skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really fascinating, I'd love to see this on a larger scale.

I was exposed to music very early but I never began to learn an instrument until I was 12. It was, however, the bassoon, which being rather unstable in intonation leads a malleable young ear to have a bit more pitch sensitivity than one raised on more settled instruments. In high school years I'd practice "absolute pitch" in a darkened practice room with a piano. I'm not sure which battery of tests the researchers are talking about but I'd be interested in taking them. The 1 in 10000 figure is especially striking to me - having grown up around musicians I never thought about how rare it would be amongst the general population, but considering how few musicians I knew would claim to possess it I suppose that does make sense.

I don't know if I really possess "Absolute Pitch" - I may just have really excellent relative pitch and know one or two reference notes for certain. When I had people test me in high school I usually just listened to the tone versus the "C" in my head and guessed relative to that interval.

Playing music with some musicians drives me crazy because they transpose anything and everything. What key is that song in? Who cares, it's I-IV-V . . . that hurts me. A friend played me a rough demo of a song in person in E, emailed me a recording she made in F, and played it in rehearsal the next day in F#. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. I can transpose songs and sing and play in different keys than the first time I heard it, IT JUST HURTS MY BRAIN.

I also hear songs everywhere. That trumpet note held on the jazz recording you are listening to? That's the same guitar note that starts this other song, and now I'm stuck hearing it in my head. What, that doorbell doesn't remind you of the beginning of a Haydn symphony? Well now I know what's playing in my head for the next hour.

The most interesting thing about my pitch sense is that I always find myself riding a motorcycle on the highway at 6600 RPM regardless of what speed I actually want to go. I just gravitate there without thinking about it. Even though my bike is much smoother and stronger at 7000+, I always find myself back at 6600. The unconscious reason? 6600 RPM * 2 cylinders = 220 Hz, or exactly an octave below the concert "A" that orchestras tune to. I've never ridden a triple but if I did I'm pretty sure I'd get stuck at 4400 or 8800 RPM for exactly the same reason. I hate being off-key when I'm riding.
Honest question: what phone do you find superior to the iPhone 5S, and why?
That's just the bargain Google struck with carriers and OEMs. They have the reins on Google services, but allowing OS customization was a concession to get third parties to adopt Android as the de facto iOS competitor. And OEMs and carriers love to push their own customizations to build revenue streams.
The other way to correct for this problem is founder cash-outs, which require some negotiating leverage but solve it even more elegantly. Rather than saying "We're worried that you'll take a small exit that would be great for you but a disaster for us", they say "we'll pay out that small exit we're worried you'll take, because you're being offered it anyway, and now you have the same incentives we do to shoot for the fences because you're already independently wealthy." It aligns incentives almost totally, and is viewed as a benefit rather than a restriction by everyone involved.
For footnotes, to make space for the hands, because we slightly perceive vertically centered text as below center, because culturally we expect documents to start at the top of a page, and to reduce the degree the head or eyes must turn to look at the text.
I'm spending this next year to build a new operating system. If you're truly interested in changing the future of computer email me: dan at techendo dot co
NSA phone surveillance legal, federal judge rules
A great law hack, should I say?
This makes people 'trendy', trailer makes people 'white trash'?

Personally I see no difference between this house and trailer.
ICloud?
A captcha I can actually read
I always was fascinated by compression. It feels like no big progress was ever made in lossless compression. How would todays best compression algos compare to the ones used during the times of the C64? And compared to the first zip algorithm implemented in PKZIP?
If you're not in the highest marginal rate bracket, or most of your income is not investment income, it's generally not worth the expense of paying for these services.

Fees for these services generally start at $10,000, and only go up from there.
Though copyright as it is has issues, this seems very off, as characters are the work, moreso than the settings and even plot - as only one of those three items tends to be unique. I've written books and stories, and the best answer I can give to you is this:

Those characters do not live in your head. They live in mine. I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper for others to learn more about them. No one else does, no one else can say they did this or that because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe. To say someone else can just write with my characters is tantamount to violating an innermost personal space - indeed, it's intruding on one of the most personal forms of control and self-expression possible. You can't just create situations and settings for things that only exist in my mind. I want others to know, so I'll put out a public work. That doesn't mean someone can put something in my world, my character's lives, without my approval. Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.

