skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Turntable dunked all other music streaming sites in playlist quality for the simple reason that the intelligence behind song selection resided in humans rather than an algorithm.

It was a specific application of the general idea that social recommendations are more powerful than algorithmic recommendations. I don't know how valid the general idea is, but when it came to Turntable, it worked. People search the space of musical works much more effectively than algorithms.

And then Turntable did nothing with that power. They had high quality playlists being minted by the thousands on a daily basis, and I could not access any of them.

At least for a time, they were focused on live engagement. Unfortunately, it's just too hard to grow a music streaming product that demands each listener be present to click a button for every song. I loved the service, but I also have a job. I cannot be on the site all day long. At the risk of being presumptuous, I would guess that the product leaders were blinded by their devotion to live engagement.

Focusing instead on their brilliant, yet simple, solution to the problem of "What song should go on next?" would have been the right call. But they did not walk this path.

As for their new product, which predictably focuses more intently on the live engagement aspect, I am unconvinced. Turntable Live provides a subset of the functionality that Twitch.tv does, with less reach.

Best of luck to them. No doubt, they are an extremely talented team.

And I'm really, really going to miss Turntable. Kickass idea. (yeah yeah plug.dj, whatever)
Queens of the Stone Age Chrome Extension for Facebook
Can resonate with the author and you. Had similar experiences.
> However, there are also errors and use cases with braces for which whitespace works better.

I find it instructive that you weren't able to think of an example.
US is -20. Other countries have other numbers.
Actually, the USF fee that's assessed on every phone bill you pay (in the U.S.) was originally supposed to be used to connect schools, libraries and municipal buildings both rural and urban areas with the understanding that once the fiber capacity was in place to service those institutions, the providers would supplement their income by connecting businesses and private residences.

In the mid-to-late '90s, I was part of a team that built significant fiber-based distance learning systems in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Texas and smaller installations in other states. The schools, a local fiber provider and our company cooperated to submit the grant proposal and the USF funds ended up offsetting enough of the equipment/infrastructure costs that the schools and SP could agree on a rate that the schools could afford.

The last of our systems (that I was involved with) was installed in about 2000 but stopped the organization overseeing those services held applications for (from memory) about 18 months. I'm not aware of how the funds are distributed now (if at all) but I know for a while some of the schools we'd connected complained that they were no longer receiving their subsidies. I do know that the fee remained on my telephone bill.

So the question is "why didn't the infrastructure installed using USF funds lead to lower prices for consumers?". I think the answer is that Internet pricing for home service in the U.S. is too lucrative - no guarantees on service (yes, you're quoted maximum through-puts but those can be affected by your neighbors) and relatively large bills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
Nope. It's for source tracking.
What about everyone who bought a .com domain early....

Or really anyone who buys a stock early for a company that becomes huge.

I mean, if you buy bitcoins right now you are speculating that it will become a stable currency at some point. It offers a bunch of interesting and disruptive features that cut out a lot of middle men.
Personally, I wouldn't bother. Asinine requirements are usually the product of asinine leadership and toxic environment. Just find another company to apply to.
This is like lowbrow-dismissal bingo. Someone (cough) should turn this into actual bingo cards.
Show HN: IndieGoGo campaign for a gaming CMS
We put together an IndieGoGo campaign for Dungeon, an open-source CMS for gamers. Check it out here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dungeon-gaming-cms/x/5376612 Give us your thoughts about it!
If it is not useful as a value store except to speculators, then it still has plenty of utility as a value transfer mechanism or a universal FOREX.
Show HN: new kind of conceptual search engine
Please post some brutally honest comments about my new search engine that mixes search results with conceptual information about your query.

This is something I have been thinking for a long time and now I have managed to create an alpha version, lots of things are still to come and I assume there are tons of bugs with conceptual information rendering code (you'll see what I mean by that when you try the service). There is a LOT to come later but the basic system is now operational (and very immature - pre-alpha would be the version number right now)

Yes, I plan to monetize using ads (and by a few affiliate tactics) but that's still on to do list, I'm just now trying to see if the concept works.

(This is not my first project, about 10 years ago I with a co-founder founded a company that we sold to a major player in the sector our company was in.)

I can go tech if people here are interested? The code is in Clojure :-)
Side story somewhat related.

I had an interesting experience when I was just out of college (long time ago) and the power company cut off our power and damaged some machinery. I complained and the utility was totally accommodating of my complaints and it seemed as if for sure they were going to do something. After all they agreed with me. They were really nice and assured me I would get compensated.

So I had nothing to fight against after all they appeared to be on my side. And each time I followed up it was just a bit more time.

