skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Noise from new furnace; How to effectively record?
I know from reading comments that some here have more than a passing acquaintance with audio recording. My new furnace is making noise intermittently; unfortunately for diagnosis/service, largely in the later afternoon and night. Next Tuesday will mark 11 weeks I've been living with this, including disrupted sleep and worry.

I'm becoming desperate to get this fixed -- effectively. In order to demonstrate to the contractor -- and now wholesaler and manufacturer what is happening, I need to be able to present good recorded examples. I don't have a lot of money to keep trying different equipment; I'm hoping some advice from HN can steer me in the right direction. What recording device and microphone might serve well, having flat response across the audible spectrum and not missing nor aggressively filtering out what it decides is undesired noise -- even and as that may be the sound I am after?
Why are passwords limited to 16 characters? That's unnerving.
Show HN: multi-AZ auto discovery for Elasticache
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine

Solves the "anywhere", but not the "any time soon".
One key difference is that we know brains can exist. We might not know the entirety of how they work, but the important thing is we already know they can be reproduced in some fashion.

Hyperdrive or any other form of FTL travel is purely in our thoughts. Nothing currently exists that even proves it is possible in our current reality. For all we know we could spend an infinite time attempting it and never achieve it.
They presumably discussed concepts in terms of equations, for which he used RPN ('they' being the initial group of Bitcoin implementers).
Sick of hackatons? Join an actual dev competition at Code in the Dark
TxTo Unrolls Your Story By Printing Out SMS Conversations Onto Scrolls
Ken Jennings Talks to Arthur Chu
So you go around randomly destroying other people's property?
SwarmCDN is now Swarmify
Devtools is also always looking for contributors! We have good first bugs and mentored bugs. Everything is written in web technologies, so if you are already a competent web developer it is fairly easy to start contributing.

Come drop in IRC and say hi :)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/Hacking

https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/GetInvolved
The sky is blue during the day, go out and look at it, it's pretty nice :)
Was XML Flawed from the Start? (2005)
Art made with code (Google Dev Art)
Thanks for laying out your thoughts, but obviously I disagree.

Let me rebut two points that kind of irk me:

You claim that the Android problem that bit several Bitcoin wallets was due to java.security.SecureRandom using /dev/urandom.

That is mistaken, as the blog posting you gave clearly shows:

"Developers who use JCA for key generation, signing or random number generation should update their applications to explicitly initialize the PRNG with entropy from /dev/urandom or /dev/random."

So, in their opinion, /dev/urandom is fine.

Furthermore you claim that I've taken quotes out of context.

I was aware that there is the danger of misunderstanding these people's point of view, so I emailed all three of them, right when I put this web page up some days ago, specifically asking them if they felt that I might be misrepresenting them or if they are otherwise unhappy about me using their names.

Of those three two replied (both very quickly).

Daniel Bernstein replied very shortly with "Seems reasonable.", but noted that he disagrees with the "more entropy cannot hurt" point. That's why I added the little sidebar with a link to his blog posting.

Thomas Pornin seems to have taken the time to really read the article, he wrote "That's a fine page. I like it.", noted a mistake in the boot scripts section (that I have fixed) and suggested some additional points to discuss (which I did not put on the page).

Off-topic remark:
All in all I was really fascinated how easy it is to get in touch with those highly-respected people, and how respectful they treat "us normals". :-)
I've had the same experience jumping into Clojure even though it's less "pure."
Why you should eat the frog first (it might just taste like chicken)
>Texas is great if you are white, wealthy, and in the oil business...

WHAT!?

>or if you live in Austin

Oh, ok, carry on.
yeah, we had internal debates whether to use gwt or just js, gwt side won and we (most of us!) do not regret it :)
I know this is kind of nitpicky, but a loss of engine power isn't really an impossible situation if the plane is close enough to a runway. It's by no means easy to land one of those things without power, but they are designed for it to be possible.
LinkedIn: Οδηγός Επιβίωσης –
For what its worth, I worked on the InDesign team during the InDesign 2.0 - CS timeframe, and my boss at Adobe had worked for a long time at Quark. He was very knowledgable about Quark's code.

During that time period, he repeatedly asserted that Quark would never be able to produce an OS X/Intel version. He believed that there were too many MacOS/PPC specific optimizations, and that the code was so difficult to modify that it would never happen.

There were also a non-trivial number of top people from Quark working on the InDesign team at that time. My impression was that Quark was a pretty unpleasant place to work, and that many of the best people left long before InDesign became dominant.

I think the article is right that Adobe tried harder to win over customers during this period. From a technical perspective, however, I think this was a classic story of an old product, architected with older technologies and for slower machines, being outpaced by a product architected with newer technologies and for faster machines.

