skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone have a good dataset I can use to populate these things and give them a workout? It'd be cool to get millions / billions of records of something real that I could test with. I could always generate something but I like real data better for such business.
I thought this was new: "Attach a one line comment convention with a new GUID to any code snippet you publish on the web. This ties the snippet of code to its author and any subsequent clones. A trivial search for the code snippet GUID would identify every other copy of the snippet on the web."
This article has a lot of applications that are in different scope. For example, it's applicable to game design as well.
John Gruber wrote a great commentary on iSuppli's methods a while ago [1]. Basically, his assertion is that their numbers are a mix of generalizations and pure imagination, and don't take into account a lot of important factors.

[1]http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/isuppli
i have an airedale terrier as well, dont see them around to much, great dogs.
Are you doing naive speed adjustment or taking more of a recycle-esque approach?
cool app...downloaded the trial.
There is a GM script that does this (PRE-fix), but with javascript: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

I tried with CSS alone, but as I recall it was inconsistent in multiple browsers, so went with js.
Amen. At Spock we had a cluster of women from Spain that got tagged as Catholic priests because they had names like "Maria Pilar Pastor". Identity resolution is one of the trickiest things they are solving.
Seems quite odd - I see them for sale all over the place for < $15 .. They might not be made in Bochum.

I would've thought this kind of spoofing involves sim cards rather than hardware.
I've built a Git datastore that works in much the same way. I constructed it to interface with Rails in a manner as close to ActiveRecord as I could. I actually ended up basing it on the CouchRest module for interfacing Rails and CouchDB, so there are a lot of similarities.

As soon as I find some time I'll do a full write up for anyone that's interested.
MySQL: Alive and Kicking
As a banjo player, let me testify: Slow downers are really useful, and they really need to be driveable using only your left hand, because there are these big fingerpicks on most of the fingers of your right hand. It's really hard to shake hands with a banjo player.

So the UI thing is quite important. Maybe even important enough to make me spend money on a second slow downer. ;)
True enough; but the rest wasn't bad.

Bookmarked.
Really quite impressive. Looks like they come from good stock. Congrats.
"The heuristic I suggest is: hear the corner case objections, make the objector calculate the odds, if the potential damage estimate is low (probability of the event occurring multiplied by its ability to put you out of business) keep the meeting focussed and move on. If you do this consistently your team will catch on."

I'm not sure what the last sentence is supposed to convey. In my opinion one of the most important reasons to raise objections is to get people thinking about other related problems that they may know of but not be thinking of at the time.

Attempting to suppress dissenting feedback by embarrassing or pressuring people on the spot sounds like a passive-aggressive tactic to me. If you don't want the input you might as well just ignore people or tell them to shut up.
"a much more serious problem is the lack of interest in AST manipulation/syntactic meta-programming in Ruby culture."

On what do you base this? Pretty much every Rubyists I have more than a passing acquaintance with would like to see more options for reaching into the AST. Quite a few would prefer to see keywords replaced with methods (headius likely disagrees because of what that means for JRuby)

I'd be surprised if the Rubyists you associate with didn't also feel the same way.

Now, matz is not so fond of this, but I'm bet a good number of hard-core Ruby hackers are. Or is there more conservatism than meets the eye?
> Difficulty of implementation should never be a deciding factor in whether or not to address the needs of the users.

Really?

Never ?

I've got to disagree with this.

All possible changes that one might make to a codebase should be evaluated in terms or ROI (return on investment).

If a 1 day project creates X value, and a 3 day project creates 5 X value, then the latter project delivers more bang for the buck, and that's where resources should be allocated.

To ignore the amount of work that a task takes is to blind oneself and discard rationality.
Part 1 says that the future of Java is really porting other languages (JRuby, Jython, Scala, etc.) to the JVM and enhancing the JVM to support them. Very little is said about Java itself. Perhaps that will be discussed in part 2. I, for one, would like to see a new Java that is less verbose and has better idioms for my tired fingers.
1. Learning to play classic music takes a long time. The process takes years.

2. Classical music recordings have a value.

3. People that play classical music should be compensated.

4. http://www.musopen.com/
This is great.

How difficult would it be to detect the notes that are being played by the bass? This would be useful for someone who is new to playing by ear and soloing.

For example, you pickup that the bass progression is G A D C--that makes figuring out the correct chords (and notes for soloing) even easier.
I've ridden in a pre-production one. They're pretty big inside. The hinges and whatnot were a bit creaky.
Cost is determined by how much people are willing to pay, not by the price of their components.

Of course knowing what goes into making one if these would help a competitor find a lower price point.
This is a useful app and certainly worth more than $4.99 to most people who need it. I wish he annotated the graph to show how sales numbers varied with the sales price.

