skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, media corporations have intense structural pressures. The real customers are wealthy corporations who buy eyeballs; you build articles to appeal to enough of their interests. Otherwise you get replaced by someone who will.

Anyone who's read Bob McChesney or Noam Chomsky on the media should be familiar with the institutional forces you mention.

(It also sounds likely that content written by a given corporation's PR flacks have bad conversion rates. Because their bosses demand it to sound too crude, like some dictator's attempt at propaganda. Professional journalists can make the propaganda more indirect and sweeter-smelling. That's not to disrespect journalists; many of us make our money at least indirectly from advertising.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131785 - item and discussion from early August about the MIT research
Law school grad here (top 10 school). Anyone asks my opinion (which seems to happen an awful lot -- I guess lots of people consider law school at some point or another), I tell them I think it's a pretty bad idea.

1) The cost (direct and opportunity) is ENORMOUS. And even with special federal govt repayment plans, if you don't get that big firm job, the debt will potentially weigh you down well into middle age (with the possibility of a nasty tax bite at the end if you have any assets and the law isn't changed).

2) The likelihood of getting a high paying job is slim. It's even pretty risky from top 10 schools.

3) Even during the boom times, when people from top schools were getting jobs at top BIGLAW firms left and right, people were HATING LIFE at the firm because they didn't realize what it was going to be like. And more broadly, lots of people get all the way through law school and realize they don't wanna be lawyers. This is super common.

4) Non-big-firm opportunities are either super competitive (like govt or public interest), super low paying (also includes lots of govt and public interest), or not a great value proposition (how'd you like 200k in debt to try scratching out 50k a year as a solo?)

Lots of the reasons people want to attend law school are pretty dumb/false (stuff like: like to argue, wanna be prestigious, think its a safe/good-paying career track). The people that should attend law school are those who:

a) won't be financially ruined by the decision,

b) actually want to be a lawyer, and

c) have some real sense of what being a lawyer actually means (e.g. they spent at least a couple years working at a firm in some non-lawyer capacity, or they have a parent who was a lawyer and told them lots about their job, or they spent tons of their time researching law and legal practice. In other words their knowledge of legal practice is not based entirely on fictional TV and movie lawyers).

I'd say that describes under 1% of the people enrolled in law schools nationwide.
I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea.

IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.
The Final Days of White Flint Mall
> People need to WORK for their success if they are to be happy.

I would guess this is not true on average. If anything, I would guess the opposite: the Waltons, Kochs, Kennedys, etc., who inherited their money and are able to do whatever kind of bullshit they want with it, are happier.
As others have pointed out, this is an old idea that has been attempted several times but never really taken off. I think it could work but it would be really really hard to implment successfully at scale. For example, I'm not sure it would work without strong DRM. People don't like ads and some install AdBlockers, but people REALLY don't like paying for things and I think even more of them would use paywall avoiding plugins. I think publishers would demand it (just as movie studios did with Netflix). That sounds like a huge step backwards for the web.

Clay Shirky wrote a somewhat famous takedown of this idea in 2009: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...
I've used Mathbox some, and am still trying to get more familiar with it. Is MathBox 2 architecturally separate, or will the original Mathbox become a subset of MB2? I'll just keep plugging away at MB (the 1st).

The comparison to D3js seems apt. MathBox is -- somewhat -- a 3D version of what D3 does. But D3 takes a bring-your-own-data approach, whereas mathbox is more directly about defining the mathematical structures. Both are fairly low-level. Mathbox is more opinionated, maybe. Vega might be a more direct comparison [1].

[1]: https://github.com/trifacta/vega/wiki/Vega-and-D3
We build BitGym (www.bitgym.com) using Unity, and it has a lot of moving parts and 2-3 developers working on scene, code and assets, and we've made it work with git. It really comes down to developing and maintaining some best practices:

- Always use prefabs wherever possible. But avoid nesting prefabs

- Always save your prefabs, then save the scene before pushing. Thus the .prefab files are also updated through git: these are more robust and have higher priority than the scene.

- Make sure source control uses meta files (unless you're using Unity's Asset Server) so that scene references are stored again in separate files updated through git.

- Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs. Unlike scripts, Unity will bomb changes from one side of the merge on binary files, but this is expected when using git on binary files. Of course you can treat the scripts as any other code project, and they merge fine.