Well, as time went they actually did nothing other than importantly give me the impression they would do something. [1] They inserted as much time as possible between the event and doing something as they could. After it all played out I had lost my steam because the whole fight didn't seem as important as it did on the day it happened. And I dropped it. But learned a valuable lesson in terms of human behavior and how to divert anger by agreement.

[1] Happens with collecting bad debt as well (when you are owed money is what I mean). Customer strings you along maybe sends a bit of money or maybe nothing but always seem as if the big payment is right around the corner. Them bam! Sorry not paying anything.
India could replace the US as Facebook’s #1 market in a matter of months
More like, "Many people can't use it in most situations, therefore it's worthless."
Same feeling. Followed by, "Oh good, he's going to focus on Occulus."

If there's a man you want as CTO, it's Carmack. One of the all time great programmers working full-time on VR is the best possible outcome.
Google Glass Mirror API now available to all developers
Austrian?
Hmm, really? To effectively enforce this (in a BTC only world), they would need to constantly be de-anonymising the blockchain. That would require dark-pools to be illegal (in the long run), which would require a unified world government.

It's either that, or simply expect people to hand them money on good faith.
I had an Apple IIe (with 64KB of RAM) when the PC came out (with 640KB of RAM) and I also once stated "what is anyone going to do with that much RAM?" - It sounds silly now, but it taught me a lesson about automatically rejecting new technologies and 5 years later I was part of the company who was first to send CATV signals over fiber optics.
> You should just try using Python for real ...

"For real"? I write Python constantly. Speaking from a purely statistical and probabilistic standpoint, it's very likely that I've written more Python code than you have. And I don't have whitespace issues in my own code. But by reading the Web I find that it's a problem for many.

Find an example where some student's C or C++ program fails because, as the following examples proclaim, the source file contains a mixture of tabs and spaces.

https://www.google.com/search?q=python+indentation+error
Existing Python libraries can be called quite easily from Julia using PyCall (https://github.com/stevengj/PyCall.jl)

Regarding ecosystem development, one advantage that Julia has is the low learning curve between "user" and "contributor". Idiomatic code usually runs reasonably quickly, and can be made "fast" by tweaking some things within the same language (devectorizing, or turning off bounds-checks, for example). These kinds of optimizations simply cannot be done in NumPy without dropping in to C+CPython or Cython (each of which has impedance mismatches and language+toolchain hurdles).
You already gave up your rights when you agreed to "implied consent". This one isn't even in the Constitution.
You mean this would not happen: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/08/us-germany-jobs-id...
one that could turn into a 8 million thing in a day when the speculators stumble and the bubble bursts.
Bob Dylan Goes Interactive in 'Like a Rolling Stone' Clip
Actually the CPI proves exactly that it is stable.
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/

This is not the observation of one person or perspective. It's the actual purchasing power of USD.
By the way, for those who aren't familiar with Lenses, it's not a bad thing to think of them as getter/setter pairs (which should be a little unsurprising at this point). They're first class, more principled, and more generalizable than your typical getter/setter pair... but my use of them here is far from unintentional.
beta list - i don't think helps that much. the founder told me himself not to bump up servers for him bc it'll come over 3 days and first day not that much.. less than 80 so far but i guess there still is an email blast coming.

there's also publications that's specific for local lifestyle magazines that's more relevant for me. for example, chicago mag is part of modern luxury and they have l.a. ny miami "mags" etc... you can pay to have it blasted to their user base which is a double opt-in newsletter subscription (risky move that worked for us bc its so targeted - chicks that like lifestyle sht). what i did was get that blasted to approximately 150,000 people (60,000 in chicago) with majority of reader base residing in la, ny, chicago. their average click through rate is 2-4%. the email ad was cleverly designed with a shopping giveaway so when people click through they come to the landing page and then the viral coefficient kicks in to get their friends to also register to get notified when we launch. if i had to do it again i think one can optimize the sht out of this to make it so much better. my was a half-hack job but still worked great.

also our current landing page was optimally designed so that it would naturally get good upvotes on stumbleupon. we had 3k people per month hitting our site via stumbleupon.

reppio being a social commerce player can leverage off of other social commerce sites pushing to svpply and even tumblr to get users baited with pictures and then come to the landing page to give us email addresses. all of those combined plus on the ground and various other tactics led to a significant amount of email addresses ahead of launch. that set we started to blast.

maybe i was premature in saying that techcrunch/tech sources wouldn't be that relevant since there are writers who write in this space and we did hundreds of hours of work on this but to no avail (we also didn't want to hire a pr person to run this and in hindsight i don't think i know pr that well). however, i didn't want to leave it to chance and so i hedged all positions for launch. now i'm sure the real hard work begins in trying to find product market fit / see how i can get re-engagement up from my core set of users. i'm in the business of engagement; that is the single most important variable for my business. just ask that chick who cut a check to pinterest very early on even thought they had a couple thousand users.

this is why i'm going to HN to get feedback from a variety of people. i know that my demographic will be geared toward women. that's natural way for my business to shift focus. but there is a player who has succeeded in balancing a 60/40 split in user base in the lifestyle category. and asking men who probably don't like shopping and seeing if there is any way i can make it cool for you guys to want to engage with my site was the goal of this post.
This problem is typically solved through certification. As none exists in our world, we have to improvise.
You can spray your plate with hair spray or clear gloss paint too - the camera flash reflects and the photo is not usable.