Personally, I'd have a separate site that marketed the product and then directed purchasers to the AppStore. Getting less than $19.99 for something this useful is ridiculous! Make it easy to use with automatic whiteboard cleanup, annotations, and target it to the right industry and it should be worth a lot more.
Staff Jobs on Campus Outpace Enrollment
If that's what you want, why not use one of the many fine languages available that target the JVM? May I recommend a lovely Clojure -- dynamic but type hintable, with ridiculously easy Java interop?
Actually, I designed Capo for one-handed use. And, if you don't have a newer keyboard w/ the option key right beside the arrow keys, you can use pgdn/pgup to go between the markers, rather than opt-left and opt-right.
Dog.name = Ronin. I forget my instance vars sometimes.
I'm using the Apple-supplied time-pitch audio unit because:

(a) it has excellent audio quality
(b) it's well-maintained
(c) it performs well; and
(d) I don't like to reinvent the wheel :)
That depends on how you read the phrase "50% mark-up". I read it as 50% of the retail price is mark-up, the other 50% is cost.
From a morality standpoint, what is the difference between shutting it down and an indefinite state of stasis? The brain wouldn't know any different, it would just cease to process for a period of time, and then resume processing later. It would be just like a blackout. Except since the brain only receives stimulus from a simulated environment, the environment could be frozen as well.

So, if everything freezes and restarts at a later time, the brain would not perceive any missing time.
I have observed the most interest in code analysis tools, which obviously require constructing and analyzing an AST even if you don't manipulate it. Heckle obviously manipulated things. And I recall another syntactic meta-programming project, I think it used its own lisp-like sexprs.

But perhaps I am ignorant of a lot of progress in this area. Which other projects/gems/plugins have you seen?
It's not difficult to detect all the notes via FFT, slightly more difficult to detect only bass notes (harmonics come into play), and quite a bit more difficult to pull useful chords out.

That said, my first Mac app, FuzzMeasure, is an audio analysis tool---so I know my way around the FFT/etc. Read into this comment however you please. ;)
The books you buy for the Kindle are physical books, i.e. they are made of electrons.
The interface looks lovely -- I'm sure I'll download the demo at some point when I next pick up my guitar.

I'd be interested to hear your thinking when it came to setting the price.
Seems unlikely that the researchers are really simulating this on a molecular level as claimed in that article. Perhaps they are using the neuron as the unit instead?
I feel the same way about GDB lacking in C++. I ran across project Archer... apparently better debugging support for C++

http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/ProjectArcher
You're assuming isolation. No feedback. It wouldn't perceive any missing time if it had no contact with the outer world. I think that's treating the brain as if it was just a computer.
Spoofing my own Danish SIM card was how I first got the iPhone to work with a Danish carrier in later summer 2007. That was one of the first method used around the world to get the iPhone to work outside of the US. Before the software hacks (anySIM).

I needed to brute force the original SIM card to get a certain number needed to forge the new SIM card. Luckily the SIM card I needed the key from was old. Modern SIM cards can not be hacked that easily. I heard that the phone companies know that number and in some cases would tell that number to the customer owning the SIM card.
"diff: pretty standard utility, but this is what I use it for: I loop through all the files I’ve modified and diff to the previous version, then pipe to a grep where I can search for something I think I’ve changed but can’t remember where."

NOOOOOOooooooo. That implies he is using ad-hoc version control (uniquely named files or directories with non-revisioned copies).

Tracking and finding changes is what git is for. Commit early and often! If you mess up, it's got your back! If your compatriots use SVN, that works, but not nearly as well (when I used SVN, I would still revision control my local copies with RCS in between SVN commits). If you are developing by yourself, rcs is the minimum acceptable alternative.
That's a good suggestion to annotate the graph to show price changes. I'll whip one up and post it later. Thanks.
People don't care about the limit on text messages because the input method for most phones is slow, which forces them to be concise.

Twitter doesn't generally have the same input speed limitations, so an artificial limit serves to prevent information overload.

Of course, many smart phones have full keyboards now, and people are starting to use other things than SMS from their phones.
One can only hope that as the reductionist principles upon which our consciousness operates are made apparent by projects like these, that the masses will finally begin to be disabused of the ever-persistent and pernicious god delusion which has impeded human progress and welfare since the dawn of recorded history.
I agree. Further, I think the creation process is similar (start with an outline or rough draft and make revisions). The more extensive the later revisions, the more painful they are to make. Even the smallest change later on in the process can result in a significant inconsistency.

Unfortunately for software a small inconsistency can kill the whole thing, writings seems more resilient here.
Yeah, we're in the market and it almost seems to good to be true.

Any experience with the EV certs?

IMHO, this seems like it might be a good way to add user confidence if you're going the route of a lessor market brand.
Two parts to this:

1. I have a domain name that I've set up a catch-all address on it. So anythign@domain.com gets accepted and forwarded to my...