It's still not ideal, and we occasionally wind up with merge issues or a day of having to carefully iron out scene conflicts when doing larger branch merges, but they haven't been so dreadful as to make us decide never to use it again because of the collaboration issues.
Genetics without Fear
Convert DVD to Samsung Galaxy Tab P7510
For anyone who is interested in what an ideal language would look like, particularly in respect to brevity vs. informativeness I'd highly suggest looking into Terry Regier's work: http://lclab.berkeley.edu/

I worked in his lab on one of many projects showing that most human languages use a near optimal trade-off in various semantic domains (so far - color, kinship, containers, and spatial relations). His work also includes some of the best evidence for some language dependent forces in cognition interacting with some universal ones.
It's not irrelevant. More people (especially more people in developed countries) = more CO2. You can't spin that away. Even if the US population goes from 300M to 200M, that would produce more CO2 than going from 300M to 100M.
But you go to amazon because you want to buy something, not because you're feeling benevolent, so the expectation of needing to jump through the hoop is there and the necessity of doing it is real. Plus, once you've gone through sign up once you never need to again.

Some site I've never been to before asks pretty please for 40 cents and I'm not about to go find my wallet (probably in my room across the house) grab my credit card and enter a ton of personal information into some strange form who's security I don't really trust, especially when I know the credit card processor is probably keeping 30c + 3%.

PayPal and similar help but then... I have to use paypal. If only I could just directly send the money (like bitcoin, from me to some address) with a token that the site provided me attached. Pretty sure a lot of people are working in this area to make it happen. I really think app-store ease of transactions with the open web will change things up for the better.
"... The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. ..."

Daniel Kahneman (2002, Nobel prize in Economics): ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman

Gini coefficient/ratio/index (statistical measure of income distribution/wealth inequity): ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
TH also ruins Haskell by inserting inivisble code with spooky action at a distance, where you have to pre-import symbols that TH will insert later, and compiler errors refer to code defined somewhere else but print line numbers of where the generated code is inserted. TH needs a compiler!
You can't like a video on Youtube without being logged into a Youtube/Google+ account.
What am I being down voted for?
Are you unhappy with my response? I thought I answered your question. What was I downvoted for?
Q&A: OkCupid’s Co-Founder on the Myth of the Data Scientist ‘Unicorn’
It seems more of a branded franchise than an entity.
Not true, instead of focusing in people that are a bit serious about game development they have done plenty of bad chooses, 64 bit processors on home PCs exist since more than a decade ago, and their engine was created in 2006 for 32 bit platforms, when it was clear 64 bits processors were here to stay. Also the GUI system is one of the worst GUI systems I have ever seen, yeah yeah they say they are going to fix it in Unity 5 but we need to develop games now, not tomorrow. Also calling JavaScript to their "implementation" of what comes down as just a mask for C# was a huge marketing mistake.
Since getting a law degree here (Denmark) is tuition-free, and the incoming class is regulated to be approximately in line with the annual demand for new lawyers, everything in this article reads like bizarro-land. Yeah, it would be a mess if students paid for educations out of pocket, and also were the ones who decided how many people were needed in a given field (a field in which they did not as of yet have any expertise). That does sound like a good recipe for a bunch of people in debt not able to get jobs. Here is a solution: don't do that.
JavaScript news in real time
i think it is more auditory and has to do with out ability to error correct. Actually there is a really fascinating section in james gleick's "the information" on African drum communication which is essentially a much less dense version of spoken language since you say everything using a long sentence which essentially reduces the possibility of it being misinterpreted despite most of the sounds of normal spoken language are missing. Not sure if more scholarly work supports this idea but if this is the case then a written or thought language could certainly be denser...like symbolic algebra or python.
Damn shitty developers like John Carmack wasting computing power on better graphics! Where's my pong!?
Absolutely false, using imported materials and creating your own is extremely easy to do in Unreal, and there are tons online of stores where you can buy 3D models, Unreal integrates pretty well with all kinds of 3D models (including riggs) specially those from Autodesk Maya. And over top of that there is an Asset Store for Unreal, is called the Marketplace and the EPIC team is filling it itself with tons of free high quality materials and models.
Have you considered using a pre-existing distributed filesystem like Ceph or even HDFS instead?
The result of that would be similar to medical school in the US - a very small percentage of those who apply can get in. I think it's what the profession needs, but good luck convincing the BigLaw companies and law schools to go along with you.

"Well yeah, the legal profession is inundated with unemployed kids in debt up to their eyeballs. That's what makes it so great!"
That's fine. Just don't expect to do it transparently with your iPhone.
According to a study published several years ago, mainstream languages seem to operate on an information density/speed tradeoff [1].The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode less information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace.