InDesign's internal architecture is the most robust, extensible desktop application architecture I ever worked with. But it was quite heavy compared to quark's, and initially that caused performance problems. But in the end, faster machines overcame the weight of the architecture (as well as optimizations which were facilitated by cleaner code), and enabled Adobe to innovate faster.

I think you see this same kind of phenomenon with something like the Nokia/iOS transition. At first, iOS seemed to have fewer features, be slower, and require excessive hardware. But pretty quickly the hardware outpaced the architecture, and the power of the underlying architecture enabled vastly more innovation.

I suspect Quark was doomed whether they outsourced their engineers or not.
Yeah, apologies. I did not mean "dynamic programming." I thought the context made what I meant fairly clear, though.

If you have any examples that show how this is technically orthogonal, I'm all ears. Hence my request for examples of things that are as extensible as emacs.

And to be clear, my understanding is that ghc is actually fairly extensible. I would love if there were more examples. Preferably in more approachable domains than compilers.
A Night At the SPA or My Upcoming Epic Dallas Trip
Make No Promises (2013)
> Are their employers the Congress or the American citizenry?

Congress. They were created by an act of Congress, and the only ones with oversight powers are the intelligence committee that they spied on.

> Spying on Congresspersons on behalf of the American citizenry makes sense.

Except it is explicitly illegal for them to do so. The same act that authorised the creation of the CIA - the National Security Act 1947 - also bars them from domestic spying. Anyone tasking the CIA to do so have at the very least participated in a crime, whether or not they can be charged with anything.

> If one of these Congresspersons were to go rogue and cooperate with a terroristic unit

That being so, that would fall under the remit of the FBI, Department of Homeland Security or - in the case they communicate about this with foreign interests - the NSA (!). Only if they were to do something stupid like attend in-person meetings outside US borders would it fall under the remit of the CIA, or even be legal for the CIA to pursue.

> It completely makes sense for an intel agency to spy on persons that have that type of capacity, regardless of title or location.

Not when they are barred by law from doing so, it is the responsibility of other agencies if any, and the persons they spy on are the very people tasked with providing the checks and balances against the CIA going rogue. And in fact, in this very case they were explicitly investigating claims that the CIA had committed gross violations of human rights. In that case there's a massive conflict of interest - the CIA has every reason to want to minimise their findings, and possibly even to try to strongarm them into silence.

And in fact, the CIA has repeatedly made public statements to try to discredit this report - that in itself is shocking to the extreme; in any other organizations, heads would be rolling if a department started a PR campaign against a board committee, which is the closest equivalence.

And do I have to remind you that the CIA has decades of history of horrific operations behind them, including the illegal overthrow of multiple democratically elected leaders, a long range of assassinations, dealing drugs to fund illegal operations, and more, - they've proven time and time again that they badly need more oversight. When was the last time a member of the intelligence committee went rogue again?

Well, unless you count the times they were complicit in illegal CIA cover-ups, that is.
> In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.

Isn't that the service that exist.io is hoping to provide? It seems to me like their mission is providing people with greater context than just a bunch of data points. They provide the expertise in interpreting this kind of data so that people don't need to analyze it themselves.

Now, I'm not convinced that they'll be able to provide actionable ways for people to improve their lives, but I certainly hope they can! We generate a lot of data w/out much effort; if we can also use it to improve our lives w/out much effort that's a big win from my perspective.

Isn't that part of the entrepreneurial spirit: having the courage to build something even though you don't yet have all the answers?
Yes, that's why I gave the example of MT. People really believe that /dev/urandom belongs to that class of RNG.
Regarding negative-energy; I think you mean "nothing in our current understanding prevents something like what we describe as negative-energy from having existed at some time in the life of the Universe". Very different from "exists in theory".
Looks interesting but an authoring tool is not something I want to run "in the cloud" and be dependant on a connection and a service that may or may not be there when I need it.

Wouldn't invest much time in a tool that is not available for download, to be honest.

Nevertheless it looks well done.
IHaskell - https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell

IHaskell is aiming to be (in a sense) a replacement for GHCi for interactive Haskell development. It uses the IPython framework (no Python code in main codebase, of course) in order to provide an interactive notebook interface. It allows multiline expressions, graphical output for things like JSON, charts, images, etc, and is very extensible. It's more or less stable but there's still a ton to do if anyone is interested - feel free to get in touch!
KDE Frameworks 5 – Taking KArchive for a Test Drive
The F-15 doesn't have thrust vectoring.
There's a typical trend of people underestimating the severity of dangerous situations, but also pilot bravado in thinking, "I've got five minutes of altitude left, I can save this thing!" rather than the desk jockey, hindsight view of "He's only got five minutes to live."
Maybe he means that he doesn't have to deal with bugs in a custom binary serializer.
I went to an SFPHP meetup the other day. Sounds like it's coming very soon.
"Haskell lacks Lisp-way macros but gets by surprisingly well with its type system magic, laziness + combinators can get you ~90% of macro power."