2. GMail account which has the best spam filter ever.

The process is this: when I have to give out an email address for a website, I use the website's address in the email. So if I'm sigining up to CNN, I put cnn.com@domain.com and for HN, I put news.ycombinator.com@domain.com.

This gives you two things:
a. Filtering ability as the To: header is usually set to the address you've given (ironically so that it passes spam filters better).

b. Blockability in that suddenly one email starts getting a ton of spam, it's an easy block. Believe me, many well known brands have "shared" (intentionally or not) the email address I've given them, and this set up proved very handy.
IPL Live Scores
Ask HN: Where can I find test data?
Hello Friends,

I'm doing some work comparing various data storage engines. I'd love to get a large dataset or two to use for the comparison. What do folks here use for large amounts of test data? The domain doesn't matter so much.

I've previously looked at the US Census data and that qualifies for the "large" part, but it's a little unstructured. It'd be cool to get some CSV files that are easily loaded into a variety of tools.
Birdhouse Helps You Polish Your Twitter Posts
Twitter apps for the iPhone may seem like a dime-a-dozen (or, to account for inflation, 99-cents-a-pop), but the newly released Birdhouse (iTunes link), by Sandwich Dynamics, isn't your dad's Twitter app--although, if your dad is on Twitter, kudos for having such a hip pater.

The first app by Sandwich Dynamics--and I hold out hope that the next app is actually sandwich-related, mmmm--the $4 Birdhouse only concerns itself with one facet of Twitter: the composition of award-winning, needle-sharp tweets of infinite wisdom. Consider it a sort of repository for your thoughts that have yet to make it to Twitter. The developers bill it as a "notepad for Twitter," where you can jot down ideas and edit them until they're finally ready for public consumption.

Birdhouse supports multiple accounts, saving drafts, the ability to rate your own tweets and sort by those ratings, unpublishing tweets that don't quite meet your strict criteria, and backing up all your data via e-mail.

Of course, the chief thing you can't do with Birdhouse is read other people's tweets, making Birdhouse more of an addition to your existing Twitter client rather than a full-fledged replacement for it. A Twitter composer for the discerning tweeter, if you will (and if you won't, then no worries).

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm acquainted with one of the app's developers and have been beta-testing Birdhouse for a few months now--I also enjoy piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. In the interest of full disclosure.
Tweetbomb - A Tweet To Shake The World
These comparisons to 1979 prices are misleading. Boston, SF, and NYC all experienced a flight to the suburbs in the 70s and 80s, followed by a return to city living in the 90s. These places are very different now than they were in 1979.
That's not the problem, the problem is when people attempt to use corner cases to destroy a good idea. Having a valid metric of when corner cases become truly important is a great way of avoiding people destroying ideas before they have a chance to come to fruition, simply because of corner cases that may or may not have major impact.

In the article he even states that it's good to hear the corner cases. You just have to make sure they don't rule the day unless they actually will have major impact.
OK. The CSS I have on my blog seems to handle long code snippets pretty well, but I can't explain how it works, since I just ported a Typo theme.

Regardless, it seems possible. Someone that actually has a clue about CSS and/or Javascript should submit a patch to fix HN :) (Unfortunately, I do not have said clue.)
Sure, the generalized statement is a bit iffy, but in this case, the number of users, ease of implementation, and utility of the feature make the lack of constants inexcusable. Bon's argument sounds pretty silly.
>"You can be president of the Unites States, if you really want to!"
>This one motivates person to at least try his best
>A more truthful message would be, "You have much higher odds of being struck by lightning than of ever becoming president of the United States"
>This one motivates the person to sit on his backside and do nothing.

No - telling someone something so patently unlikely sets a disconnect between a goal and the effort required to reach it (as if the only thing required to be president of the USA was to want it.) Two possibilities: the person ignores the message (if they're sensible), or they take it to heart and then get dejected when they fail.

This is also the current thinking on teenage girls and anorexia; presented with supermodels in the media and the (implied) message that they should/can emulate those role models is what is thought to cause self-esteem problems in impressionable teenage girls, which can lead on to more serious disorders.

I think it would be better to teach people how to make the best of their circumstances (and by this I mean personal attributes as well as social surroundings), rather than encourage unrealistic expectations.
This is an ass-backwards blog post. Web standards aren't simply a "product" used by web developers. Every feature added to a popular standard is a tax on every compliant implementation. It is absolutely a valid engineering question to consider whether something is best accomplished in the standard, or in application layers built over the standard.

Indeed, instead of Bos ignoring this guy's argument, it seems to me it's the other way around. The standards body's response to "add variables to CSS" is "why? that's an application-layer concern, easily handled by any web development framework, which has nothing to do how browsers actually process style information". The onus is in fact on the advocates of extending CSS to explain why this feature is so important browsers should be required to implement it.