This does seem to suggest that biology may be the limiting role in controlling the rate at which humans convey information. Indeed, the language mentioned in the article seems almost laughably cryptic and dense. However, I feel that the limitation of the mentioned study results from the fact that it treats information on a relatively limiting per syllable basis. Quijada seems to suggest that an artificially constructed language has the ability to incorporate all the implicit meanings of a phrase that are left unsaid in normal conversation.

Ultimately, while Quijada's project seems quite unlikely to catch on among those who are not fringe pseudoscientists, it poses interesting philosophical questions about the nature of speech and communication and perhaps earns its title as a "conceptual-art project."

[1] http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs...
Besides the reasons mentioned, another point I've heard from talented artist friends is that specific art assets have a tiny market -- Most games require the art to be customized a non-trivial amount to suit their game's atmosphere, theme, color schemes, etc -- Even generic things like zombies, fighter jets, rocket launchers, medkits, etc. So stock art assets tend to only be used in prototyping phases, and after that an artist is contracted to finalize the asset.

Since this is the usage of their products (early prototypes), artists can't charge the premium they deserve for the quality of the product.

The only way they can is they create super-specific but very cliche/popular artwork, like planet earth, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, iPhone, Desert Eagle, etc, which can actually be sold for a premium because they can be used as-is in polished final games. And then, only the best one or two of each item rise to the top of the marketplace and obviously noone needs the rest.

The Unity Asset store is a good place to look to get an idea for the economics of free/for-sale art assets. There are very few models/art assets that can be used in production, and the most usable/popular items are either tools, customizable assets like shaders, particle effects and materials, prototyping asset packs, or the specific items like I mentioned. And none of them can sell for very much.

From Unity devs I've heard the tools category makes the most money.
FWIW, my experience is the opposite. Reporters are so worried about the appearance of bias that they sometimes avoid writing good stories about companies who happen to be advertisers.
Well put--there's a world of difference between yet another cutesy software sim of robots (of which I've been guilty!) and an actual hardware implementation. If you haven't actually dealt with things like shitty odometry, derpy wifi signals, packet corruption, motor driver noise screwing up logic, or any of a dozen other things, you probably don't appreciate just how tricky this is to get right.

If you'd like to see more about a lab doing real swarm stuff on real (buggy) hardware, check out the Multi-Robot Systems Lab at Rice:

http://mrsl.rice.edu/
Humin sounds like what you're looking for:
https://www.humin.com/#/product
I think it is an interesting idea that has yet to gain traction, let alone interoperable implementations, possibly due to the cantankerous origins. May have difficulty penetrating the enterprise, where control of policy trumps most other considerations. And as with any multi-sided business model, it requires a community segment with unmet needs to provide initial critical mass. I suggest trying to make the protocol less binary and more like a classical line-oriented exchange, it'll improve uptake amongst implementers. And I wish you well; every effort to reinvent email deserves a red hot go.
I don't think that explains anything; it looks like a list of aesthetic "faults" that the author finds, unlikely to be recognised by anyone without a degree in linguistics. Surely those faults exist, but it's a stretch to pretend that they alone explain anything.

I speak some Esperanto but I'm no zealot. The "explanation" that your neighbours don't speak Esperanto, if such a simplified thing can exist, is probably as simple as network effects. I can learn German and speak to the man next-door, or I can learn Esperanto and speak to some theoretical people that may exist somewhere but I don't know them and they are mostly a bunch of nerds that meet at the local co-op to speak in Esperanto mostly about how great Esperanto is.

Go ahead. Ask your neighbour why he doesn't speak Esperanto. Does he say " The 'basic' number‐terms tri, trio, tria ('three, threesome, third') are a crowded jumble, making a mockery of the regular root/noun/adjective pattern they imitate" (K5 in the article)?

Or does he say "what's that?"?
Indeed, the "School Scam" is a lot broader than law schools.
>Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise.

Which is good for scientists and logicians, but would probably be an issue for novelists and poets. Exploiting ambiguity is a common feature of the arts.
>The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode more information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace.

I think you mean the inverse.
Since most of us will only ever see medical care from the patient's perspective, it might surprise us that many physicians consider the medical profession to have the same problem, just not yet to the same degree as the legal profession. Of course the externalities of surplus lawyers are much worse for society than the externalities of surplus physicians.
You'll generally have better luck through email...

...generally.
I like the output of melomics quite a bit. I checked out quite a few tunes on youtube. If the music had just a hair more structure, I'd almost pay money to have a continuous stream I could play in the background during the workday.

It's a little markov-chainy right now, which I actually find a hair distracting.