You can get 90% of the rest with Template Haskell, at the cost of some compile time and (arguably) some prettiness.
What's the difference between model aircraft and UAS? Is it line of sight flying?
Ecrire - https://github.com/pothibo/ecrire

A blog engine for those of us that want to write post in HTML. Live preview, per-page CSS/JS, image and partial importer. Check it out!
Server optimization recipes:

http://tweaked.io/ + https://github.com/skx/tweaked.io/

I've started this and done a reasonably good job, but it would benefit from more content.
Well society hasn't crumbled due to college students wrecking everything yet, so we must have figured out a way to deal with the drunk idiots. Perhaps some variation on the "If they break the law, arrest them for it." technique is being employed...
A new number here in Uruguay costs U$ 2.

Though the market here is VERY different, many people legitimately use prepaid phones, it's not like in the U.S. where it's something seen as suspicious/fringe, so it might be subsidized by the phone company.

Edit: they do sell prepaid SIMs in the USA but they're really expensive, much like cell phone service overall there.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414494,00.asp

some forums suggest there are cheaper options

www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g32655-i61-k5212639-Pre_Paid_SIM_card_while_in_USA_non_residents-Los_Angeles_California.html
You have the wrong opinion of Texas by the way.

California has the highest poverty rate in the US:
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21590933-america...

http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Texas-vs-Cal...
Mandatory A-10 worship post requirement satisfied. Now onto why guns > missiles, and how the SR-71 was really cool.
I wouldn't call Zeta any more a clone of BeOS than eComStation is a clone of OS/2. It used the same codebase.
From what I can tell, high doses of Vitamin C can help lessen the effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Might be an oversimplification.

Edit: Definitely an oversimplification. High doses of Vitamin C can help lessen or prevent Blood-brain barrier (BBB) breakdown and mitochondrial dysfunction, which are two suspected causes of Alzheimer's Disease.
Curation of video is a fine idea, but I wanted to comment on the actual messaging of the site so far.

Something the tone of the copy bothers me. "Let's meet Joe. Joe is an everyday internet user". "Joe is confused!". I don't think most users, even every day users, would describe themselves as "confused" about what to watch. Pandora certainly doesn't position itself as helping music listeners be "less confused".

I think it would be more useful to focus on the benefits, and how/why someone needs this. And while we're on benefits, focusing on real features/benefits has to be more impactful than saying "it takes only a few seconds to login". Having that in there almost detracts from the real point you're trying to get across, which is that you make video recommendations based on your viewing history.
I realize this may be a bit OT for HN. My karma here's generally decent, and on a personal level I could really use the help.

Also, this and some other experiences with noise have me thinking again about learning to design products and services that help people document unreasonable noise and get it addressed. Whether a malfunctioning appliance or piece of equipment, or the neighbour kids with the booming subwoofer. Timing, localization, and calibrated measurement of intensity.

--

It's actually been a series of noises that have changed after each of the two attempts at repair. I have an older analog tape cassette recorder whose built-in microphone captured the first sound fairly well.

The built-in microphone of an old iAudio MP3 player with a record function didn't capture that sound well, but it did capture the lower sound made after the first repair.

Between the two devices, I assumed one would capture the "in between" sound that followed the second repair. However, both built-in microphones seem to be "dead" in that frequency range.

I borrowed a Sony "stick" digital voice recorder when the first repair produced the second noise profile, but it did not seem to register this at all. I don't have the manual for it, but I've played with / guessed at its settings, and it is now picking up the third noise following the second repair to some extent, but not too well. It does have a microphone in mini-jack.

P.S. While I've learned that more minor noise with this unit hints at the real trouble to come, I'm not what is just a minor background noise. I'm speaking of "wake you in the middle of the night", give you headaches at your home office work desk types of noise. Unfortunately, since particularly the more recent noises are intermittent, I can't count on them manifesting for the very limited time a service technician may be on-site.
Ask HN: What are your favorite coffices in NYC?
I’m transitioning from SF, where there are plenty of great cafes to work. My favorites: https://bonjourn.al/journal/151-coffices.

Any good recs for NYC? Thanks!
I would agree. I've found, in my own code at least, that callback hell only happens with code that is not modular enough. If you separate your logic out into small self-contained modules that do one thing, they never get too deep. Promises allow you to have monolithic code that's not superficially ugly.
You can technically achieve this from callbacks as well. Simply pass in the callback as a function to the method. This way you can still make your async call in a context where you don't know what has to be done next - what will be done next can be passed in dynamically to the function.