It is just too bad that the current form of copyright is far from ideal, as we've seen. I'm not against fan fic or other expression of still-in-copyright works either, I tend to like them and tend to agree that they do more good than harm, just pointing out that it does matter in some cases, discretion of the author should always be allowed, and just being well-known and popular doesn't magically make that control disappear. Being dead does though, so much of this doesn't really apply to the original topic, but felt I had to make a response to this.
Now You Can Install Evasi0n 7 Updates using Cydia’s Default Repo
If you are running this on your laptop and want to save your battery then use this patch...

http://pastebin.com/BxXDDtTh
Tax shelters are very tricky. Unlike most other crimes, it's possible to be convicted of tax fraud even if the tax shelter was legal (or at least not illegal) at the time the shelter was put into place. This is generally because many tax provisions look to the facts-and-circumstances of a transaction or an item of income rather than to the strict letter of the regulations.
> my new ThinkPad is twice as thick as my MBP

how much did you pay for the thinkpad and how much did you pay for MBP? i doubt that your MBP is thiner than the Lenovo Carbon X1
I want to keep this short, so I'll only address your first point.

He used the 5s vs original iPhone comparison to make the point that improvement happens incrementally, not to make the point that 2013 was a great year.
I second everything phaus said above. This post was typed on a Galago Ultra Pro. The 3rd generation keyboard is "ok" and doesn't bother me, but many other things do (touchpad drivers, battery life, stability, etc).

For comparison I used Linux (Gentoo & Ubuntu) for years on a Lenovo T61p and didn't realize how well I had it. For work I use a rMBP (not by choice). Both blow the Galago Ultra Pro out of the water.

The single redeeming quality of the Galago Ultra Pro is the horsepower of i7-4750HQ combined with mSATA + 2.5" SSD. I do alot of big builds for embedded devices and the space and horsepower help alot. Unfortunately, everything else is "meh" and the battery life and touchpad are down right disappointing.

And System76 does little to support Linux as far as I can tell. The Intel Wireless 7620 had firmware problems System76 up until several weeks ago they weren't even aware of[1], just to gauge their QA process. And what power user machines don't fully support UEFI[2] these days?

I've had the machine for less then a month and seriously considering sending it back. :(

[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2194000
[2] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2191909
Galaxy S4 for one. Between the screen size, SD card support, Google navigation, Swype, replaceable battery, general Android advantages (notifications, Google account integration), Chrome, hardware back button, etc., I would pretty bummed if I were somehow forced to give it up and get an iPhone.

Actually, the screen size and Swype would be enough since I mainly use my phone for web browsing and composing email.
Did anyone notice that there's an Android phone with a 2/3" camera sensor? That's larger than in the PowerShot S110.

http://connect.dpreview.com/post/9705313773/sony-xperia-z1-c...

Hardly a lost year in smartphones.
Get a Macbook Air, install Linux.
The link to the schedule points to:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/schedule.html

It should be:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/schedule.html
35% corporate income tax + 20%-39.6% dividend tax.
It is basically an open-source reimplementation of Windows XP.
There's a 2012 schedule also:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/schedule.html
No, there is no secret project sucking up the engineering resources for the simple reason that we know where the engineering resources have been spent. iPad Air. iPad mini retina. Ios7. Mavericks. iPhone 5s. Mac Pro.

That's a big bunch of products to roll out in one year. Which does not mean that we won't see something different, like a 20" tablet, or Kinect style controls on a new Apple TV, but the fact is that Apple have released a large number of best in breed products this year, so we don't need to speculate on where engineering resources have been spent - the answer is right in front of us.
" If you would prefer not to pay taxes, you could always move to a zero-tax haven like Somalia. I hear it's a lovely place this time of year."

Dubai is a pretty lovely place this time of the year (21C/70F temperature), and you'll pay exactly zero income and corporate tax.
I'm actually in the middle of The Fat Duck Cookbook. Blumenthal's recipe for top-notch pub chips (large and slightly bulky, not thin like fries) even goes by the name "triple-cooked chips".

In the TV series, In Search of Perfection, he goes the extra mile to figure out a way to reproduce the recipe in reasonably well equipped home kitchens. One of the many tricks is that having salt in the blanching water is mandatory. It helps to create the porous surface. His recipe is so good I can make delicious chips at home even without access to a temperature controlled fat fryer.

(Incidentally, Jamie Oliver blanches whole skinned potatoes before roasting them in the oven. I've tried that too and it does make a big difference to how they come up.)

But the vinegar trick was something I hadn't heard before. I'll have to give it a try, because it would seem to give some extra leeway with timing. For a home cook, that is an important factor.
> The whole arguments of iOS 7 spurring planned obsolescence comes from the theory that the transitions, parallax, etc. etc. were done not only from a design standpoint but from an inferior-hardware-can't-replicate-this standpoint, which I believe Gruber propagated himself (though in reference to Android, rather than older iPhone models.)

I don't think anyone is arguing that Apple added those features solely because they perform poorly on inferior hardware. Perhaps that's a side effect, but Apple openly concedes that, as evidenced by graceful fallbacks included in the operating system which turn off features such as blurring and parallax on older devices, as well as manual options to disable various hardware-intensive aesthetic improvements.
>He’s got it all backwards. The nature of progress is to move incrementally.