However, I really liked this tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIeo1XvrnTo

How come music generating software like this never seems to end up in the public's hands?
Ask HN: What do people think about the concept of 'crowd-creating?'
Noting the growing activity in areas of crowdsourcing/crowdfunding, I have been toying with the idea of 'crowd-creating.' Is it practical to create a platform where individuals/makers/experts from all over the world can get together and collaborate on projects (software+hardware) without ever having to meet (or meet occasionally)? Would such a platform be conducive to building products? Is physical presence a must?
Is it useful to compare capacitors to batteries in this fashion? It's not as though you could swap out one for the other, in pretty much any realistic application.
I viewed this whole presentation on a MacBook Air plugged into a 32" monitor, and while 1 or 2 of the slides would pause here and there, overall it was amazingly smooth. Mind blown.
> Still perpetually disappointed every new "neo terminal" is monospace tho.

Have you thought of ways around the path dependence[1] on monospace imposed by existing bodies of textmode UIs (and source code)? It seems unlikely that a new terminal-esque tool would succeed without some kind of legacy support. The best concept I've come up so far with is to build in affordances which handle legacy vs. new-world user interaction and app I/O models.

Related, I continue to hold out (vain) hope that elastic tabstops[2] will someday gain traction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

[2] http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
Ask HN: Developer evangelist to startup founder?
I'm finishing up my CS degree at a top 20 state school. While I've been doing web and mobile development for years, I've been looking at getting into a developer evangelist role. I feel as though I might be in the top 15% of the developer talent pool coming out of college. While this is great - I feel like my brain just isn't wired to compete with those in the top 1-2%. I am however interested in the business side of things as well - sales, marketing, business development, etc. This led me to become interested in developer evangelism.

My concern is that years down the road, I'll want to do my own startup. If I was to be on a founding team, it seems like it would be more valuable to have a true developer who has had years of experience. Am I wrong about this? Would someone with a developer evangelist background be valuable to an early stage startup, when compared to a vetted software engineer?
Interesting discussion of medical school admissions and the limiting factors here [0], from a few days ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122377
That's correct, but there's not much reason to use green threads in Rust--they don't have the advantages that green threads in Go do, besides the lack of context switching (they aren't "lightweight" because they are just as resource-intensive as threads).
I'm not sure that the dominant influence of Google and Facebook has been a net benefit for the internet. I can't help but think we might have maintained a significantly more open and decentralized web if Yahoo had acquired them early on.
How to find founders
Hey HN,

(because I have no HN history) I am a sophomore studying software engineering.

I already registered for a few startup conventions in SF/NY, how did you find your partners in crime?
Music lover? Join us – Bop.fm (YC S13) is hiring a lead iOS engineer in SF
Ithkuil is not simple. It's so ridiculously complex that it is just not possible for anyone to learn to speak fluently. It never stood any chance of being adopted in the way Esperanto has. I'm surprised that it found any use at all, but people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered.
So? I don't think that's evidence that another 49% are desperate to dispense tips but can't do so because they haven't signed up for a free account.
What annoys me the most about this is that everyone is overlooking the big picture here - Anonymous will always have subversive elements from government agencies who's goal is to bring about the loose collective's demise or, more importantly, to control it's direction. This was effectively promised in state media during Anonymous' original publicity.
Ithkuil is definitely one of the most amazing pieces of work I have ever come across. I having been using the name as my email address for many years and another variant of it he had called 'ilaksh' as my screen name (note I didn't have anything to do with the creation of ithkuil/ilaksh, just a fan). I think not only other conlangers but also anyone interested in fields like linguistics, computer programming, knowledge representation, etc. can be inspired by what Quijada did.

I did get a few somewhat weird emails that I think were in Russian some years ago, but I think they figured out pretty quick that it wasn't the right email address to reach Quijada.
As I understand it, the projects aren't nearing completion. The features are coming in Unity 5.x, which means over the next few years (since 5.0 isn't even out yet).

If the timing were purely coincidental, and the effort routine, you'd expect to see a big problem being solved every now and then. Instead we've gone from radio silence to a barrage of activity.

You also seem to be making the mistake of assuming that the Unreal engine subscription public announcement was the first Unity Technologies realized the threat. It's a small industry, and the default assumption should be that people talk to one another and know which way the wind is blowing.

Unity2D is actually one of the things I had in mind when I wrote the post. It seemed to me to be aimed at increasing the potential market size for Unity, rather than something that made life better for existing developers.

My post was not to claim that Unity was doing nothing; only that they were not acting like they had a fierce competitor. I believe that now they are. And that is a fantastic thing. It makes me much more comfortable being on the Unity platform, because my ideal preference is to stay on something like this for a decade. I want Unity to succeed.