It's illegal, of course.

I much prefer the idea of getting a custom plate that's something like 00000O0000 or 1111l11111 etc. depending on the font.
What's really missing though is unions with destructuring `case`. Once you start coding in a language with proper unions, it's hard to go back. In python it might look something like this:

DataType = union({ 'type1': ['field1', 'field2'], 'type2': ['field3'] })

DataType.type1(val1, val2)
DataType.type2(val3)

# pretend syntax
case datum:
DataType.type1(a, b):
doSomethingWith(a, b)
DataType.type2(c):
doSomethingWith(c)
gamblor956 could one get you on the phone/skype/mail?
MILEY CYRUS WRECKING BALL VIDEO MOVEMBER PARODY
CheapAir.com First Online Travel Agency to Accept Bitcoin
That was prevented only because of strong unions effectively setting a minimum wage for their industries. Hence why non union workers where getting shafted.
Which suburb? My wife Erin took welding at Triton in Tyne near west suburbs and liked it, but they shut the program down before she could take the advanced class.
At first I was elated, but then I realized I was confusing Carmack with the egotistical John Romero.
On the desktop we can install OS X on non-Apple hardware to make Hackintoshes. So far this is just a kernel port with no graphics, but will it lead to installing iOS on non-Apple phones in a similar way? 'iClones'?
I'd say that's a much more fair way to go about it. If you're going to ask someone to do work for you, that should be a paying gig, and it should be a task worth doing. If you're looking for a free sample a public repo or a task that fits within the parameters of a normal interview time would be better alternatives.
Sigh - yet another hiring process complaint post. As an employer hopefully I can shed some light here.

a) If you are trying to hire 5 engineers, say, you need to talk to ~25 candidates at least. It's a competitive market.
b) If you aim to talk to 25 candidates in a short period of time, you need to have SOME standard way to evaluate candidates if you don't want to just throw darts on the board. Being sloppy with process is bad for companies and the engineers and a waste of everyone's time.
c) In order to create a standard process, you have a very limited # of options to work from. I've seen comments like "do a co-working day to get a real sense" or "do a contract and see them work with you daily" positioned as realistic options. They are not. If an engineer has an existing full-time job they don't have the time to do co-working days or contracts.
d) The other options are 1) whiteboard interviews 2) coding challenges 3) some combination thereof.
e) Lots of candidates hate whiteboard interviews. Lots of candidates hate coding challenges too. Neither is a perfect system but it's better than doing nothing or asking for co-working time.
f) We use coding challenges at the top end but we time-box it to 3 hours. If someone asked us to pay for the time, we would happily do so.
g) Our coding challenges have 3 different problems so candidates can pick whichever aligns best to skills. One problem is JavaScript-heavy and 2 others are Ruby/Rails-heavy.
h) Several engineers on the team solved the coding challenges on a timed basis before we put them out to candidates. Doing otherwise would be stupid/unfair.
i) In the few cases where we've been able to do 1-2 co-working days, we have offered to pay for the candidate's time. Not full freight consulting dollars but something that indicates our seriousness.
j) In this case, the OP got caught by a dumb coding challenge to build a full website. But the headline paints with a broad brush because coding challenges by themselves are not evil. They are a tool that can be used well or poorly. That's all.
Did VW #playtheroad shamelessly rip off music tech startup RjDj?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWCtMKGia6M
vs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mss2tv8PYBw
Just my $0.02:

OpenVPN has a built-in 2-factor authentication based on the X509 certificates: you need to have a valid certificate together with a valid password to connect to the VPN service. SMS/phone based authentication does not add another factor since it is also a "what you have" type of authentication (i.e. your laptop can be stolen in exactly the same time as your phone is stolen). Of course, X509 certificates work the best in the enterprise environment but that's the OpenVPN target market anyway.
What a strange move. Maybe he wasn't spending enough time at iD and was forced to leave?

You'd think his having a leg in gaming and a leg in VR would create a wonderful synergy. Knowing all the in's and out of both worlds he could have insured great integration of Doom 4 with the Oculus rift - making sure iD was on the technological forefront while the Oculus would have a great demo from day 1.