What a strange straw man to pick. Isn't it glaringly obvious that progress happens in leaps and then incrementally in between the leaps? The leaps create opportunity that is exploited in the years following the leap.

If there is no leap for a while, this incremental progress starts to feel like stagnation. Some feel it earlier, some feel it later. It seems rather contrived to present this as some kind of fundamental contradiction.
Rank 2nd or 3rd when logged in G+ and seeing your own post, it doesn't register otherwise.

Another SEO and social expert moron. Nothing to see here, move along.
Front-end design. I can make a beautiful back-end, but what does it matter to anyone but fellow hackers if a front-end end-user thing doesn't look good, is useful to beginners, but is also useful to those who've been around the block a bit?
Hey, I'm not trying to say OSX is flawless. That would be silly. What we're both saying is that we feel like we have to make the opposite OS work and that it's an unsatisfying exercise in frustration whichever way you go. It's about the pain of learning different conventions and the unwillingness of OS vendors (both of them) to copy each other's good bits.

Neat about the calendar. I have to disagree about the dock because it can force quit things, the Windows taskbar won't auto-hide, and some of the ugliest UI hacks in Windows all live in the tray (2 finger scroll, task manager, etc).

I disagree about explorer, mostly because I can't figure out how to get it to sort in alphabetical order (instead of folders and files sorted separately), a feature that's crucial for keyboard navigation and extracting files after download without scrolling through the entire downloads folder.
Maybe a British judge should just declare it?
Oh it can be beaten.

For hundreds less you can easily build a near-identical system. For example: Audioengine A5 + Audioengine S8 + Behringer UCA202. DACs are grossly overrated when it comes to their influence on sound quality. Regardless, the UCA202 measures outstandingly well.

For somewhat less you can easily build a much, much, much, much better system. For example: Audioengine A5 + Audioengine S8 + Behringer UCA202 + MiniDSP 2x4 + MiniDSP UMIK-1 + Room EQ Wizard. This nets you basic room response correction, plus an active crossover between the speakers and sub. Configured well, you could get a more linear response, better imaging, and better bass integration.
Felix Salmon has an article discussing a couple of such services.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/12/10/how-online-...
Out of curiosity, is any of this process of moving money around amenable to automation? Can the "rules" be systematized in software?
Ask HN: Have you used Fiverr to run a lean startup experiment?
It's Friday night and I needed a break from that startup life. But of course as I let my mind drift off, I end up running a "lean startup" experiment instead.

I want to validate that e-commerce stores will pay for product promotions on influential social media accounts. So I turn to Fiverr to find people who need paid promotions (http://fiverr.com/goodaudience/share-5-items-to-7711-of-my-wanelo-followers--2).

Currently, I have 7,711 followers on Wanelo. Who's willing to bet money that someone on Fiverr will pay me to promote their products?

If this is successful, what next step would you take?
It's mostly a joke, but there is truth behind it.

Apple has a long history of "fixing" products by removing useful buttons (every mouse they've ever made), user serviceable battery/RAM, integrated RJ45 connectors, etc. Sometimes in the name of packaging, and other times just to increase their service revenue.

People are missing the real point -- that point being that Anandtech thinks that being able to replacing a CPU on a power user desktop is noteworthy.
I use this to cut my fries: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004RDFH/ref=oh_details_o...

I don't blanch them, I first soak them, dry them, then deep fry them twice per Alton Brown's guidance: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/chips-and-fis...

They're perfect.
It is bad, but not quite that bad. If you just look at taxes on wages for someone making $250k per year, you will pay about 40% in obvious taxes in California. There are sales and other taxes on top of this and some additional regulatory taxes as well.

Since I have operated companies with substantial payrolls in California and therefore been privy to the cost details, I can say that the total outlay to various government authorities when a paycheck is cut can exceed the total value of the paycheck in California but not much beyond that; maybe 52% to government, 48% to the employee.

In summary, you will only approach 60% if you include all possible taxes on the income including the spending of said income, which does not happen often in practice. Even in California, the worst case is closer to 50% if you manage your income reasonably well.

This still adds up to a lot of money if you compare it to a state like Washington with similar software engineering wages and no income tax, since that adds up to tens of thousands of extra income.
You're talking about at least 2 different taxpayers: the corporation, and it's owner(s).

Also, dividends to shareholders are not subject to a 39.6% rate. By definition, any dividend from a U.S. corporation is a "qualified dividend" subject to the 0-20% rates (plus potentially up to 4.3% in Medicare and Medicaid investment taxes).
I think he means MS does make compelling products, they just can't market them as well.