It's also just bad engineering to add features at lower layers that are just as effectively handled at higher layers. The end to end argument in systems design doesn't just apply to network protocols.
Love it -- thanks for sharing
(most of which do not work)

That's pretty much the key: if you can make it work in a medically useful fashion then there's a lot more money to be made selling it as an actual regulated Device.

As long as you don't make medical claims then it won't be regulated as a Medical Device, but it would still have to follow other Consumer Product Safety regulations. Those are much easier/cheaper to meet. The only EEG/EKG type devices I have ever seen were kits and they didn't provide any medically useful information.

Ultrasound imager classification is covered here: http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...
In your example you are deciding between delivering two different valuable improvements, which is fine. Bos' is deciding to do nothing just because the one solution presented to him might be hard. That's inexcusable.
Explain to me why we should be stuck with one standards group's idea of how to organize style information, when an app-layer implementation of the same idea imposes no cost to end users, adds flexibility, and doesn't force the whole web to rush to standardize an idea that sees less than 1% adoption among all web apps today?
A 100% clean source of energy cheaper than coal. Period.
This is very close to the setup I have that enabled my to determine that emusic.com has leaked my email address to spammers. I'm getting 100 emails a day from them (the spammers) and it's fortunate that my filters work.

Don't give an email address you care about to email.com.

Cross-referenced to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566825
Someone who is good at painting and hacking and sees similarities. Just like this person is good at writing and hacking and sees similarities.
It's a better analogy than almost any of the other ones, maybe because programming isn't only like writing, it is writing (a point the OP makes in its title).

The fact that people put so much effort into coming up with analogies for programming, and that they're all ultimately unsatisfying, suggests that programming is a fundamentally new activity.

Edit: But it's good the analogies are gradually getting less catastrophically wrong.
To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn't So Green
I work at Google (blinks AT). Our search results are no different, but we have a corporate membership with ACM's Digital Library which is insanely useful.

I'm sure most other major tech companies have the same deal.
Why StumbleUpon's Use of IE6 is Hurting America
Mobile Startup Bug Labs Having Surprising Success In Enterprise
I want to see a tweetbomb in a movie--preferably a bank heist. :~)
The first paragraph of this article by itself leads me to believe this is some strange propaganda. Perhaps the term "Followers" is being taken much too literally by the author, but I'm afraid that the million people following Ashton Kutcher are not waiting to bend to his every command.
Freddie Mac CFO Commits Seppuku
David Kellermann, acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, was found dead in his Hunter Mill Estates home Wednesday morning in what police say was an apparent suicide.
What's the first slow downer you use? I'm a banjo player as well but haven't found a good way on a mac to slow Scruggs to the point where I can distinguish his notes.

Capo looks amazing, but if I'm going to drop consider dropping 40 bucks I want to compare :)
Capo is selling to a market that includes folks who (and I'm included) would easily throw an extra $100 into a guitar because it has a nice rosewood back & sides versus mahogany.

That $100 isn't going to help you play any better. It'll make you sound different, but it isn't improving your ability to play. The same can be said for buying a $30 guitar strap, quick-release pins for $20, a pedal for $80, etc...

For $50 (as of July 1), Capo _will_ help you play better, and using it regularly will make you a better overall musician. So will the other tools, which also cost $50.

My reasoning is probably quite similar to why they're priced the way they are--it is a seriously helpful tool to those that need it, and it is worth the money.

Now, why do I think someone would choose Capo over the other tools? I think Capo is easier to use, more well-integrated with iTunes, performs very well, looks far better, and is generally more Mac-like (see point 1 below). Any one of these reasons would be a valid reason to choose Capo.

In some respects, one could argue that I should charge more than my competition based on those 'better' points (see Eric Sink's software pricing article, for instance). However, Capo is a 1.0 product, and I need to build Capo's reputation, and a large following of users.

I hope this answers your question (and helps others out there looking for more discussion about pricing their own products)!

(point 1) The other apps are cross-platform, and have some odd quirks. The UI isn't quite right in areas, the keyboard shortcuts are strange (to me, anyway), and behavior isn't always what I'd expect.
True. It's not as if the group will be so smart, that they will be able to think of all the corner cases ahead of time, anyways.

There are times when something might not be just a corner case, however. One should ask: is there a motivation to exploit it?

In online games, the impact of a minor bug will be greatly enhanced if large numbers of users are motivated to exploit it. An example: in Eve Online several years ago, certain operations involving items could cause large server overhead. This wasn't seen as a big issue, because those operations weren't that frequent. Unfortunately, these operations were also virtually free, so the losing side in a big fleet battle would sometimes use this to cause a server crash, often negating their loss. The result: lots of crashes during big fleet battles, and lots of unhappy paying customers.

Perhaps the right solution to a corner case is to make sure the economics don't encourage exploitation.