(see the Leap Motion for an example of what happens when you don't have a good demo day 1)
You might be an authoritarian if...
Decrypt to Anything
>[ ] The name of your language makes it impossible to find on Google

Unless you work for Google, in which case your language's name (maybe shared with a common verb or a popular board game) will quickly become the top search result!
Which drone future will Americans choose?
Perfect.

To me it looks like a few new languages are introduced every week and I just cannot understand why. I can understand that a programmer who reaches a certain level wants to build his own language, but do they really think that the world is waiting for yet another programming language?
It is just not getting easier with a new language.

This article is a must read for everyone who considers writing a new language.
If all the arguments do not apply for your language, then the world is probably really waiting for your new language. :)
China Central Bank: People Should be Free to Use Bitcoin Exchanges
>Also, the Open Handset Alliance terms may prohibit OEMs from replacing Chrome with, say Firefox.

Any link to that "prohibition" or it is just speculation?
Need a complete template package for your startup?
Nice article, some ideas reminded me of a passage I read on Chris Dixon's blog a while ago.

"The successful products took big meals and converted them to snacks. The Internet likes snacks – simple, focused products that capture an atomic behavior and become compounded only by linking in and out to other services. This has become even more so with the shift to mobile."-

His entire post wasn't necessarily about 'specificity', but I really liked his 'snack' analogy. Looking at currently successful products, many are incredibly focused and snack-like.

1. A defined use-case (flavor) they users easily distinguish from other products.

2. Efficient interaction (consumption) that addresses the problem: quickly, simply, and mobile(ly).
Misleading title - this is just Darwin. There doesn't appear to be anything iOS specific in this announcement.
"One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after that) well.... you don't have a currency, you have a speculative commodity."

This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation. You are only comparing btc to the most dominant currencies in the world right now, and btc obviously is not one of the most dominant currencies.
Sure thing! As for actual people to contact. http://twitter.com/turoczy is the writer for Silicon Florist and has ties to Pie.
https://twitter.com/stevemorris is the director of OTBC.
I'm working thru it in order. I didn't feel the need to jump around, but it would be nice to know how much longer I have to go, i.e. how many more screens.
>If only there wasn't an agreement prohibiting such replacements.

Exactly what agreement?
The implication of license plates changed from individual tracking (recording the plate during a crime) to mass tracking (recording all plates all the time). That's very different.

Also, misusing a gun is different than misusing information.
I suck at chess but I recommend a holiday in Indonesia. People don't drink alcohol much but socialise by playing chess. I ended playing chess nearly every day. I didn't win at all. The coffee is also awesome.

http://www.shunya.net/Pictures/Indonesia/Yogyakarta/Chess.jp...
http://xkcd.com/1105/
Emergence it is!
CASH Music Summits, music meets technology
Hackintoshes are largely possible because it's possible to get almost the same components used in Macs on regular PCs. It might be a little more difficult to get your hands on the chips Apple uses in iPhones/iPads (not to mention cobbling them together). Not that doing so wouldn't be pretty awesome.
What has to do OHA with Google Apps?
My classes were at Elgin Community College (I was living in Saint Charles at the time). Unfortunately, its quite the haul from Chicago.
When one is in public, out of eyesight of any non-friendlies, one does indeed expect privacy.

When one is moving across several disparate geographical locations, there is indeed an expectation of privacy.

The simple "hurf durf you're in public ergo no privacy ever" argument is horseshit, to put it bluntly.
ChromeOS on Android on Linux?
Basic guide to collaborating with Git, Github for Windows, and Bitbucket
The "Dallas Area Rapid Transport" is the only counter-example I could find.
No, this is Darwin which is the open source part of iOS / OS X. I would imagine iOS looks for some pretty specific set of things from the chipset it is running on and there is no "generic ARM phone".
Minimum income is currently not a politically viable option. None of the major parties even considers it as a serious option, nor is there viable public support for it. Minimum wage has widespread support in the population and during the last years the conservative party never styled itself as fundamentally opposed to minimum wage (though always only minimum wage implemented independently from government through collective bargaining where available). As evidenced by the loss of parties who are actively campaigning for a minimum wage in the recent election it’s also obviously not an issue that wins elections (though probably also not one that loses elections).

About half of German employees are covered by those minimum wages through collective bargaining (which, of course, only exist because of the political and regulatory framework for collective bargaining in Germany). Garbage collection workers, for example, are at €8.68, lowly construction workers are at €10.25 (East Germany) and €11.05 (West Germany) and so on.
Insofar as one could consider the kernel to be the core of an operating system, this (specifically, XNU on ARM) is the core of iOS. Having the Darwin userland atop that is simply icing on the proverbial cake.

What would you consider the core? Is it UIKit? Cocoa? libc? SpringBoard (the homescreen application)?

(Edited: s/Darwin/XNU/; thanks shibby!)