is to fairly compensate the innovators (that part works really well). But there's an expiry on both patents and copyright - that's explicitly there so innovations can benefit the people, and to spur new innovation. And that's where the US system falls apart. Loopholes are found times and again and in the US once you have a copyright or patent, you basically have it forever. A monopoly, hurrah!

That's just plain wrong. The US needs to fix its system. I imagine when that happens it will also make more sense for Pharma industry to spend more on R&D than they spend on marketing and bribing Doctors and healthcare providers and politicians.

Really happy to hear Indian courts don't fall for this sort of crap.

How can Disney have a copyright on Mickey Mouse? An absolute joke.
And all of that surrounding infrastructure is reliant on Mathematics which didn't originate in the US.
5 Popular Services & Companies Blocked By PayPal
Looking at the number of pull requests for any given project I guess is a very good indicator. Looking at the number of closed jQuery pull requests yields a pretty high number: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pulls?direction=desc&pa... — there's no doubt in my mind that putting Bootstrap on Github is the reason it succeeded as well (look at the number of pull requests, forks and issues raised. Looking at Rails you can see there have been thousands of successfully merged pull requests: https://github.com/rails/rails/pulls?direction=desc&page... — would that number of bugs and features have been addressed if it weren't on Github? I could go on with lists of more high activity repositories, but I think it's more than obvious Github has been a blessing to a lot of open source projects and undoubtedly helped them become more successful and stable (how much is a somewhat subjective and un-measurable thing).
I´ve always thought that someday there would be a way to use old dumpers (or even actual ones, although some of them have a good recycle system) as a source of raw materials. After all there are some decades of waste accumulation there and proper recycling is relatively recent. It could be a new kind of mining.
I don´t know the composition data on old garbage, so maybe is not worth the effort. For example I imagine that iron and copper was well recycled and reused even 100 years ago.
Kind of shocking but that's not even the biggest problem.

The first problem is the money they spend on buying laws, aka bribes, aka "lobbying" as the USA likes to call it. Corruption in its finest form. That's why they get perpetual patents;

The second problem - and I kind of assume that that falls under "marketing" expenses - is that they can basically bribe healthcare providers and doctors to use their products.

Result: Most expensive health care system in the world, by a large margin.
How Procrastination ruined my life
This is something the team is looking into implementing. There's a ton of work we need to do and we have that in mind as well.
This is a great explanation. I wish I would've had something like this when I started out haha. Another good one is the mixing colour analogy.
Garbage is a Mafia standard: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/01/feds_charge_32_alle...
What's the real environmental cost of electric cars?
Becasue if they want to kill that competitor & take over their business, they can just cut them off from the api.
Font panel. YES.
https://github.com/thinkpixellab/flatland/pull/15
I'm saying that this isn't necessarily a great idea, just because it's working for this guy now that doesn't mean we understand it and it could be dangerous.
There's an old saying from my Yorkshire roots, 'Where there's muck there's brass'.
How Gmail Has Evolved Over the Years
We just changed the way you can inspect objects in the Web Console, check out a Firefox Nightly. For more details you can read:

http://www.robodesign.ro/mihai/blog/web-console-improvements...

Also, we have an open bug about clearing the web console after page reload. See:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=705921
There's also Anne Hunter in Course 6, who I think started out as some kind of secretary and has essentially been the most important, helpful, and generally nice person in the EECS department at MIT for the past 20 (?) years.
Because every implementation of anything has certain assumptions and when you're not someone who regularly juggles different scripts at once it's easy to miss a lot of things (e.g. blindly assuming that everything is ASCII).

Also part of the problem was U+0027 and its use as a quote character in shell scripts. So that was not a Unicode issue but rather a shell script injection issue and programmers do that all the time (although usually with SQL, I guess).
They have been standardised in Unicode 6.
I work for a company who sells a Garbage Collection log analyser if that counts!

http://www.jclarity.com/products/censum/
Such a useless comment.
Mathematics was arrived at by research which everyone shared when the vast majority of the research was happening...
Bosnia and Russia are both listed as having worse infant mortality rates than the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mor...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash should be an OK start, with further links to more precise explanations of the crypto concepts.

> How do you know it can't be reversed easily?

Some you prove: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provably_secure_cryptographic_h...

But more commonly (because provably secure crypto functions are extremely hard to design) you think hard about them, then unleash fellow and opposing crypto specialists to try and break them[0], as was done by NIST[1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_hash_function_competition
How The Location of Top Colleges Hurts The Economy
How Parents in America Differ from Parents Everywhere