That said, I still much prefer promises as they make it much more explicit.
I don't think it does. I think he meant that if a save became corrupted it wouldn't do so silently, it would violently crash the game because of a syntax error.
Perl 6 is what happens when you try to rewrite a long-established and mature piece of software from scratch--that is: it's going to take years longer than you planned, it won't be remotely backwards compatible, it probably won't even do the same stuff, and it will end up souring lots of people on the old and new versions. I've seen it happen time and again.
> (Graphics: Microsoft)

Last words on the article
The curse of the full stack marketer
Does Cosmology Hint At How To Build Artificial Minds?
What video formats can I export to?
There is no paradox here. His English isn't bad: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-satoshi-...

Sounds like jealousy in not getting the scoop.

edit: he may or may not be the creator.
It's an informal way to put it, but yes, it boils down to that. It's almost the definition of a block cipher.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_permutation
Finding Confidence in Crowds: Y Combinator’s Female Founders Conference
"I often wonder why I didn’t choose to pursue a startup sooner. I think through the obvious challenges: the fast pace, steep technological curve, demand for creativity, and realize those don’t stack up to the hardest thing I face everyday: having confidence in myself."
This would be a great addition to the monthly "Who's Hiring" and "Freelancers" posts that go up. Not sure who runs the whoishiring account but maybe they could consider this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring
Isn't that a textbook example of the dangers of short term thinking? In any engineering field, it's irrational to think that the industry won't shift underneath you in a way that makes your 95% market share irrelevant. And when the market does shift, the incumbent that fired all its engineers will be easy pickings for the new breed of competitors.

It's not just a tech industry issue either. When the U.S. auto industry was ascendent, Japan had a reputation for poor quality products and South Korea wasn't even on the scene yet. Well, Japan kept improving the technology and with that the quality, and not only caught up but blew past Detroit and the automakers did not even see it coming. U.S. automakers have spent the last few decades investing in the improvements Japanese companies had the foresight to be investing in all along.

It's not "rational" for companies to mortgage their futures to goose profits in the near term. It might be "rational" for executives to do so, but not for corporations as a whole.
I recently open sourced my github api client. It's written in php and there's still lots of stuff to code: https://github.com/mpscholten/github-api
List of Profs who have quit academia and their essays on quitting
My biggest hatred of xml as a data structure, and believe me I've seen this in production systems more then once, is that it allows for the following.

<customer>
<account>
<type>Personal</type>
...
</account>
<account>
<type>Business</type>
...
</account>
<custid>496F3AB</custid>
</customer>

This may seem innocuous, but XML allows mixing of arrays and objects too liberally, and makes automatic parsing overly complex. At first <customer> appears to be an array of account objects, but wait now that we reach the end we find that <customer> is an object with multiple keys and must create an unnamed array key to hold accounts.

XML is a document markup language, not a data format.
Eviction

noun
1.
the action of expelling someone from a property; expulsion.
"the forced eviction of residents"
synonyms:	expulsion, ejection, ousting, throwing out, drumming out, driving out, banishing, banishment, removal, dislodgement, displacement, clearance;

--------

You're plainly part of the over 40 cohort with buy to let property otherwise you wouldn't be so keen to bend rational thought in knots in order to make yourself feel better about the damage you cause to decent people.

If anyone else is reading this, here we see an example of how the damage continues to be done. There are many with a vested interest in the harmful status quo and so they pretend everything is fine for as long as they benefit.

I note you make no mention of societies in the rest of europe where renting is the norm and where work has been done to help remove exploitation from the system. Presumably you aren't in favour of that either so long as you're alright jack.

You are quite a sick individual and you will waste no more of my time. Your tenants have my sympathy.
http://www.javascripture.com - Simple/fast interactive JS API documentation

I started this project a few years ago because I was frustrated with existing JavaScript documentation being too complicated and I wanted a simple way to test out APIs without spinning up a new browser tab/text editor. I finished the basic JavaScript APIs (Array/String/Object/etc) and started adding docs for some more advanced types as I used them myself. Now there are a lot of APIs without descriptions or examples. I would love assistance with filling in missing documentation/examples and possibly translating this site to other languages. If I can get a few people's interest in contributing (here or at http://www.javascripture.com/contribute) I will put the project up on github.
It sounded more like the description of the AC-130.
No idea. I was just correcting the notion that there is only one "Russian republic".
Well, at that point, it's really just a matter of opinion. If a layout uses media queries to 'respond' to different screen sizes, it is by definition 'responsive'. Anything past that starts to be an aesthetic/no true scotsman type of argument.
Creating a Company Culture…Deliberately
Smaller Corrections, Sooner
Something like this would be a good, inexpensive option for a microphone:

http://www.amazon.com/MXL-770-Cardioid-Condenser-Microphone/...

For a recording device, most people use their computer. You'd need to add an audio interface into which you can plug both the microphone (XLR) and the computer (Firewire/USB, generally). Lots of options. The cheapest one would probably be fine for this purpose. Then use, say, Audacity software on the computer to record.