As for "advanced technology", Apple is far behind Microsoft and Google these days when it comes to cutting edge stuff, but this is mostly because they both have fingers in a lot of pies while Apple restricts itself to a few highly profitable niche areas.
It's just something she decided to do. Her doctor was more than happy to just keep pumping her full of insulin. But as it turns out, diabetics can be successful avoiding carbohydrates the same way lactose intolerants are successful avoiding dairy and people with peanut allergies are successful avoiding peanuts. It just makes sense, really.
I actually have little experience in neither, but even so, my interest leans towards back-end design. Could you recommend any resources for teaching myself?
This is strictly my opinion.

I keep hearing from people "oh you need funding", "you need to give a way 25~50% for X amount of money", "you need to capture the market".

I just find this extremely annoying. I want to build a business, a profitable one, by not owing anyone anything. I want to be in control because I am passionate about the technology and the problem it solves.

What I can see from a macroeconomic point of view, is the previous generations grasp at innovative output by the younger generation. They are essentially declaring a "piece of the action" for something they see only as a money bet. For someone with a billion dollars, spraying six digits to several companies is not a big risk. Consider how much work that now needs to go in to satisfy their expectation-go big or go home. This is ultimately bad for the consumer choice and the economy. Much human capital and time is wasted when good services and useful product needs to get shelved because they didn't struck a homerun with the investor etc within the time frame allocated.

I don't want to be part of this mickey mouse game. I want to know what it takes to build a profitable business from nothing, because ultimately I'm not in it soley for the money, I want to actually solve problems that I think is worthy of solving, and I need to be able to do this at my pace.

Leverage from outside money is a double edge sword as all day traders know. It magnifies profit but it also magnifies loss. I see companies that just keep on getting money without ever thinking about positive net profit growth, and instead what the next idiot will think the company will make in the "near future", however long that is. I simply do not see this working and neither did Warren Buffet during the dotcom bubble, the idea that share price today is reflected on by not cash earned today but what it could make tomorrow is insanity (la nouvelle économie ooh la la)

I too support bootstrapping vs. funding, I mainly feel that the intellectual value is being exploited by profit at all cost kamikaze capitalism, and I just wonder how the attitude will change when we see the likes of Facebook and Twitter collapse in the oncoming market correction, when the next investor comes along and starts to worry that they won't be making net profit this year or the next or the next, and that it's a giant pump and dump scheme, where the victims will once again be duped investors.
They should call it PrismOS.
As sjtrny already mentioned, it's not a secret and Kenji would not have been stuck not knowing it. What he found interesting was that "McDonald's does indeed use a double fry method, but it's far from the traditional one." It's indeed interesting the method McDonald's has ended up with. I blanched many potatoes as a young lad working in a restaurant. Interestingly, the local farmers who we sourced our potatoes from often came in for lunch and requested single fried fries (unblanched). They were certainly a lot different, mostly not as crispy a crust.

bostik has also already mentioned that Heston Blumenthal covers a method in detail in the fish and chips episode of his In Search of Perfection series. I've only gone all the way with this method once, but it is fairly close to what we did at the restaurant, only we never froze our fries, only refrigerated them. It does make nicer fries than simply double frying, but not by a wide margin.

Fries are a bit of an ongoing project for me. I'm trying to find some reasonable method to have nice baked fries. What I get so far is serviceable, but not nearly as nice as frying them.

Edit: I forgot to add the second reason I wanted to make this post: Kenji has an ongoing series on Serious Eats called The Food Lab. He takes the same semi-scientific approach to certain dishes as in the submitted article. Another good post in the series is on dry-aging beef at home [0]. American's Test Kitchen [1] tends to do the same thing, but they only really share the final result with a few tidbits on their process of discovery.

[0] http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/03/the-food-lab-complete-gui...

[1] http://www.americastestkitchen.com/
No. What precisely is your point? That there are legitimate uses for weed? Ok, agreed.

There are legitimate uses for alcohol too. Great disinfectant. Great at cleaning mechanical parts.

Doesn't mean drinking half a bottle of vodka a day will make you a great business leader. Smoking weed won't make you into one either.
Nimrod, German, efficient functional programming, algorithmic analysis & design, and analytic number theory
Good catch... fixed it. Thanks!!
Yes, but the process of creating and more importantly updating that software would involve so much human input that you wouldn't end up with much of a net gain in terms of time or costs saved.

US federal tax laws change every year, and are so interconnected that quite frequently small changes in one tax law can have massive impacts on entirely different areas of law. And that doesn't even take into account state and local taxes, or the taxes of the foreign jurisdictions you'd be dealing with, or the impacts that tax treaties could have, or even the impact that non-tax laws may have on financial transactions.
Even in Straitened Times, Portugal Loves Its Bimby Cooking Robots
"3. A set A of real numbers is said to be sense if every open interval contains a point of A."

For those googling: there's a typo: sense => dense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_set)